Conclusion

Author(s):  
Simon Willmetts

In his introduction to Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s cogent critique of excessive US Government secrecy, FBI historian Richard Gid Powers wrote: ‘If official secrecy had a devastating impact on American history, its impact on Americans’ understanding of that history was a collateral disaster.’1 From the very beginnings of history as a professional discipline in the nineteenth century, indeed, since the time of the ancients and the first known works of source-based historical narrative by Herodotus and Thucydides, history has always existed, as Lynn Hunt put it, ‘in a symbiotic relationship with nationalism’....

Author(s):  
Supriya Mukherjee

This chapter focuses on Indian historical writing. The end of colonial rule in 1947 was a turning point in Indian historical writing and culture. History emerged as a professional discipline with the establishment of new state-sponsored institutions of research and teaching. Attached to the institutionalization was the political imperative of a newly independent nation in search of a coherent and comprehensive historical narrative to support its nation-building efforts. At the same time, there was a desire to establish an autonomous Indian perspective, free of colonial constraints and distortions. In this, post-independence historiography owed much to earlier strands of nationalist historiography. During the first two decades after independence, three main trajectories of historical writing emerged: an official and largely secular nationalist historiography, a cultural nationalist historiography with strong religious overtones, and a critical Marxist trajectory based on analyses of social forms.


2021 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 344-363
Author(s):  
Barbara L. Coffey

Materials that were born digital, and printed materials that have been digitized, have aided an updated examination of nineteenth-century US whaling voyages’ financial returns. Items included the American Offshore Whaling Voyages dataset from whalinghistory.org , The Whalemen’s Shipping List and Merchant’s Transcript, a congressman’s speech and a state’s census reports. These works and others, with analysis, showed that for the 11,257 analysable voyages ending in the 1800s, the mean return was 4.7% and 4.6% for whaling and US government bonds, respectively. Ideally, this work will place the nineteenth-century US whaling industry returns in context of other investments.


2018 ◽  
pp. 164-184
Author(s):  
GEORGE M. FREDRICKSON

2021 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 389-422
Author(s):  
Dory Agazarian

The condition of St. Paul's Cathedral was central to concerns about the perception of London over the course of the nineteenth century. Designed by Sir Christopher Wren, it faced public criticism from the start. Unlike gothic Westminster Abbey, St. Paul's was an eclectic amalgam of gothic and neoclassical architecture; its interior was never finished. Efforts to decorate were boxed in by the strictures of Victorian architectural revivalism. This is the story of how academic historiography resolved a problem that aesthetic and architectural theory could not. Throughout the century, cathedral administrators sought to improve the cathedral by borrowing tools from historians with varying success. In the 1870s, a solution emerged when historians reinvented the Italian Renaissance as a symbol of liberal individualism. Their revisionist Renaissance provided an alternative to pure gothic or neoclassical revivalism, able to accommodate Wren's stylistic eclecticism. Scholars have traditionally plotted disputes about St. Paul's within broader architectural debates. Yet I argue that these discussions were framed as much by historical discourse as aesthetics. Turns in Victorian historiography eventually allowed architects to push past the aesthetic limits of the Battle of the Styles. New methods in Victorian historical research were crucial to nineteenth-century experiences of urban space.


2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 226-242
Author(s):  
Isabelle Richet

This paper discusses the symbiotic relationship that developed between English-language periodicals published in Italy and major reading rooms in Rome and Florence. This relationship took various configurations – from Luigi Piale in Rome, who opened a reading room and published the weekly The Roman Advertiser, to the Gabinetto Vieusseux in Florence that provided access to the many English-language periodicals published in Italy – and created important spaces of transnational cultural interaction. The paper looks at the cultural practices and the forms of sociability represented by the reading of periodicals and the patronizing of reading rooms as ‘imported traditions’ brought to Italy by the many British cultured travellers and residents in the nineteenth century. It identifies the actors who promoted these cultural practices (editors, librarians, cosmopolitan intellectuals) and analyses their role as mediating figures who created in-between spaces where cross-cultural exchanges unfolded. The paper also discusses the broader transnational cultural dynamic at work as those cultural practices imported from England favoured a greater engagement of British visitors and expatriates with the Italian political and cultural environment.


Author(s):  
William H. McNeill

IN THE LATTER part of the nineteenth century, east coast city dwellers in the United States had difficulty repressing a sense of their own persistent cultural inferiority vis-à-vis London and Paris. At the same time a great many old-stock Americans were dismayed by the stream of immigrants coming to these shores whose diversity called the future cohesion of the Republic into question almost as seriously as the issue of slavery had done in the decades before the Civil War. In such a climate of opinion, the unabashed provinciality of Frederick Jackson Turner's (1861-1932) paper "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," delivered at a meeting of the newly founded American Historical Association in connection with the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago (1892), began within less than a decade to resound like a trumpet call, though whether it signalled advance or retreat remained profoundly ambiguous....


2018 ◽  
pp. 135-157
Author(s):  
Millington W. Bergeson-Lockwood

This chapter focuses on the formation of national civil rights organizations in Boston and how they confronted the rising tide of Jim Crow in the final decade of the nineteenth century. Through these organizations, black men and women merged local political concerns with a broader movement for racial equality. This chapter pays particular attention to the Boston black community’s response to the rise in southern lynching. In doing so, it expands the historical narrative that has focused on anti-lynching during the 1890s as a product of the actions of central national leaders.


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