American Misfits and the Making of Middle-Class Respectability

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Wuthnow
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
American Culture ◽  
Hard Work ◽  
Religious Community ◽  
Cultural Work ◽  
Community Leaders ◽  
Her Family ◽  
Nineteenth Century America

How did Americans come to think of themselves as respectable members of the middle class? Was it just by earning a decent living? Or did it require something more? And if it did, what can we learn that may still apply? The quest for middle-class respectability in nineteenth-century America is usually described as a process of inculcating positive values such as honesty, hard work, independence, and cultural refinement. But clergy, educators, and community leaders also defined respectability negatively, by maligning individuals and groups—“misfits”—who deviated from accepted norms. This book argues that respectability is constructed by “othering” people who do not fit into easily recognizable, socially approved categories. It demonstrates this through an in-depth examination of a wide variety of individuals and groups that became objects of derision. We meet a disabled Civil War veteran who worked as a huckster on the edges of the frontier, the wife of a lunatic who raised her family while her husband was institutionalized, an immigrant religious community accused of sedition, and a wealthy scion charged with profiteering. Unlike respected Americans who marched confidently toward worldly and heavenly success, such misfits were usually ignored in paeans about the nation. But they played an important part in the cultural work that made America, and their story is essential for understanding the “othering” that remains so much a part of American culture and politics today.

Nineteenth-Century Suffrage Journals

2020 ◽  
pp. 42-60
Author(s):  
Linda Steiner
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Black Woman ◽  
New Woman ◽  
Postwar Period ◽  
Her Family ◽  
Status Politics ◽  
The Revolution

This chapter use theories of status politics (conflicts as proxies for important debates over the deference paid to a particular group’s lifestyle) to show the importance of nineteenth-century suffragists’ own newspapers and magazines to the movement. The women who wrote for, edited, and published these outlets essentially invented and then celebrated at least four different versions of a new political woman and then proceeded to dramatize that new woman, showing how she named herself, dressed, dealt with her family, and interacted in the larger public sphere, and showing why she deserved the vote. The pre-Civil War suffrage periodicals essentially proposed a “sensible woman” while the postwar period saw competition between the “strong-minded” women aggressively promoted in the Revolution and the more moderate “responsible women” advocated by the Woman’s Journal. Later, the Woman’s Era dramatized an “earnest” new black woman.

Beyond the Iconoclastic Republic

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Thomas J. Brown
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Military Service ◽  
Early Republic ◽  
American Culture ◽  
The United States ◽  
Public Monuments ◽  
Compulsory Military Service

This introduction traces antebellum American skepticism about public monuments to the distrust of standing armies that was central to the ideology of the American Revolution. The popularity of Independence Day illustrates the iconoclasm of the early republic, which paralleled a widespread resistance to compulsory military service. Remembrance of the Civil War vastly increased the number of public monuments in the United States. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, these memorials became a vehicle for the militarization of American culture.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Christopher Grasso
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
American Culture ◽  
Adult Males ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
The Feminine

A through-line in Kelso’s multifaceted life is his commitment to manhood. “Manhood” in nineteenth-century America was about more than the gendered distinctions between the masculine and the feminine. It was what distinguished the human from the beast, and the adult from the child. It had both political and economic characteristics. It demanded that the man take action according to the dictates of conscience. Moreover, there were different dialects of manliness, even among men of the same race, class, ethnicity, and region: competitive or fraternal, passionate or stoic, explosively violent or piously persevering. For Kelso manhood was at once an expectation for all adult males, a quality of character to be developed and expressed, and a prized achievement earned from others. This theme helps us see how aspects of nineteenth-century American culture that might seem worlds apart were in fact experientially connected.

Looming Civil War

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason Phillips
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
Antebellum Era ◽  
Research Challenges ◽  
The Future

This work explains how American prophecies and forecasts of the Civil War formed, spread, and affected the war’s outbreak, conduct, meaning, and memory. It identifies two temporalities in nineteenth-century America, progressive anticipations and fatalistic expectations, and shows how these approaches to the future shaped predictions of frontier conflicts, class warfare, slave insurrections, revolutions, and Armageddon. By interpreting the material culture of weapons, particularly bowie knives and pikes, it reveals how arms projected the looming conflict by threatening enemies and goading men to fight. Recovering the visions of leaders, citizens, soldiers, and slaves, this research challenges the popular notion that Americans expected a short, bloodless war at the outset. This short war myth gained currency after the conflict to reconcile the sections and romanticize an innocent antebellum era.

The Human Medium

2020 ◽  
pp. 110-144
Author(s):  
Jerome Tharaud
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
American Culture ◽  
Sacred Space ◽  
Early Writing ◽  
Cultural Significance ◽  
Reading Public ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
Uncle Tom's Cabin ◽  
Modern Media

This chapter examines Harriet Beecher Stowe's work for one of the nation's most prominent evangelical newspapers, the New-York Evangelist. It recounts how Stowe's literary apprenticeship altered the cultural significance of the most popular book in nineteenth-century America. It cites several pieces Stowe's work published in the Evangelist between 1835 and 1852, which reframed Uncle Tom's Cabin as a sustained reflection on modern media. It also explains how Stowe theorized the human itself as a medium through which information, feeling, and divine power circulate by crafting a novel that scrutinizes the problems of apocalyptic interpretation. The chapter explores how Stowe became the medium through which a distinctive form of modern sacred space reached a vast reading public and stamped itself indelibly on American culture. It reconsiders the cultural significance of Uncle Tom's Cabin by reframing it as the culmination of Stowe's early writing career in the evangelical press.

Useful Objects

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Reed Gochberg
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
American Culture ◽  
Science And Literature ◽  
Useful Knowledge ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
Alternative Systems ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Ideas

Useful Objects: Museums, Science, and Literature in Nineteenth-Century America explores the debates that surrounded the development of American museums during the nineteenth century. Throughout this period, museums included a wide range of objects, from botanical and zoological specimens to antiquarian artifacts and technological models. Intended to promote “useful knowledge,” these collections generated broader discussions about how objects were selected, preserved, and classified. In guidebooks and periodicals, visitors described their experiences within museum galleries and marveled at the objects they encountered. And in fiction, essays, and poems, writers embraced the imaginative possibilities represented by collections and proposed alternative systems of arrangement. These conversations spanned spheres of American culture, raising deeper questions about how objects are valued—and who gets to decide. Combining literary criticism, the history of science, and museum studies, Useful Objects examines the dynamic and often fraught debates that emerged during a crucial period in the history of museums. As museums gradually transformed from encyclopedic cabinets to more specialized public institutions, many writers questioned who would have access to collections and the authority to interpret them. Throughout this period, they reflected on loss and preservation, raised concerns about the place of new ideas, and resisted increasingly fixed categories. These conversations extended beyond individual institutions, shaping broader debates about the scope and purpose of museums in American culture that continue to resonate today.

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