The First Breed of Cattle

Author(s):  
Rebecca J. H. Woods

Chapter 3 interrogates the concept of a “native” breed within the context of pedigree cattle breeding in the early- to mid-nineteenth century. It centers on Hereford cattle, which began their career as a hardy regional breed of varied appearance. As cattle breeders increasingly turned towards recorded pedigrees as guarantees of value, and pure-breeding (mating closely-related animals to narrow a genotype) became the became the desired goal, if not always the practical norm, within the industry, Hereford cattle increasingly failed to measure up against “improved” varieties like the Shorthorn breed. “Nativeness” initially operated as a proxy for purity in the case of Hereford cattle, as the close connection between type and place worked in favour of the breed, but over time, breeders turned to other measures. Phenotypic uniformity became paramount at mid-century by which time all Herefords displayed red coats and white faces, and its “native” character began to expand beyond its original region to take on national trappings in conjunction with a growing national taste for British beef.

Author(s):  
Rebecca J. H. Woods

This chapter uses the case of Soay sheep, one of the United Kingdom’s most ancient and remote breeds of sheep to pose the central question of the book: what is the relationship between place and type in both the practice of and rhetoric surrounding British breeds of sheep and cattle in the nineteenth century? This relationship pivoted on the notion of the “native” breed, a category whose meaning shifted over time but nonetheless structured efforts to selectively breed sheep and cattle in both Britain and its empire during the period of study. Attention to breed as a category, this chapter argues, can revitalize scholarly conversation and inquiry around animals and environmental history, much of which has focused on the level of species, and thereby overlooked some of the most important features of ecological imperialism in the nineteenth century.


Author(s):  
C. Michael Shea

For the past several decades, scholars have stressed that the genius of John Henry Newman remained underappreciated among his Roman Catholic contemporaries, and in order to find the true impact of his work, one must look to the century after his death. This book takes direct aim at that assumption. Examining a host of overlooked evidence from England and the European continent, Newman’s Early Legacy tracks letters, recorded conversations, and obscure and unpublished theological exchanges to show how Newman’s 1845 Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine influenced a cadre of Catholic teachers, writers, and Church authorities in nineteenth-century Rome. The book explores how these individuals then employed Newman’s theory of development to argue for the definability of the new dogma of the Immaculate Conception of Mary during the years preceding the doctrine’s promulgation in 1854. Through numerous twists and turns, the narrative traces how the theory of development became a factor in determining the very language that the Roman Catholic Church would use in referring to doctrinal change over time. In this way, Newman’s Early Legacy uncovers a key dimension of Newman’s significance in modern religious history.


Author(s):  
Linford D. Fisher

Although racial lines eventually hardened on both sides, in the opening decades of colonization European and native ideas about differences between themselves and the other were fluid and dynamic, changing on the ground in response to local developments and experiences. Over time, perceived differences were understood to be rooted in more than just environment and culture. In the eighteenth century, bodily differences became the basis for a wider range of deeper, more innate distinctions that, by the nineteenth century, hardened into what we might now understand to be racialized differences in the modern sense. Despite several centuries of dispossession, disease, warfare, and enslavement at the hands of Europeans, native peoples in the Americans almost universally believed the opposite to be true. The more indigenous Americans were exposed to Europeans, the more they believed in the vitality and superiority of their own cultures.


1987 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 337-342
Author(s):  
Eric Monkkonen

Samuel Kernell's article “The Early Nationalization of Political News in America,” in Studies in American Political Development: An Annual (1986), 1: 255–78, raises issues that are at once interesting and puzzling. He measures the number and length of all political articles in leading Cleveland newspapers through the middle decades of the nineteenth century in order to ask about the amount of newspaper attention paid to local, state, and national political issues. He observes that local issues were predominant only very early in the nineteenth century and that they declined quickly over time. Kernell concludes that politics nationalized far earlier than historians like Robert Wiebe had ever thought. Wiebe's “island communities” were gone by 1845. It is a clever piece of research of substantial significance.


2021 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 102-129
Author(s):  
KRISTAN COCKERILL

ABSTRACT Despite the long-understood variability in the Mississippi River, the upper portions of the river have historically received less attention than the lower reach and this culminated in the lower river dominating twentieth century river management efforts. Since the seventeenth century, there have been multiple tendencies in how the upper river was characterized, including relatively spare notes about basic conditions such as channel width and flow rates which shifted to an emphasis on romantic descriptions of the riparian scenery by the mid-nineteenth century. Finally, by the late nineteenth century the upper river was routinely portrayed as a flawed entity requiring human intervention to fix it. While the tone and specific language changed over time, there remained a consistent emphasis that whatever was being reported about the river was scientifically accurate.


