scholarly journals What Space Is This Time? Historiography in the Space of History

2021 ◽  
Vol 70 (4) ◽  
pp. 25-40
Author(s):  
Rosemarie K. Bank
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Systems ◽  
The United States ◽  
Cultural Knowledge ◽  
Structural Constraints ◽  
Ancient Society ◽  
Columbian Exposition ◽  
Wild West

In asking the question embedded in the title, this article explores the tension between inertia and change in cultural historical studies. Inertia in this context does not mean inactive or inert (i.e., without active properties), but the structural constraints that are revealed when codes, forms, practices, roles, etc., contest. What kinds and forms of socio-cultural knowledge, values, or structures are maintained, developed, or abandoned across geographies and throughout a system’s history? Rather than thinking in terms of core and margin and related binaries of difference and “othering,” inertia and change as historiographical strategies focus on the dynamics that affect social systems and structures, preserving some systems to conserve energy while introducing or forsaking others. In the process of exploring these spaces in historiographical time, this article draws historical examples from attempts among scholars and performers in the United States in the latter nineteenth century to stage “American” histories that stored, rejected, and created past and contemporaneous historical spaces at such sites as Lewis Henry Morgan’s view of Ancient Society (1877), the Columbian Exposition of 1893, and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West.

To 1750

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
William H. McNeill
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
American History ◽  
East Coast ◽  
The United States ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
Columbian Exposition ◽  
The Republic

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....

Poor Lo

Jockomo ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 53-74
Author(s):  
Shane Lief ◽  
John McCusker
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
The United States ◽  
Entertainment Industry ◽  
Mardi Gras ◽  
Wild West Shows ◽  
Wild West

While based on local families expressing their blended Native and African legacies, the development of the Mardi Gras Indian cultural system was also shaped by the stereotyped notion of the “American Indian.” Throughout the nineteenth century, as the United States expanded westward across the continent, theatrical and musical productions increasingly incorporated stereotypes of Native Americans, sometimes appearing in Wild West shows. This fell within a larger pattern of minstrelsy, a form of entertainment based on ethnic caricatures especially popular at that time. This chapter examines how minstrelsy, including the Wild West shows, influenced local enactments of “Indianness” in New Orleans. Conventional historiography has often seen the Wild West shows as the point of origin for Mardi Gras Indian traditions. This historical axiom is dispelled, however, and the nineteenth century entertainment industry is instead revealed as a phenomenon which reinforced previously existing cultural practices.

Literature

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arna Bontemps
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Slave Narratives ◽  
The United States ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
Free Verse ◽  
World's Columbian Exposition ◽  
Literary Societies ◽  
Columbian Exposition

This chapter examines Negro literature in Illinois, beginning with the literary societies, orators, and slave narratives of the nineteenth century. The Illinois Negroes' interest in literature had been recorded almost a decade before the Civil War by the organization of the Chicago Literary Society. Prior to 1861, there had been thirty-five works of Afro-American authorship published and sold in the United States; at the time of the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893 in Chicago more than 100 had been issued. This chapter considers the literary turn marked by the dialect poetry of Paul Lawrence Dunbar, James Edwin Campbell, and James David Corrothers, along with the free verse of Fenton Johnson. It also discusses the works of other Negro writers such as Frank Marshall Davis, Langston Hughes, and Arna Bontemp, as well as those of a number of white scholars, poets, and novelists from Illinois who had written sympathetically about African Americans.

Thinking About Scots Law

1996 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Rodger
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
British Empire ◽  
United States Of America ◽  
Case Law ◽  
The United States ◽  
Memorial Lecture ◽  
University Of Edinburgh ◽  
The University

This article is the revised text of the first W A Wilson Memorial Lecture, given in the Playfair Library, Old College, in the University of Edinburgh, on 17 May 1995. It considers various visions of Scots law as a whole, arguing that it is now a system based as much upon case law and precedent as upon principle, and that its departure from the Civilian tradition in the nineteenth century was part of a general European trend. An additional factor shaping the attitudes of Scots lawyers from the later nineteenth century on was a tendency to see themselves as part of a larger Englishspeaking family of lawyers within the British Empire and the United States of America.

