Shoring Up Partisan Control: The Speakership Elections of 1839 and 1847

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffery A. Jenkins ◽  
Charles Stewart
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Small Group ◽  
National Party ◽  
Roll Call ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Party Leaders ◽  
Antebellum Period

This chapter examines the speakership elections of 1839 and 1847, each of which highlighted the conflicting impulses of party and region at a time when national party leaders were striving for greater organization over House affairs. It explores the dynamics of roll call votes once the House began electing Speakers and other officers through viva voce voting, first in the 26th Congress (1839–1841), when the officer choices were dictated by a small group of nominal Democrats led by John C. Calhoun, and then in the succeeding four Congresses. The chapter also considers whether the coalition that elected Speakers in the early nineteenth century could look like a governing coalition, or even a procedural cartel. It shows that controlling the speakership was no guarantee of controlling the floor for the remainder of the antebellum period.

All Politics Are Local: Another Look at the 1890s

2009 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-24
Author(s):  
Peter H. Argersinger
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Campaigns ◽  
Local State ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Party ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
Party Leaders ◽  
Judicial Intervention ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Although rarely considered by historians, legislative and congressional apportionments were among the most important, absorbing, and contentious political issues of the late nineteenth century. Local, state, and national party leaders struggled to shape apportionments and thereby secure disproportionate influence for the counties, districts, and states their followers controlled. Gerrymanders, in turn, not only distorted representation but often incited a furious opposition, which disrupted legislative bodies, transformed political campaigns, and ultimately produced unprecedented judicial intervention. In surveying these overlooked developments, this essay points to important questions that historians must hereafter address.

French Missionary Priests and Borderlands Catholicism in the Diocese of Bardstown during the Early Nineteenth Century

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Pasquier
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Early American Republic ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early American ◽  
Ecclesiastical Authority ◽  
Antebellum Period ◽  
Institutional Church ◽  
The One ◽  
Spiritual Suffering

An examination of the experiences of French missionary priests in the trans-Appalachian West adds a new layer of understanding to places ordinarily associated with the evangelical Protestant revivals of the Second Great Awakening. Their experiences of material deprivation, physical hardship, spiritual suffering, and lay opposition to ecclesiastical authority prompted some of them to reconsider what it meant to be a Catholic missionary in the early American republic, a context quite different from the one they envisioned. Many had difficulties relating their premigratory expectations of the missionary priesthood to their actual experiences of life within a borderlands diocese constructed by church officials in Rome thousands of miles away from the local populations, regional histories, and geographic obstacles that the foreign clergy would come to know intimately over the course of the early nineteenth century. As church leaders in the United States and Rome gradually broke up the Diocese of Bardstown during the antebellum period, French missionary priests realized that their dreams of establishing a nationwide institutional church and saving the peoples of an entire continent always clashed with the goals of other interest groups in the backwoods of Kentucky.

The Gathering Storm: Slave Responses to the Threat of Interregional Migration in the Early Nineteenth Century

2012 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 286-315
Author(s):  
Damian Alan Pargas
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Slave Narratives ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Family Separation ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
Antebellum Period ◽  
Upper South ◽  
Motivating Factor ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
Eastern Seaboard

Between the American Revolution and the outbreak of the Civil War almost a million American-born slaves were relocated from the Upper South and eastern seaboard to the ever-expanding southern interior. An outpouring of historical research has greatly contributed to our understanding of the political, economic, demographic, and business aspects of interregional slave migration in the antebellum period, but as yet relatively few studies have examined the ways in which early-nineteenth-century slaves anticipated and reacted to the prospect of interstate migration, the ways in which they attempted to resist or negotiate the terms of their migration, or their motivations for doing so. Drawing from slave narratives and interviews, travel accounts, southern newspapers, and plantation records, this study briefly explores the ways in which slave migrants (and their loved ones) experienced and dealt with the news of forcible removal across state lines in early-nineteenth-century America, with a particular emphasis on the theme of family separation as a motivating factor behind their actions and reactions.

A history of some fruit models in wax and other materials: scientific teaching aids and courtly table decorations

2003 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 299-316 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hans-JüRgen Lechtreck
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Fruit Trees ◽  
Visual Aids ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Teaching Aids ◽  
Scientific Teaching ◽  
Glass Marble ◽  
History Of ◽  
By Products ◽  
Wax Models

Two early nineteenth century texts treating the production and use of wax models of fruit reveal the history of these objects in the context of courtly decoration. Both sources emphasise the models' decorative qualities and their suitability for display, properties which were not simply by-products of the realism that the use of wax allowed. Thus, such models were not regarded merely as visual aids for educational purposes. The artists who created them sought to entice collectors of art and natural history objects, as well as teachers and scientists. Wax models of fruits are known to have been collected and displayed as early as the seventeenth century, although only one such collection is extant. Before the early nineteenth century models of fruits made from wax or other materials (glass, marble, faience) were considered worthy of display because contemporaries attached great importance to mastery of the cultivation and grafting of fruit trees. This skill could only be demonstrated by actually showing the fruits themselves. Therefore, wax models made before the early nineteenth century may also be regarded as attempts to preserve natural products beyond the point of decay.

Disease and Civilization: A Scottish Atlantic Network of Physicians in the Enlightenment

2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 197-216
Author(s):  
Sarah Irving-Stonebraker
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Historical Progress ◽  
Practice Of Medicine ◽  
Benjamin Rush ◽  
American Physician ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
A Current

Through an examination of the extensive papers, manuscripts and correspondence of American physician Benjamin Rush and his friends, this article argues that it is possible to map a network of Scottish-trained physicians in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Atlantic world. These physicians, whose members included Benjamin Rush, John Redman, John Morgan, Adam Kuhn, and others, not only brought the Edinburgh model for medical pedagogy across the Atlantic, but also disseminated Scottish stadial theories of development, which they applied to their study of the natural history and medical practices of Native Americans and slaves. In doing so, these physicians developed theories about the relationship between civilization, historical progress and the practice of medicine. Exploring this network deepens our understanding of the transnational intellectual geography of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century British World. This article develops, in relation to Scotland, a current strand of scholarship that maps the colonial and global contexts of Enlightenment thought.

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