Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Wuthnow
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
American Dream ◽  
Philosophy Of Life

This introductory chapter discusses how Americans in the nineteenth century pursued the American Dream. It argues that moving the American Dream from the stratosphere in which it is often discussed into the mundane realities of everyday life forces it to be considered differently. The topics of relevance cease to be the long-term trajectory through which protagonists rise from rags to riches and become instead questions about the immediate contexts in which people live. It suggests that what we might call middle-class respectability gets us further than continuing to discuss the American Dream as an ideal or philosophy of life. Middle-class respectability was something that people may have aspired to as an ideal, but it was modeled, learned, and exhibited in practice.

Thomas Chalmers, David Nasmith, and the Origins of the City Mission Movement

2004 ◽  
Vol 76 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-46
Author(s):  
Ian J. Shaw
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Lay Leadership ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Urban Mission ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Mission Movement ◽  
The City

The development of important models for urban mission took place in early nineteenth-century Glasgow. Thomas Chalmers’ work is widely known, but that of David Nasmith has been the subject of less study. This article explores the ideas shared by Chalmers and Nasmith, and their influence on the development of the city mission movement. Areas of common ground included the need for extensive domestic visitation, the mobilisation of the laity including a middle- class lay leadership, efficient organisation, emphasis on education, and discerning provision of charity. In the long term Chalmers struggled to recruit and retain sufficient volunteers to sustain his parochial urban mission scheme. However, Nasmith’s pan-evangelical scheme succeeded in attracting a steady stream of lay recruits to work as city missioners, as well as mission directors. Through their agency a significant attempt was made to reach those amongst the urban masses who had little or no church connection.

Who Is the Tea Party and What Do They Want?

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher S. Parker ◽  
Matt A. Barreto
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Movements ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Economic Freedom ◽  
Tea Party ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Fiscal Responsibility ◽  
The Real ◽  
Conventional View

This introductory chapter considers how people are driven to support the Tea Party from the anxiety they feel as they perceive the America they know is slipping away, threatened by the rapidly changing face of what they believe is the “real” America: a heterosexual, Christian, middle-class (mostly) male, white country. The Tea Party's emergence is the latest in a series of national right-wing social movements that have cropped up in America since the nineteenth century. This chapter argues that support for the Tea Party is motivated by something beyond the more conventional view of conservatism in which economic freedom and small government, as well as social and fiscal responsibility, are prized. Instead, people who are attracted to the Tea Party are reactionary conservatives: people who fear change of any kind.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-40
Author(s):  
Ushashi Dasgupta
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Property Market ◽  
Spatial Turn ◽  
Domestic Ideology ◽  
Preliminary Discussion ◽  
History Of ◽  
Economic Transaction

The Introduction offers a preliminary discussion of what Charles Dickens calls the ‘lodger world’, and it establishes the book’s main lines of argument. It explains that tenancy, an economic transaction realized in space, was a central aspect of everyday life in the nineteenth century. An overwhelming majority of Victorians did not own their homes outright. Instead, they were tenants: while single families could take entire houses on lease, lodgers lived in rooms overseen by landladies, and these many kinds of rented space captured Dickens’s imagination. The pervasive need to rent in the period encourages a reassessment of middle-class domestic ideology. The Introduction surveys the history of the property market, reviews Dickens’s active participation in rental culture throughout his life, and describes a number of his creative relationships. It considers the ‘spatial turn’ in cultural studies, and ultimately sets up a link between rented space, narrative, and genre in Dickens’s thinking.

Economy and Class

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John L. Campbell
Keyword(s):  
Economic Growth ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
American Dream ◽  
Upward Mobility ◽  
International Competition ◽  
Economic Program ◽  
Long Term Trends

Chapter 3 begins by showing how long-term trends in the economy beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s, notably stagflation, automation, globalization, and increased international competition, caused working- and middle-class wage stagnation, rising inequality, and mounting levels of personal debt in America. These in turn caused many Americans to worry that the American Dream was slipping out of reach and that the chances for upward mobility were evaporating into thin air. They were right. This is a story of the decline of America’s postwar Golden Age of prosperity. Trump took advantage of this by promising to be the best jobs-creating president God ever put on Earth and claiming that his economic program would boost economic growth beyond what most economists believed was possible.