‘A Routh O’ Auld Nick-Nackets’ – the antiquarian collection of John Rae

2015 ◽  
Vol 36-37 (1) ◽  
pp. 163-183
Author(s):  
Paul Taylor
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Context ◽  
Moral Education ◽  
The United States ◽  
Representative Case ◽  
National Museums ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The University

John Rae, a Scottish antiquarian collector and spirit merchant, played a highly prominent role in the local natural history societies and exhibitions of nineteenth-century Aberdeen. While he modestly described his collection of archaeological lithics and other artefacts, principally drawn from Aberdeenshire but including some items from as far afield as the United States, as a mere ‘routh o’ auld nick-nackets' (abundance of old knick-knacks), a contemporary singled it out as ‘the best known in private hands' (Daily Free Press 4/5/91). After Rae's death, Glasgow Museums, National Museums Scotland, the University of Aberdeen Museum and the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, as well as numerous individual private collectors, purchased items from the collection. Making use of historical and archive materials to explore the individual biography of Rae and his collection, this article examines how Rae's collecting and other antiquarian activities represent and mirror wider developments in both the ‘amateur’ antiquarianism carried out by Rae and his fellow collectors for reasons of self-improvement and moral education, and the ‘professional’ antiquarianism of the museums which purchased his artefacts. Considered in its wider nineteenth-century context, this is a representative case study of the early development of archaeology in the wider intellectual, scientific and social context of the era.

A HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE ON THE AUDITOR'S ROLE: THE EARLY EXPERlENCE OF THE AMERICAN RAILROADS

1983 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-86 ◽  
Author(s):  
James L. Boockholdt
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Internal Control ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
The United States ◽  
Advisory Services ◽  
Audit Independence ◽  
Inherent Part

The paper explores the origins of the auditing profession in the United States. It is suggested that the development of the audit function in this country can be traced to reporting by internal and shareholder auditors in the American railroads during the middle of the nineteenth century. Evidence is presented that a recognition of the need for audit independence existed, and that the provision of advisory services and reports on internal control by American auditors have been an inherent part of the auditor's role from that time.

An Overview of the History of Religious Life in the United States

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patricia Wittberg ◽  
Thomas P. Gaunt
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Religious Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
Religious Order ◽  
Religious Institutes ◽  
History Of ◽  
Socioeconomic Composition

This chapter briefly describes the history of religious institutes in the United States. It first covers the demographics—the overall numbers and the ethnic and socioeconomic composition—of the various institutes during the nineteenth century. It next discusses the types of ministries the sisters, brothers, and religious order priests engaged in, and the sources of vocations to their institutes. The second section covers changes in religious institutes after 1950, covering the factors which contributed to the changes as well as their impact on the institutes themselves and the larger Church. The chapter concludes with a brief overview of the subsequent chapters.

Deafness and Ethnic Identity: The Idea of a Deaf State and its Resonances with American Exceptionalism and Frontier Ideology

2019 ◽  
Vol 67 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-90
Author(s):  
Marion Rana
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Ethnic Identity ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
American Exceptionalism ◽  
Manifest Destiny ◽  
The United States ◽  
Culture Studies ◽  
Deaf Identity ◽  
American Nation

Abstract This article focuses on the nineteenth century as a pivotal time for the development of a Deaf identity in the United States and examines the way John Jacob Flournoy’s idea of a “Deaf-Mute Commonwealth” touches upon core themes of American culture studies and history. In employing pivotal democratic ideas such as egalitarianism, liberty, and self-representation as well as elements of manifest destiny such as exceptionalism and the frontier ideology in order to raise support for a Deaf State, the creation and perpetuation of a Deaf identity bears strong similarities to the processes of American nation-building. This article will show how the endeavor to found a Deaf state was indicative of the separationist and secessionist movements in the United States at that time, and remains relevant to Deaf group identity today.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document