Weak Whites: Yellow Fever in Three Nineteenth-Century Louisiana Novels

2020 ◽  
Vol 70 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-55
Author(s):  
Robin Anita White
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Yellow Fever ◽  
Woman Writer ◽  
George Washington ◽  
George Washington Cable ◽  
The Third ◽  
Nineteenth Century Novels ◽  
The Voice

Since the eighteenth century, yellow fever has had a racialized history in New Orleans and elsewhere in the Americas stemming, in part, from the disease’s origins in West Africa. There was a misconception that blacks were less likely to fall victim to the disease. This article establishes the theories around contagion and susceptibility, showing that whites, especially foreigners, were thought to be at greater risk for what was called the “Strangers’ Disease.” It then analyzes three nineteenth-century novels about New Orleans wherein yellow fever plays an important role. Two of the novels are quite well known: The Grandissimes: A Story of Creole Life (1880) by George Washington Cable and Chita: A Memory of Last Island (1889) by Lafcadio Hearn. The third novel, Amitié et dévouement, ou Trois mois à la Louisiane (1845) by Camille Lebrun, although virtually forgotten, is especially important as it represents the voice of a French woman writer whose views on race differ from those of the two other authors.

Historical Fragments’ Mobile Echo

Transfers ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-119 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan E. Bell ◽  
Kathy Davis
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Ming Dynasty ◽  
Third Century ◽  
Refugee Crisis ◽  
The Third ◽  
Opium War ◽  
The Subject

Translocation – Transformation is an ambitious contribution to the subject of mobility. Materially, it interlinks seemingly disparate objects into a surprisingly unified exhibition on mobile histories and heritages: twelve bronze zodiac heads, silk and bamboo creatures, worn life vests, pressed Pu-erh tea, thousands of broken antique teapot spouts, and an ancestral wooden temple from the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) used by a tea-trading family. Historically and politically, the exhibition engages Chinese stories from the third century BCE, empires in eighteenth-century Austria and China, the Second Opium War in the nineteenth century, the Chinese Cultural Revolution of the mid-twentieth century, and today’s global refugee crisis.

scholarly journals “We Would Ride Safely in the Harbor of the Future”: Historical Parallels between the Existential Threats of Yellow Fever and Sea Level Rise in New Orleans and Norfolk

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 331-335
Author(s):  
Morris W. Foster ◽  
Emily E. Steinhilber
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sea Level Rise ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Sea Level ◽  
Yellow Fever ◽  
First Century ◽  
Climate Resilience ◽  
Sanitary Reform ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
And Sea Level

AbstractThe nineteenth-century experiences of yellow fever epidemics in New Orleans and Norfolk present historical parallels for how those cities, and others, are experiencing existential threats from climate change and sea level rise in the twenty-first century. In particular, the nineteenth-century “sanitary reform” movement can be interpreted as a model for challenges facing twenty-first-century “climate resilience” initiatives, including denialism and political obfuscation of scientific debates as well as tensions between short-term profit and the cost of long-term infrastructure investments and between individualism and communitarianism. The history of sanitary reform suggests that, at least in the United States, climate resilience initiatives will advance largely on a regional basis through extended local debates around these and other challenges until resilient infrastructure and practices are taken for granted, much as sanitary waterworks and sewers are today.

scholarly journals Robert Burns and the Re-making of National Memory in Contemporary Scotland

Authorship ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Josephine Dougal
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Tourism Industry ◽  
First Century ◽  
National Memory ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Selling Point ◽  
The Voice ◽  
Iconic Figure

Robert Burns, the eighteenth-century Scottish poet and song writer, continues to maintain a substantial cultural ‘afterlife’ in the twenty first century, both within Scotland and beyond. Achieving cult status in the nineteenth century, the power of Burns as a popular cultural icon remains undiminished. Where the appropriation of Burns as national icon in the nineteenth century was made manifest in statuary, commemorative objects, and painted portraits, the twenty-first century has been marked by the proliferation of the image of Burns in new forms and  technologies, with Burns as product and brand logo, museum and heritage attraction, and tourism industry selling point. This recent flourishing of interest and engagement raises questions about why and how an eighteenth-century poet continues to be the object of such extensive cultural elaboration at this time. In approaching this question, some fruitful lines of enquiry are being suggested in recent discussions that have looked at the nineteenth-century Burns as a ‘mobilizing agent in collective memory production’ (Rigney 2011, 81). One such appraisal points to how the construction of Burns in the nineteenth century as an iconic figure of Scottish cultural memory has the potential to ‘be resignified as necessary in subsequent chronological and geographical sites’ (Davis 2010, 14). It is this potential for the resignification of Burns as a symbolic site for the nation’s memory that this paper explores. In pointing to Burns’ representation in a variety of popular forms and in public discourse, the paper examines how a writer comes to be invested and reinvested as the voice and persona of the nation.

