Indians, Modernity, and History

2020 ◽  
pp. 288-296
Author(s):  
Kate Flint
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Indian Society ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Environmental Preservation ◽  
Native Peoples ◽  
James Welch ◽  
Transatlantic History ◽  
Contemporary Writing ◽  
Modes Of Thought

This chapter assesses how attitudes started to shift at the beginning of the twentieth century—partly under the influence of Western movies, partly as modernist writers and artists started to idealize the Indian for their own ends, and as other wannabe Indians, most notably Grey Owl, began to develop the association of Indianness with environmental preservation. It also looks at some contemporary writing by native peoples—especially James Welch and Leslie Marmon Silko—that aims to reappropriate nineteenth-century transatlantic history in a range of imaginative ways. By writing this fiction today, both Silko and Welch reclaim and rewrite the possibilities inherent for native peoples in the late nineteenth century. In so doing, they demonstrate that despite the importance, then and now, of tradition as both concept and practice within Indian society, identity, and modes of thought, it stands not isolated from modernity, but rather in mediation and dialogue with it. At a time when critical attention within American studies has increasingly turned toward imperialism and transnationalism, to explore the importance of the transatlantic Indian is to provide an important reminder that the internal colonial relations of the United States cannot be separated from these other trajectories.

Editing for Expansion: Railroad Photography, Native Peoples, and the American West, 1860–1880

2019 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 281-313
Author(s):  
Alessandra Link
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
American West ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The West ◽  
Native Peoples ◽  
Landscape Photography ◽  
Shared History ◽  
Technological Developments

Abstract In the nineteenth century, both railroad expansion and photography influenced relations between the United States and Native peoples in powerful ways. Scholars have often dealt with these two technological developments separately, but photographs and railroads have a shared history. Throughout the mid-to-late nineteenth century railroad companies engaged with photographs and photographers to promote travel on their lines. This article evaluates the production and circulation of transcontinental railroad photographs, and it concludes that the so-called golden age of landscape photography was built on the suppression of peopled scenes in the West. Images of Indians and trains that reached broad audiences placed Indigenous peoples in opposition to the modern forces cast in steel and running on steam. Picturing an unpeopled West and anti-modern Indians brightened business prospects for those investing in the promise of U.S. expansion beyond the 100th meridian.

Debt, Trust, and Reputation

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sebastian Schwecke
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Financial Markets ◽  
Indian Society ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Trust And Reputation ◽  
Active Interest ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Starting in the late nineteenth century, colonial rule in India took an active interest in regulating financial markets beyond the bridgeheads of European capital in intercontinental trade. Regulatory efforts were part of a modernizing project seeking to produce alignments between British and Indian business procedures, and to create the financial basis for incipient industrialization in India. For vast sections of Indian society, however, they pushed credit/debt relations into the realm of extra-legality, while the new, regulated agents of finance remained incapable (and unwilling) of serving their needs. Combining historical and ethnographic approaches, the book questions underlying assumptions of modernization in finance that continue to prevail in postcolonial India, and delineates the socioeconomic responses they produced, and studies the reputational economies of debt that have emerged instead – extra-legal markets embedded into communication flows on trust and reputation that have turned out to be significantly more exploitative than their colonial predecessors.

Rebuilding the City, Leaving it behind

2014 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 183-199 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Wells
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Urban Fringe ◽  
Environmental Crisis ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Urban Elites ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Suburban Developments ◽  
The City

As U.S. cities burgeoned in the late nineteenth century, their environmental problems multiplied. In response, some urban elites worked to rebuild the city to alleviate its environmental ills; others relocated to more environmentally enticing surroundings in new suburban developments. For members of both groups, new forms of transportation infrastructure profoundly shaped how they responded to the era's environmental crisis. Whereas efforts to rebuild and retrofit downtown were hampered by the difficulties and expense of working in densely built and populated areas, efforts to build on the urban fringe faced few serious obstacles. As a result, the most significant late nineteenth-century attempts to use transportation to remake city dwellers' relationships with nature in the United States - including tools developed with an eye on rebuilding dense city centers - exercised far greater influence on the expanding periphery of cities than on their environmentally fraught cores.

