The Romantic Indian

Author(s):  
Kate Flint

This chapter looks at the image of the Indian that the nineteenth century inherited from Romantic writing, one that emphasized the trope of the “dying Indian” as a member of a race associated with positive connotations of bravery, loyalty, dignity, and so on. It shows how it provided an opportunity for poets to exploit their fondness for the melancholic or to explore the qualities of supposedly primitive people. The chapter then traces the shift from the way in which the Indian was seen as a vehicle of rhetorical eloquence to being a figure of pathos. How did this transition come about? The answer lies in a combination of factors. Taken together, these illustrate the interdependency of poetic traditions on either side of the Atlantic during this period and the adaptability of the idea of the dying Indian to serve a range of aesthetic, political, and emotional ends. In both Britain and the United States, there was a growing and increasingly compassionately expressed knowledge about what was happening to native peoples. Indians in North America, however numerous they might appear to those who still saw them as formidable military allies or opponents, were becoming increasingly vulnerable: not just to diseases, but to displacement.

Fragmentology ◽  
10.24446/dlll ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 73-139
Author(s):  
Scott Gwara

Using evidence drawn from S. de Ricci and W. J. Wilson’s Census of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the United States and Canada, American auction records, private library catalogues, public exhibition catalogues, and manuscript fragments surviving in American institutional libraries, this article documents nineteenth-century collections of medieval and Renaissance manuscript fragments in North America before ca. 1900. Surprisingly few fragments can be identified, and most of the private collections have disappeared. The manuscript constituents are found in multiple private libraries, two universities (New York University and Cornell University), and one Learned Society (Massachusetts Historical Society). The fragment collections reflect the collecting genres documented in England in the same period, including albums of discrete fragments, grangerized books, and individual miniatures or “cuttings” (sometimes framed). A distinction is drawn between undecorated text fragments and illuminated ones, explained by aesthetic and scholarly collecting motivations. An interest in text fragments, often from binding waste, can be documented from the 1880s.


Author(s):  
Neal Salisbury

The Atlantic Northeast emerged as a distinctive region between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries. Its largest tribal groupings were the Abenaki, Mi’kmaq, Penobscot, and other Wabanaki peoples; the Delaware and other Lenape peoples; and Mohegan, Mohican, Munsee, Narragansett, Pequot, and Wampanoag Indians. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, these peoples struggled to survive in the face of depopulation from diseases, warfare, emigration, and other effects of European, particularly English, colonization. Thereafter, they and their communities persisted, despite further marginalization in non-Native law, society, and discourse in the United States and Canada. Since the end of the nineteenth century, Native peoples have begun to resist such marginalization through greater public visibility as celebrities and activists, by regaining some lands and rights, and by proclaiming their own perspectives on their history.


1996 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa M. Anderson

In 1855, the first ‘coloured’ minstrel troupe, the Mocking Bird Minstrels, appeared on a Philadelphia stage. While this company did not stay together long, it heralded a change in the ‘face’ of minstrelsy in the United States. Many other black minstrel troupes would quickly follow, drawing attention away from the white minstrels who had until then dominated the scene. However, the white minstrel show had already iconized a particular representation of the ‘Negro’, which ultimately paved the way for black anti-minstrel attitudes at the end of the nineteenth century. The minstrel show existed in two guises: the white-in-blackface, and the black-in-blackface. The form and content of the minstrel shows changed over time, as well as audience perception of the two different types of performance. The black minstrel show has come to be regarded as a ‘reclaiming’ of slave dance and performance. It differs from white minstrelsy in that it gave theatrical form to ‘signifyin” on white minstrelsy in the manner in which slaves practised ‘signifyin” on whites in real life.


2019 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 137-158
Author(s):  
M. Ann Hall

During the nineteenth century in North America, a small group of working-class women turned to sport to earn a living. Among them were circus performers, race walkers, wrestlers, boxers, shooters, swimmers, baseball players, and bicycle racers. Through their athleticism, these women contested and challenged the prevailing gender norms, and at the same time expanded notions about Victorian women’s capabilities and appropriate work. This article focuses on one of these professional sports, namely high-wheel bicycle racing. Bicycle historians have mostly dismissed women’s racing during the brief high-wheel era of the 1880s as little more than sensational entertainment, and have not fully understood its importance. I hope to change these perceptions by providing evidence that female high-wheel racers in the United States, who often began as pedestriennes (race walkers), were superb athletes competing in an exciting, well-attended, and profitable sport.


Author(s):  
Frank Towers

Today’s political map of North America took its basic shape in a continental crisis in the 1860s, marked by Canadian Confederation (1867), the end of the U.S. Civil War (1865), the restoration of the Mexican Republic (1867), and numerous wars and treaty regimes conducted between these states and indigenous peoples through the 1870s. This volume explores the tumultuous history of North American state-making in the mid-nineteenth century from a continental perspective that seeks to look across and beyond the traditional nation-centered approach. This introduction orients readers by first exploring the meaning of key terms—in particular sovereignty and its historical attachment to the concept of the nation state—and then previewing how contributors interrogate different themes of the mid-century struggles that remade the continent’s political order. Those themes fall into three main categories: the character of the states made and remade in the mid-1800s; the question of sovereignty for indigenous polities that confronted the European-settler descended governments of Canada, Mexico, and the United States; and the interaction between capitalist expansion and North American politics, and the concomitant implications of state making for sovereignty’s more diffuse meaning at the level of individual and group autonomy.