The Irish Priest in North America

1989 ◽  
Vol 25 ◽  
pp. 311-352
Author(s):  
Owen Dudley Edwards
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
North America ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
The United States ◽  
Frederick Jackson Turner ◽  
Catholic Clergy ◽  
The Third ◽  
Major Significance

To assert at the outset of this study, as I do, that the task before me is both impossible and essential, may be justly proclaimed a proceeding both cowardly and obvious. We are principally concerned with the nineteenth century, but the twentieth century prolonged many of the features of Irish Roman Catholic clerical identity of the nineteenth, in North America as elsewhere. Vitally important patterns and castes (social and mental) were established in the eighteenth century, and the first Irish-American Roman Catholic priestof major significance in the United States, John Carroll (1735-1815), first Roman Catholic bishop in the U.SA and first archbishop of Baltimore, owed his American birth initially to migration of his father’s kinsmen in the late seventeenth century. Anglophone North America from 178 3 consisted of two political obediences, with similarities and contrasts both subtle and, at least superficially, forceful. The huge and consistently expanding area of white settlement in North America in which the Irish Catholic clergy participated, created other great divergences: when American historians at the end of the nineteenth century under the influence of figures as divergent as Frederick Jackson Turner of the ‘frontier thesis’, Ulrich Bonnell Phillips of slavery apologetics, and Alfred Thayer Mahan of sea-power celebration, looked to environmentalism as the chief explanation of the American past, they may have oversimplified—indeed, they did oversimplify—but their sheer preoccupation with the question gives its own warnings against a filio-pietism which chooses to see an Irish ethnic character resolutely asserting itself to the third, fourth, and even later generations.

The Ghost of Pistoia

2019 ◽  
pp. 212-247
Author(s):  
Shaun Blanchard
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
Vatican Ii ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Many

This chapter shows that the Synod of Pistoia was a “ghost” on the council floor; that is, a key moment in the Church’s collective memory that influenced the drafting of texts and the subsequent debate over them. The first section briefly traces the legacy of Auctorem fidei and the Pistorienses from the death of Ricci (1810) to the eve of Vatican II. In the increasingly ultramontane nineteenth-century, the memory of the infamous Pistoians was evoked in a range of ecclesial documents. Auctorem fidei was firmly established as a bulwark of ultramontane thought. The second section surveys the many contexts in which Auctorem fidei was cited in Vatican II draft documents. The third section thoroughly analyses six evocations of Auctorem fidei during the debate on episcopal collegiality. These evocations constitute the most detailed discussion of an eighteenth-century doctrinal document at the Council, and prove that Pistoia was a “ghost” in the Aula.

Marie Lloyd (1870–1922) and Biographical Constructions of the Nineteenth-Century Female Superstar

2020 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-130
Author(s):  
Paul Watt
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Varied Range ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Music Hall ◽  
The Voice ◽  
Alternative Reading

Marie Lloyd (1870–1922) was a vocal superstar of the late nineteenth century. With tens of thousands of ardent followers in Britain and America—and an income that eclipsed even what Adele Patti and Nellie Melba earned—Lloyd was a vocal sensation. Biographers of the prima donna, the female vocal celebrity, are often quick to turn their subjects into heroines through the conferment of appellations such as “The Swedish Nightingale” (for Jenny Lind), “The Queen of Song” (Adelina Patti), and “The Voice of Australia,” in the case of Nellie Melba. Marie Lloyd was also bestowed a heroic title, but in an entirely different milieu: “Queen of the Music Hall.” This article probes the varied reasons—and ambiguities—of this appellation in biographical constructions of Lloyd, especially in relation to the dexterity of her voice that was arguably more varied in its scope than most of her operatic peers. Lloyd's biographers provide disembodied narratives of her career and achievements, since they have virtually nothing to say about the extraordinary range and versatility of her voice. With the aid of historic recordings it is possible to finally make an estimate of Lloyd's technique, and the results are surprising: she was no mere music-hall singer. Lloyd's voice and acting encompassed techniques ranging from eighteenth-century melodrama to nineteenth-century diseuse, allowing for an alternative reading of Lloyd's reputation as Queen of the Music Hall and the varied range of singing found in this institution.

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