Between Empires: Spanish Immigrants in the United States (1868–1945)

2019 ◽  
pp. 229-239
Author(s):  
James D. Fernández
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Working Class ◽  
The United States ◽  
National Narrative ◽  
Spanish Speaking ◽  
South Central ◽  
Entire Country ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Cigar Makers ◽  
Historical Accounts

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, tens of thousands of Spanish peasants, seamen, and workers emigrated to the United States, and settled in an archipelago of tight-knit enclaves that dotted the entire country from Barre, Vermont to Monterey, California, and from Boise, Idaho, to Tampa, Florida. Neither friars nor conquistadors, those tens of thousands of immigrants from Spain who ended up in the United States represent just a tiny percentage of the millions of Spaniards who, in those same years, crossed the Atlantic, most with the goal of settling in various points of the Spanish-speaking Americas. Herein lies one of the best-kept demographic secrets of the American hemisphere: the massive presence of Spaniards in the Americas –South, Central and North– is largely a post-imperial phenomenon. For every Spanish friar or explorer from Spain’s Age of Empire who is commemorated by a statue or a street name in the United States, there would arrive, during the Age of Immigration, thousands of Spanish seamen, nannies, cigar-makers, canners, miners, shopkeepers, sheepherders and steelworkers. But because their stories do not easily fit into any conventional national narrative in either country, these working-class Spaniards are, for the most part, absent from standard historical accounts of both Spanish emigration and US immigration. They are, as it were, invisible immigrants.

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.

Placing and Preserving Labor History

2017 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-83
Author(s):  
Rachel Donaldson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Working Class ◽  
American History ◽  
Public History ◽  
Labor History ◽  
The United States ◽  
National Narrative ◽  
Labor Activism ◽  
Working Class History

This article focuses on the significance of sites and landscapes of labor history in public history, particularly in the fields of preservation and interpretation. Through the preservation of labor history sites, public historians can educate various audiences about the diversity of the working-class experience in the United States. Although sites of work have long been identified as historically significant, all too often the workers have been excluded from these narratives. By understanding which sites are important in working-class history and by bringing workers’ voices into the act of protecting, commemorating, and interpreting sites of labor, we can achieve a more inclusive view of labor history—one that connects these stories to the national narrative and illustrates the centrality of labor and labor activism to American history.

Rumba

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juliet McMains
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Working Class ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Dance Music ◽  
Ballroom Dancing ◽  
Black Neighborhoods ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
White Elite

Rumba refers to a genre of Afro-Cuban dance music played on hand percussion, including the subgenres of rumba yambú, rumba guaguancó, and rumba columbia. It is danced by a single couple or solo dancer in an African style with playful improvised steps featuring segmented movements of the hips, torso, and shoulders. Rumba, which evolved in late-nineteenth-century working-class, black neighborhoods of Matanzas, Cuba, was marginalized by Cuba’s white elite until the Castro regime embraced it as a symbol of modern national identity in the 1970s. Since the 1980s, rumba increasingly became a major feature of Cuban cultural export and cultural tourism, figuring prominently in Cuba’s modernization strategy through sale of state-sponsored folklore. Rumba also refers to a style of modern ballroom dancing that developed in the 1930s in the United States, England, and Europe that was loosely based on the Cuban music and dance form called son. In its early practice, ballroom rumba was characterized by a small box step incorporating swaying of the hips and partnered turns borrowed from American ballroom dances.

Questioning Similarities: Prohibition in the United States and Finland

2017 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-18
Author(s):  
Mark C. Smith
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Temperance Movement ◽  
Women's Christian Temperance Union ◽  
The Us ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Alcohol Prohibition

Only two republics have ever adopted national alcohol prohibition in peacetime, and they did so at almost exactly the same time. For these reasons and others, historians of temperance have considered prohibition in Finland and the United States to be essentially similar. In fact, despite originating at the same time, the two are quite dissimilar. American prohibition came out of Protestant revivalism and a capitalist desire for worker efficiency. By the late nineteenth century two powerful temperance organizations, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and the Anti- Saloon League, had emerged to lead the movement for domestic prohibition and to evangelize for prohibition abroad. Prohibition in Finland came out of the movement to achieve a cultural and political nationalism. Temperance was part of the Turku academics’ attempt to create a virtuous unified peasantry and working class. The working class, in particular, used the temperance movement to organize their movements. While the United States and Finland were the only two republics to undertake national prohibition, the US largely ignored the Finnish experiment. They praised it in the early 1920s only to emphasize its later failures as a way of trying to obscure their own inability to achieve a viable policy.

Middle-Class Victorian Street Arabs: Modern Re-creations of the Baker Street Irregulars

2012 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dominic Cheetham
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Children's Literature ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Street Children ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
The United States ◽  
Sherlock Holmes ◽  
Upward Shift

In three of Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories there are brief appearances of the Baker Street Irregulars, a group of ‘street Arabs’ who help Holmes with his investigations. These children have been re-imagined in modern children's literature in at least twenty-seven texts in a variety of media and with writers from both Britain and the United States. All these modern stories show a marked upward shift in the class of the Irregulars away from the lower working class of Conan-Doyle's originals. The shift occurs through attributing middle-class origins to the leaders of the Irregulars, through raising the class of the Irregulars in general, and through giving the children life environments more comfortable, safe, and financially secure than would have been possible for late-Victorian street children. Because of the variety in texts and writers, it is argued that this shift is not a result of the conscious political or ideological positions of individual writers, but rather reflects common unconscious narrative choices. The class-shift is examined in relation to the various pressures of conventions in children's literature, concepts of audience, and common concepts of class in society.

Second and Third Sessions of the Seventy-fifth Congress, 1937–38

1938 ◽  
Vol 32 (6) ◽  
pp. 1099-1123
Author(s):  
O. R. Altman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New Deal ◽  
Political Party ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Political ◽  
Entire Country

The election returns of November, 1936, seemed to portray a democracy strongly united behind a leader and a program of action. It appeared that Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal platform had been endorsed by nearly every interest and section in the United States, and an overwhelmingly Democratic Congress selected to enact into law those principles for which he “had just begun to fight.” Within six months, however, that unity started to disintegrate. Congress began to dissect carefully the program which the President proclaimed to be both beneficial for the entire country and politically prudent for the political party which he headed.

Japanese Multinationals in the United States: Continuity and Change, 1879–1990

1990 ◽  
Vol 64 (4) ◽  
pp. 585-629 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mira Wilkins
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Direct Investment ◽  
The United States ◽  
Business Leaders ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Historical Survey ◽  
Continuity And Change ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

A great deal of attention has recently been focused on the extent of Japanese direct investment in the United States. In the following historical survey, Professor Wilkins details the size and scope of these investments from the late nineteenth century, showing that Japanese involvements in America have deep historical roots. At the same time, she analyzes the ways in which late twentieth century Japanese direct investment differs from the earlier phenomenon and attempts to explain why it has aroused such concern among both business leaders and the general public.

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