1983 ◽  
Vol 115 (11) ◽  
pp. 1545-1546 ◽  
Author(s):  
B.J. Kangasniemi ◽  
D. R. Oliver

Eurasian water milfoil, Myriophyllum spicatum Linnaeus, was introduced into eastern North America late in the nineteenth century. It has spread and developed into a major aquatic weed in many areas of the United states and Canada (Aiken et al. 1979; Reed 1977). In British Columbia, it was first observed in the Vernon Arm of Okanagan Lake in 1970 and had spread to all major 1,akes in the Okanagan Valley by 1976 (Newroth 1979).


Author(s):  
Brendan W. Rensink

On July 27, 1882, a group of at least seventy-five “Turtle Mountain Indians from Canada” crossed the US–Canada border near Pembina, Dakota Territory, ordered white settlers off the land, and refused to pay customs duties assessed against them. “We recognize no boundary line, and shall pass as we please,” proclaimed their leader, Chief Little Shell. Native to the Red River region long before the Treaty of 1818 between the United States and Great Britain drew imaginary cartographies across the region or the 1872 International Boundary Survey left physical markers along the 49th parallel, Little Shell’s Chippewas and Métis navigated expansive homelands bounded by the natural environment and surrounding Native peoples, not arbitrary latitudinal coordinates. Over a century later, Indigenous leaders from the United States, Canada, and Mexico formed the Tribal Border Alliance and hosted a “Tribal Border Summit” in 2019 to assert that “Tribes divided by international borders” had natural inherent and treaty-bound rights to cross for various purposes. These Indigenous sentiments, expressed over centuries, reveal historic and ongoing conflicts born from the inherent incongruity between Native sovereignty and imposed non-Native boundaries and restrictions. Issues of land provide a figurative bedrock to nearly all discussion of interactions between and boundary making by non-Native and Native peoples in North America. Indigenous lands and competing relations to it, natural resources and contest over their control, geography and territoriality: these issues underpin all North American history. Adjacent to these more familiar topics are complex stories of boundaries and borders that were imposed, challenged, ignored, violated, or co-opted. Native histories and experiences at the geographic edges of European empires and nation-states uncover rough and untidy processes of empire-building and settler colonial aspirations. As non-Natives drew lines across maps, laying claim to distant Indigenous lands, they also divided the same in arbitrary manners. They rarely gave serious consideration to Native sovereignty or rights to traditional or evolving relationships to homelands and resources. It is a wonder, therefore, that centuries of non-Natives have been surprised when Indigenous peoples refused to recognize the authority of imposed borders or co-opted their jurisdictional “power” for their own uses. Surveying examples of Indigenous peoples and their histories across imposed boundaries in North America forces historians to ask new questions about intercultural exchange, geopolitical philosophies, and the histories of nations, regions, and peoples. This is a worthy, but complex, pursuit that promises to greatly enrich all intersecting topics and fields.


1973 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-92 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ged Martin

The movement for imperial federation has traditionally been regarded as a late nineteenth century phenomenon, which grew out of a supposed reaction against earlier ‘anti-imperialism’. J. E. Tyler set out to trace its growth ‘from its first beginnings… in and around 1868’. Historians were aware of the suggestions made before the American War of Independence that the colonies should send M.P.s to Westminster, but tended to dismiss them as of antiquarian rather than historical interest. A few also noted apparently isolated discussions of some Empire federal connexion in the first half of the nineteenth century, but no attempt was made to establish the existence of a continuous sentiment before 1870. C. A. Bodelsen did no more than list a series of examples he had discovered in the supposed age of anti-imperialism. In fact between 1820 and 1870 a debate about the federal nature of the Empire can be traced. Like the movement for imperial federation after 1870, there was only the vaguest unity of aim about the mid-century projects, and before 1870, as after, the idea was never consistently to the fore, but enjoyed short bursts of popularity. It is, however, fair to think of one single movement for a federal Empire throughout the nineteenth century. There is a clear continuity in ideas, in arguments, and in the people involved. Ideas of Empire federalism were influential, not so much for themselves as for their relationship to overall imperial thinking: to ignore the undercurrent of feeling for a united Empire is to distort the attitudes of many leading men. In the mid-nineteenth century general principles of imperial parliamentary union were argued chiefly from the particular case of British North America, the closest colonies to Britain and the most constitutionally advanced. This Canadian emphasis strengthened the analogies with the United States which occurred in any case.


2019 ◽  
pp. 195-288
Author(s):  
Ulrich Bindseil

The annex presents, with a common template, a catalogue of 25 pre-1800 central banks. While it benefits considerably from previous surveys, it has a narrower focus on central bank operations and balance sheets, and on the genealogy of central banking. It also includes some banks which are not contained in the previous surveys of Roberds and Velde (the Bank of Scotland, the Banco di Santo Spirito di Roma, the American settlers’ land bank projects, the central bank projects of Leipzig and Cologne, the Copenhagen bank, the Russian Assignation Banks, the Banco Nacional de San Carlo, the Bank of North America, and the Bank of the United States). Not all institutions completely fulfil the definition of a central bank, and particularly not for the entire lifetime of its existence. However, all banks included had, at least in the way they were conceived, important elements of central banking, and thereby at least illustrate the challenges that central bank design faced pre-1800.


2019 ◽  
pp. 36-50
Author(s):  
Alejandro de la Torre

Correspondents played a vital role in the Spanish anarchist press. They helped to build a global libertarian community; three specific cases narrated in this chapter describe how a nucleus of Spanish-speaking anarchist readers developed in North America. The correspondents’ work made possible, in large part, the connection between local hubs and other communities of libertarian readers in distant places. Such links describe the emergence of a powerful transnational “print culture” that gradually incorporated the United States (as a political, economic, and cultural space) in the ideological panorama of Ibero-American Spanish-speaking anarchism. In this sense, the image of the United States, as a symbolic reference for exploitation, found a fertile ground in the transnational Spanish-language anarchist print network beginning at the end of the nineteenth century.


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