“The Great Middle Class” in the Nineteenth-Century United States

2019 ◽  
pp. 64-84
Author(s):  
Marcus Gräser
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Racial Segregation ◽  
Poor Relief ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Diverse Group ◽  
The Core ◽  
Racial Exclusion ◽  
Nineteenth Century United States

This chapter shows that in America the middle class has historically been more than just a diverse group of middling sorts. In self-awareness as well as in the descriptions made by foreign observers, the middle classes after the eighteenth century appeared as embodiments of the new society that had developed in the colonies of settlers on North American soil. This resulted not least from the fact that typical elements of European societies—above all the aristocracy but also the clergy as a separate estate—were absent. Since the state was relatively weak, the core tasks of civil society, such as poor relief or the establishing of institutions—museums, libraries, symphony orchestras—relied on the private initiatives of the American bourgeoisie and middle class, respectively. In reality, however, the “great American middle class” was much more fragmented than the emphasis placed on it in political discourse might suggest. One important reason for this was racial exclusion. Although the emergence of an Afro-American middle class succeeded in the last third of the nineteenth century, its rise was restricted by a variety of racially motivated discriminations. Overcoming such racial segregation was hardly possible until the second half of the twentieth century.

DELIGHTFUL COXCOMBS TO INDUSTRIOUS MEN: FASHIONABLE POLITICS IN CECIL AND PENDENNIS

2002 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 289-304 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claire Nicolay
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Upward Mobility ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Class A ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
A Site ◽  
Trade Office

THOMAS CARLYLE’S CONTEMPTUOUS DESCRIPTION of the dandy as “a Clothes-wearing Man, a Man whose trade, office, and existence consists in the wearing of Clothes” (313) has survived as the best-known definition of dandyism, which is generally equated with the foppery of eighteenth-century beaux and late nineteenth-century aesthetes. Actually, however, George Brummell (1778–1840), the primary architect of dandyism, developed not only a style of dress, but also a mode of behavior and style of wit that opposed ostentation. Brummell insisted that he was completely self-made, and his audacious self-transformation served as an example for both parvenus and dissatisfied nobles: the bourgeois might achieve upward mobility by distinguishing himself from his peers, and the noble could bolster his faltering status while retaining illusions of exclusivity. Aristocrats like Byron, Bulwer, and Wellington might effortlessly cultivate themselves and indulge their taste for luxury, while at the same time ambitious social climbers like Brummell, Disraeli, and Dickens might employ the codes of dandyism in order to establish places for themselves in the urban world. Thus, dandyism served as a nexus for the declining aristocratic elite and the rising middle class, a site where each was transformed by the dialectic interplay of aristocratic and individualistic ideals.

scholarly journals Nicholas Kurti, C.B.E. 14 May 1908 — 24 November 1998

2000 ◽  
Vol 46 ◽  
pp. 299-315 ◽  
Author(s):  
J.H. Sanders
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Jewish Family ◽  
Austrian Emperor ◽  
German Origin ◽  
Nicholas Kurti

Nicholas Kurti was born in Budapest into a middle–class Jewish family. During most of the nineteenth century his father's family name had been Karfunkel, a name of German origin that conformed to the eighteenth–century decree of the Austrian Emperor that all Jews should take German names. At the end of the nineteenth century the Magyarization of the German names of Jews became widespread after the emancipation of the Jews, and Karfunkel became Kürti (4)*.

scholarly journals Bossa Nova: the reinvention and reinvigoration of samba in the 1950s

2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 169
Author(s):  
Martinus Helmiawan
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
The Core ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Bossa Nova ◽  
National Music

<p>In a society where music becomes the core of its people’s life, many discourses emerge and root in music. In Brazil, for instance, samba as the national music represents the chronicle of the Brazilians, which starts from the slavery in eighteenth century. However, at the start of the era of Brazil’s modernism in 1950s, samba was deemed stagnant. It was unable to cope with the fast developments of Brazil’s politics, societies, and cultures. This essay observes the history of samba, investigates the reasons why samba becomes stagnant and reviews the efforts made to revitalize it through the invention of Bossa Nova. In the process of redefining samba, American jazz plays an important role as the agent which brings modernity and revolution to the original samba. The ideology of the Brazilian urban middle class is also important, as well as Brazilian 1950s musicians’ efforts such as Antonio Carlos Jobim, Joao Gilberto, or Vinicius de Moraes. This paper aims to analyze Bossa Nova’s contributions in revitalizing and redefining samba, with its jazz influence which could be traced from the ideology of the Brazilian urban middle class. The paper also highlights the contradiction between foreign influences and traditional heritages in the music.</p>

scholarly journals "Med blod man våra åkrar sköljer": folk och dygd i Bengt Lidners Ode til Finske Soldaten

2011 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 20
Author(s):  
Anna Cullhed
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Core ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
The People ◽  
Key Concepts ◽  
Late Eighteenth

Bengt Lidner's poem &lsquo;Ode to the Finnish Soldier' from 1788 was written during the Swedish war with Russia. This paper argues that Lidner took part in Gustav III's staging of the war by accusing the officers of the so-called Anjala league of treachery, and at the same time turning to &lsquo;the people' for support. &lsquo;The people' were defined as subjects of the Swedish crown from the core parts of the realm, today's Finland and Sweden, irrespective of language or ethnicity, but sharing a common and glorious history. Lidner combines a cosmopolitan perspective with a patriotic tendency in his poem. Some of the central concepts of the ode, such as &lsquo;citizen' and &lsquo;citizen-ness', carry potentially republican and egalitarian connotations, but this tendency is counteracted by the poet's obvious praise of the king. Lidner's ode stands as an example of the ambivalent use of political concepts during the late eighteenth century, the very concepts that would transform into the key concepts of nineteenth-century nationalism.