John Robert Seeley and the Political Theology of Empire

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Duncan Bell
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
World Order ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Political ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Famous Book ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This chapter focuses on John Robert Seeley (1834–95), the most prominent imperial thinker in late nineteenth-century Britain. It dissects Seeley's understanding of theology and religion, probes his views on the sacred character of nationality, and shows how he attempted to reconcile particularism and universalism in a so-called “cosmopolitan nationalist” vision. It argues that Seeley's most famous book, The Expansion of England (1883) should be understood as an expression of his basic political-theological commitments. The chapter also makes the case that he conceived of Greater Britain as a global federal nation-state, modeled on the United States. It concludes by discussing the role of India and Ireland in his polychronic, stratified conception of world order.

Anglospheres: Empire Redivivus?

2019 ◽  
pp. 38-55 ◽  
Author(s):  
Duncan Bell
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Deep Roots ◽  
The World ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
American Union

This chapter will explore the similarities and differences between late nineteenth-century debates on the British settler Empire and more recent visions of the Anglosphere. It suggests that the idea of the Anglosphere has deep roots in British political thought. In particular, it traces the debates over both imperial federation and Anglo-American union from the late nineteenth century onwards into the post-Brexit world. I examine three recurrent issues that have shaped arguments about the unity and potential of the ‘English-speaking peoples’: the ideal constitutional structure of the community; the economic model that it should adopt; and the role of the United States within it. I conclude by arguing that the legacy of settler colonialism, and an idealised vision of the ‘English-speaking peoples’, played a pivotal role in shaping Tory Euroscepticism from the late 1990s onwards, furnishing an influential group of politicians and public intellectuals, from Thatcher and Robert Conquest to Boris Johnson and Andrew Roberts, with an alternative non-European vision of Britain’s place in the world.

The Empire's New Frontiers

2003 ◽  
Vol 102 (667) ◽  
pp. 383-387 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael T. Klare
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Natural Behavior ◽  
Central Eurasia ◽  
South Central ◽  
Strategic Position ◽  
Late Nineteenth

The United States … wants to enhance its own strategic position in south-central Eurasia, much as Great Britain attempted in the late nineteenth century. This effort encompasses anti-terrorism and the pursuit of oil, but many in Washington also see it as an end in itself—as the natural behavior of a global superpower engaged in global dominance.

A Theater of Violence

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Jackson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Film History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The South ◽  
Half Century ◽  
The Common ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Chapter 5 examines lynching, a longstanding practice in the United States that became more regionally associated with the South in the late nineteenth century, as a force in film history from the earliest days of the medium through a cycle of anti-lynching films during the years around midcentury. Paradoxically, the Western genre is important here, absorbing many of the common rituals and generating a powerful ideological defense of lynching. During different periods across this half-century, different attitudes about lynching led to a variety of film representations, culminating with a number of films in the late 1930s and beyond questioning both lynching and its cinematic traces.

A Discussion of Jessica Blatt's Race and the Making of American Political Science

2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 808-809
Author(s):  
James Farr
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Racial Difference ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Racial Hierarchy ◽  
Civic Discourse ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
American Political Science

In Race and the Making of American Political Science, Jessica Blatt argues that the professionalization of the discipline was deeply entwined with ideas about racial difference, and the concomitant attempt by leading scholars to define and defend a system of racial hierarchy in the United States and beyond. Although it focuses on the period from the late nineteenth century through the 1930s, the book also raises fundamental questions about the historical legacy of racialist arguments for professional political science, the extent of their continuing resonance, and contemporary implications for both academic and broader civic discourse. We have asked a range of leading political scientists to consider and respond to Professor Blatt’s important call for scholarly self-reflexivity.

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