Making Bourbon

Author(s):  
Karl Raitz

Kentucky distillers have produced bourbon and rye whiskeys for more than two centuries. Part I of this book examines the complexities associated with nineteenth-century distilling’s evolution from an artisanal craft practiced by farmers and millers to a large-scale mechanized industry that adopted increasingly refined production techniques. The change from waterpower to steam engines permitted the relocation of distilleries away from traditional sites along creeks or at large springs. Commercial-scale distilling was accompanied by increasing government taxes and oversight controls. Mechanized distilleries readily expanded production and increased their demand for labor, grains, cooperage, copper stills, and other metal fixtures. Improved transportation—turnpikes, steamboats, trains, and dams and locks—allowed distillers to extend their reach for grains and equipment while distributing their product to national and international markets. Industrial production produced large amounts of spent grains, or slop, which had to be disposed of by feeding it to livestock or dumping it in sinkholes and creeks. Industrialization also increased the risk of fire, explosions, personal injury, and livestock diseases. Overproduction during the last third of the nineteenth century, among other problems, forced many distilleries to stop production or close. The temperance movement eventually led to Prohibition, which was in effect nationwide from 1920 to 1933. A small number of distillers survived that period by making medicinal whiskey. Part II consists of two case studies that provide detailed information on the general process of mechanization and industrialization: the Henry McKenna Distillery in Nelson County, and James Stone’s Elkhorn Distillery in Scott County. Part III examines the process of claiming product identity through naming, copyright law, and the acknowledgment that tradition and heritage can be employed by contemporary distillers to market their whiskey. Distillers venerate the “old,” and reconstructing the past as a marketing strategy has demonstrated that the industry’s heritage resides on the landscape—much of it established in the nineteenth century in the form of historic buildings, traditional routes, distillery towns, and other features that can be conserved through historic preservation and utilized by contemporary whiskey makers.

Author(s):  
Karl Raitz

Part I of this book is a geographic history of Kentucky’s distilling industry, focusing on the nineteenth century. Kentucky distillers have produced alcohol spirits, bourbon, and rye whiskeys for more than two centuries. This part examines the change from craft distilling practiced by farmers and millers to large-scale industrial distilling using mechanized processes and refined production techniques. Some distillers relocated their works away from traditional sites along creeks to rail-side sites, whether in the countryside or in towns. The changeover to commercial-scale distilling was accompanied by increasing government taxation and oversight controls. Mechanized distilleries readily expanded production and increased their demand for labor, grains, cooperage, and copper stills. Improved transportation allowed distillers to obtain grains and equipment from more distant sources, while also allowing them to distribute their products to national and international markets. A by-product of industrial production was spent grains, or slop,which was disposed of primarily by feeding it to livestock. The nineteenth-century temperance movement eventually led to national Prohibition, which was in effect from 1920 to 1933. A small number of distillers survived by making medicinal whiskey. Part II consists of three chapters that outline the concentration of industrial distilling in the Inner and Outer Bluegrass regions as well as in Ohio Valley cities.


Author(s):  
Catherine Massip

Among the documents which give access to musical life and its various events, ephemera occupy a special field. The word (ephemeron singular; ephemera plural) covers several kinds of written or printed documents largely scattered but being produced for a short life and not subject to be handled and stored in a permanent way. “Those papers of the day” as defined in eighteenth century were produced on a large scale in the nineteenth century when newspapers became the major medium for publicity. The main purpose of these documents was primarily information and publicity. This chapter argues how ephemera may be read not as mere sidelines to culture but as central documents pertaining to the wide and complex intellectual issues in music.


2021 ◽  
Vol 66 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-97
Author(s):  
Phuong Nguyen Minh

After failing to attack on French military at Kham Su and Mang Ca on July 5, 1885, Ton That Thuyet took the Emperor Ham Nghi into hiding, and then later led the Can Vuong movement which was a large-scale Vietnamese patriotic movement. Quang Nam is one of the regions that strongly responded to the Can Vuong movement under the leadership of Nghia Hoi. The process of operation and development of the Can Vuong movement in Quang Nam pertained to the revolutionary base areas and names of many politicians. This research investigates the revolutionary base areas of the Can Vuong movement in Quang Nam, and also clarifies the contribution of the Can Vuong movement in Quang Nam to the Can Vuong movement of our country in the late nineteenth century.