‘Here in India’: Nineteenth-Century British Women Navigating their Position in the Empire through Children's Literature

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-185
Author(s):  
Jesse Aberbach
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Infants And Children ◽  
Children's Books ◽  
Children’S Books ◽  
Maternal Roles ◽  
Female Writers ◽  
And Control ◽  
Botanical Study

This article considers how the children's books written by two nineteenth-century female writers, Eliza Tabor and Mary Martha Sherwood, when they accompanied their husbands to India, enabled them to navigate this new environment and their position as respectable middle-class women while revealing how India was deemed a place where British childhood was impossible. Just as many women took up botanical study to legitimise their ‘otherwise transgressive presence in imperial spaces’ (McEwan 219), writing for children enabled others to engage with the masculine world of travelling and earning money without compromising their femininity. Addressing their work to children also seems to have helped both writers to deal with the absence of their own children: the Indian climate made it impossibly challenging for most British infants and children. In this way their writing gives expression to what might be termed a crisis of imperial motherhood. Underlying the texts is an anxiety relating to British settlement and an attempt to comprehend and control a place that threatened their maternal roles.

Epic and Novel

2013 ◽  
Vol 68 (3) ◽  
pp. 396-422 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natasha Moore
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Economic Life ◽  
Modern World ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Aurora Leigh ◽  
Big Picture

This essay explores a peculiarly Victorian solution to what was perceived, in the middle of the nineteenth century, as a peculiarly Victorian problem: the fragmentation and miscellaneousness of the modern world. Seeking to apprehend the multiplicity and chaos of contemporary social, intellectual, political, and economic life, and to furnish it with a coherence that was threatened by encroaching religious uncertainty, Victorian poets turned to the resources of genre as a means of accommodating the heterogeneity of the age. In particular, by devising ways of fusing the conventions of the traditional epic with those of the newly ascendant novel, poets hoped to appropriate for the novelistic complexity of modern, everyday life the dignifying and totalizing tendencies of the epic. The essay reevaluates the generic hybridity of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1856) as an attempt to unite two distinct kinds of length—the microscopic, cumulative detail of the novel and the big-picture sweep of the epic—in order to capture the miscellaneousness of the age and, at the same time, to restore order and meaning to the disjointed experience of modernity.

Gran Paradiso: Erkenntnisse aus der sich natürlich regulierenden Steinbockpopulation|Gran Paradiso: Conclusions from the naturally regulated Capricorn population

2007 ◽  
Vol 158 (11) ◽  
pp. 349-352
Author(s):  
Grégory Amos ◽  
Ambroise Marchand ◽  
Anja Schneiter ◽  
Annina Sorg
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Population Density ◽  
National Park ◽  
Optimal Management ◽  
Capra Ibex ◽  
Large Fluctuations ◽  
The Alps ◽  
Gran Paradiso ◽  
Gran Paradiso National Park

The last Capricorns (Capra ibex ibex) in the Alps survived during the nineteenth century in the Aosta valley thanks to the royal hunting reservation (today Gran Paradiso national park). Capricorns from this reservation were successfully re-introduced in Switzerland after its Capricorn population had disappeared. Currently in Switzerland there are 13200 Capricorns. Every year 1000 are hunted in order to prevent a large variation and overaging of their population and the damage of pasture. In contrast, in the Gran Paradiso national park the game population regulates itself naturally for over eighty years. There are large fluctuations in the Capricorn population (2600–5000) which are most likely due to the climate, amount of snow, population density and to the interactions of these factors. The long-term surveys in the Gran Paradiso national park and the investigations of the capacity of this area are a valuable example for the optimal management of the ibexes in Switzerland.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Isabel Rivers
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Fundamental Importance ◽  
Christian Belief ◽  
Pilgrim's Progress ◽  
Organizational Differences ◽  
Book Publication

The Introduction summarizes the aims and methods of the book, explains the title, taken from Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, addresses the paradox of the otherworldly aims of religion and the worldly means of book publication, lists the principal questions the book sets out to answer and the denominations and groups covered, and points out the varied meanings of the terms ‘Methodist’ and ‘evangelical’. Despite the theological and organizational differences between these denominations and groups, they agreed on the fundamental importance of disseminating books for inculcating Christian belief and practice. To illustrate the long-term influence of such publications there is a brief analysis of Collins’s nineteenth-century series, ‘Select Christian Authors, with Introductory Essays’.

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