2021 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 569-600
Author(s):  
Naomi R. Lamoreaux ◽  
Laura Phillips Sawyer

Scholars have long recognized that the states’ authority to charter corporations bolstered their antitrust powers in ways that were not available to the federal government. Our paper contributes to this literature by focusing attention on the relevance for competition policy of lawsuits brought by minority shareholders against their own companies, especially lawsuits challenging voting trusts. Historically judges had been reluctant to intervene in corporations’ internal affairs and had been wary of the potential for opportunism in shareholders’ derivative suits. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, they had begun to revise their views and see shareholders as useful allies in the struggle against monopoly. Although the balance between judges’ suspicion of and support for shareholders’ activism shifted back and forth over time, in the end the lawsuits provoked state legislatures to strengthen antitrust policy by making devices like voting trusts unsuitable for purposes of economic concentration.


2021 ◽  
Vol 51 (4) ◽  
pp. 440-463
Author(s):  
Raffaella Sarti

What did early-modern and nineteenth-century Italians mean when they used the expressions tener casa aperta or aver casa aperta, literally to keep open house and to have an open house? In this article I will try to answer this question, which is far less trivial than one might imagine. Before tackling the topic, a premise is necessary. In some previous works, I used an etic category of ‘open houses’, i.e. a category I elaborated to interpret the implications of the presence, in many households, of domestic staff from different classes, places, races than their masters/employers. Such a presence made those houses open. The border between different peoples and cultures was inside the houses themselves that were places of exchanges, confrontations and clashes. In this article, I will develop a different approach: I will map the emic uses of the ‘open-house’ category, i.e. I will analyse how early-modern and nineteenth-century Italians used the expressions tener casa aperta or aver casa aperta. While some uses had to do with hospitality and sociability, others had legal meanings, referring to citizenship rights and privileges, the status of aristocrats, the differences between foreigners and local people and taxpaying. I will pay particular attention to the latter, also suggesting possible geographical differences and changes over time. This will present an opportunity to delve into the cultural and legal world of early-modern and nineteenth-century Italians, and to unveil the importance of houses for one's status.


2018 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 52-91 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathryn Gin Lum

AbstractThis article asks whether and how J. Z. Smith's contention that religion is a “non-native category” might be applied to the discipline of history. It looks at how nineteenth-century Americans constructed their own understandings of “proper history”—authenticatable, didactic, and progressive—against the supposed historylessness of “heathen” Hawaiians and stagnation of “pagan” Chinese. “True” history, for these nineteenth-century historians, changed in the past and pointed to change in the future. The article asks historians to think about how they might be replicating some of the same assumptions about forward-moving history by focusing on change over time as a core component of historical narration. It urges historians to instead also incorporate the native historical imaginations of our subjects into our own methods, paying attention to when those imaginations are cyclical and reiterative as well as directional, and letting our subjects' assumptions about time and history, often shaped by religious perspectives, orient our own decisions about how to structure the stories we tell.


2015 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 277-303 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emma Moreton

This paper examines the use of the pattern Pronoun + Verb + Pronoun (as in I hope you, you think I and she knows he) in a corpus of nineteenth-century Irish emigrant correspondence. The corpus contains 88 letters by four sisters (the Lough sisters), who emigrated from Ireland to America in the 1870s and 1880s. The study aims to investigate how these clauses — described as projection structures — function and how they contribute to the interactive nature of letters, helping to strengthen and maintain familial bonds over time and distance. Corpus methods are used first to identify and extract these patterns. A more qualitative investigation then examines the function of projection structures and how they construct and reflect author/recipient relationships.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 (139) ◽  
pp. 52-74
Author(s):  
Henrique Espada Lima

Abstract This article examines postmortem inventories and notarial records from Brazilian slaveholders in southern Brazil in the nineteenth century. By discussing selected cases in detail, it investigates the relationship between “precarious masters” (especially the poor and/or disabled, widows without family, and single elderly slaveholding women and men) and their slaves and former slaves to whom they bequeathed, in their testaments and final wills, manumission and property. The article reads these documents as intergenerational contractual arrangements that connected the masters’ expectations for care in illness and old age with the slaves’ and former slaves’ expectations for compensation for their work and dedication. Following these uneven relationships of interdependence and exploitation as they developed over time, the article suggests a reassessment of the role of paternalism in Brazil during the country’s final century of slavery. More than a tool to enforce relations of domination, paternalism articulated with the dynamics of vulnerability and interdependency as they changed over the life courses of both enslaved people and slave owners. This article shows how human aging became a terrain of negotiation and struggle as Brazilian slave society transformed throughout the nineteenth century.


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