“Charity Properly Understood”: Changing Ideas about Poor Relief in Liberal Spain

1991 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-55 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anrian Shubert
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Poor Relief ◽  
The Poor

When the English cleric Joseph Townsend visited Spain at the end of the eighteenth century, he was impressed by the apparent tolerance with which beggars were treated and by what he called the “excessively generous” way in which charity was distributed. He cited, with both surprise and disapproval, the Bishop of Cordoba, who daily fed some 7,000 people by distributing 1,000 kilograms of bread.1 This image of Spain as a paradise for the poor persisted until well into the nineteenth century. George Borrow, who travelled through the country in the 1830s trying to sell Bibles without much luck, remarked approvingly that poverty was not despised in Spain as it was in other countries:Yet to the honour of Spain be it spoken, it is one of the few countries in Europe where poverty is never insulted nor looked upon with contempt.…In Spain the very beggar does not feel himself a degraded being for he kisses no one's feet and knows not what it is to be cuffed or spitten upon.

Social Care in Eighteenth-Century Batavia The Poorhouse, 1725–1750

Itinerario ◽  
1995 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 18-31
Author(s):  
Margreet van Till
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Social Care ◽  
Poor Relief ◽  
Dutch Republic ◽  
Upper Middle Class

Almost everyone living in the Dutch Republic or its territories in the East in the eighteenth century, who did not belong to a patrician family or to the upper middle class, could be considered ‘poor’ according to modern standards. In these societies, however, there was one group of people who could be singled out as extremely poor. These people, representing the lowest stratum of society, were the clientele of the poorhouses and poor relief.

scholarly journals Home and Away: A Schoolmistress in Lowland Scotland and Colonial Australia in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century

2011 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 28-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jane McDermid
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Elementary Education ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Liberal Arts ◽  
English Education ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
For Profit ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
History Of

Writing in this journal in 1993, Marjorie Theobald examined the history of middle-class women's education in late-eighteenth-century Britain and its transference and adaptation to colonial Australia in the nineteenth century. She questioned both the British historical perception that before the middle of the nineteenth century middle-class parents showed little, if any, interest in their daughters' education, and the Australian assumption that the transplantation of the private female academy (or seminary) was simply a reflection of the scramble for respectability by a small middle class scattered among a convict society. Theobald found that, as in Britain by the early 1800s, these schools—all private and run for profit by the wives and daughters of clergy and other professional men—shared a remarkably similar curriculum, generally advertised as “An English education with the usual accomplishments.” This was not, she argued, an elementary education, but rather was rooted in the liberal arts tradition and had been influenced by the search for stability within a rapidly industrializing Britain. The daughters of the British middle classes were to be taught how to deploy their learning discreedy, to ensure that it was at the service of their domestic role and civilizing influence.

Epilogue

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louis A. Pérez
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Class ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Social Differentiation ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Interior Spaces ◽  
Cultural Displacement ◽  
Moral System ◽  
Successive Generations ◽  
Cultural Shifts

Middle-class Cubans in the nineteenth century had developed the capacity to admire themselves, a self-assurance inscribed in the very ethos by which an emerging social class advanced its claim to ascendancy. These developments implied a heightened confidence in the authority to act in common in the pursuit of collective interests: developments occurring at a time when the propriety of Cuban was gaining currency as a matter of cultural displacement and moral deportment, when pretensions to being a separate people were enacted through multiple forms of social differentiation. Successive generations of Cubans had crossed into new realms of self-awareness, in part political, to be sure, but also moral and cultural, reaching deeply into those interior spaces where a people accept as a matter of a shared conviction the need to exert their claim to agency and exercise the prerogative of choice as a way to situate themselves as subjects of history in narratives of their own making. The habit of volition had taken hold as a facet of far-reaching cultural shifts, a deepening consciousness of the authority of agency within an emerging moral system formed to accommodate the cosmology of Cuban....

Extra-illustration, preservation and libraries in the nineteenth-century United States

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-105 ◽  
Author(s):  
Megan Walsh
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Information Organization ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
George Washington ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Nineteenth Century United States

Extra-illustration, usually considered an eighteenth-century and early-nineteenth-century British phenomenon, is abundantly present in the creative book practices of the late nineteenth-century United States, but it is often overlooked in scholarship. Analysing the collecting, cutting and pasting habits of Massachusetts banker Nathaniel Paine, this article argues that extra-illustration was closely connected to the then emerging modes of information organization that have since shaped modern libraries. Paine added hundreds of mass-produced images of US president George Washington to the volumes in his library, including a group of pamphlets printed just after Washington died in 1799. This unusual group of pamphlets, as well as Paine’s other extra-illustrative supplements to his volumes and scrapbooks, reveal an effort not only to preserve a particular version of the past but also to develop an indexing scheme built around pictures.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document