2008 ◽  

From the late Sixties on, industrial development in Italy evolved through the spread of small and medium sized firms, aggregated in district networks, with an elevated propensity to enterprise and the marked presence of owner-families. Installed within the local systems, the industrial districts tended to simulate large-scale industry exploiting lower costs generated by factors that were not only economic. The districts are characterised in terms of territorial location (above all the thriving areas of the North-east and Centre) and sector, since they are concentrated in the "4 As" (clothing-fashion, home-decor, agri-foodstuffs, automation-mechanics), with some overlapping with "Made in Italy". How can this model be assessed? This is the crucial question in the debate on the condition and prospects of the Italian productive system between the supporters of its capacity to adapt and the critics of economic dwarfism. A dispassionate judgement suggests that the prospects of "small is beautiful" have been superseded, but that the "declinist" view, that sees only the dangers of globalisation and the IT revolution for our SMEs is risky. The concept of irreversible crisis that prevails at present is limiting, both because it is not easy either to "invent", or to copy, a model of industrialisation, and because there is space for a strategic repositioning of the district enterprises. The book develops considerations in this direction, showing how an evolution of the district model is possible, focusing on: gains in productivity, scope economies (through diversification and expansion of the range of products), flexibility of organisation, capacity to meld tradition and innovation aiming at product quality, dimensional growth of the enterprises, new forms of financing, active presence on the international markets and valorisation of the resources of the territory. It is hence necessary to reactivate the behavioural functions of the entrepreneurs.


2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Carla Da Cruz

This dissertation investigates the use of clay as a medium in contemporary sculpture made between 1980 and 2003. This research focuses specifically on discussing the artists' (both sculptors and ceramists) different approaches and attitudes to working with clay, from construction, manipulation, firing and glazing techniques through to their personal aesthetics and ideas. This dissertation examines how and why the contemporary sculptor trained in Fine Art is increasingly using clay as a medium in which to work. In addition, the candidate discusses the work of ceramic artists that have moved away from the constraints of earlier, more traditional, functional ceramics and have sought to push the boundaries of clay usage in terms of size, scale, mass and concept. Chapter One presents a broad historical overview of the use of clay in sculpture. This overview illustrates the depth and breadth of the use of clay in the making of sculpture, spanning the Nineteenth Century to the Twentieth Century, in order to highlight the significant shift in the use of clay in contemporary sculpture. Chapter Two introduces and discusses a number of contemporary sculptors who work in clay in different ways. Section One examines artists using clay and other materials in the creation of installations. These include Antony Gormley and Andy Goldsworthy. Section Two discusses those artists working with clay in large-scale, including Jun Kaneko and Wilma Cruise. The architectural and environmental use of clay materials is discussed in Section Three; this includes artists John Roloff, who works with the kiln as sculpture and Joyce Kohl, who works with adobe assemblages and steel.


Author(s):  
Carolyn Marvin

Anthropologists and literary theorists are fond of emphasizing the particularistic and dramatic dimensions of lived communication. The particularistic dimension of communication is constituted in whatever of its aspects have the most individually intimate meaning for us. The dramatic dimension is the shared emotional character of a communicated message, displayed and sometimes exaggerated for consumption by a public. Its dramatic appeal and excitement depend partly on the knowledge that others are also watching with interest. Such dimensions have little in common with abstractions about information and efficiency that characterize contemporary discussion about new communications technologies, but may be closer to the real standards by which we judge media and the social worlds they invade, survey, and create. Media, of course, are devices that mediate experience by re-presenting messages originally in a different mode. In the late nineteenth century, experts convinced of the power of new technologies to repackage human experience and to multiply it for many presentations labored to enhance the largest, most dramatically public of messages, and the smallest, most intimately personal ones, by applying new media technologies to a range of modes from private conversation to public spectacle, that special large-scale display event intended for performance before spectators. In the late nineteenth century, intimate communication at a distance was achieved, or at least approximated, by the fledgling telephone. The telephone of this era was not a democratic medium. Spectacles, by contrast, were easily accessible and enthusiastically relished by their nineteenth-century audiences. Their drama was frequently embellished by illuminated effects that inspired popular fantasies about message systems of the future, perhaps with giant beams of electric light projecting words and images on the clouds. Mass distribution of electric messages in this fashion was indeed one pole of the range of imaginative possibilities dreamt by our ancestors for twentieth-century communication. Equally absorbing was the fantasy of effortless point-to-point communication without wires, where no physical obstacle divided the sympathy of minds desiring mutual communion.


2019 ◽  
pp. 146-170
Author(s):  
Tyler Carrington

Chapter 5 follows the sensational trial of Frieda Kliem’s murderer and the strategy of the defense, which was not so much a legal strategy as a way of turning the trial into a question of Frieda’s respectability as a middle-class woman. It interprets this trial—and the life of Frieda Kliem, more generally—as a microcosm of the large-scale confrontation between nineteenth-century society and the emerging twentieth-century world. It contends that identity, presented either authentically or as an illusion, became supremely relevant in the metropolis, where the ubiquity of strangers, new faces, and mysterious crimes shaped the way city people narrated the search for love and intimacy. And because enterprising outsiders like Frieda Kliem so flouted the established patterns of middle-class respectability, they remained on the outside looking in as German society clung to the nineteenth-century world that was crumbling in the face of a bewilderingly new twentieth-century one.


2007 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-86 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph E. Inikori

The article examines the debate on globalization as a historical process and provides a context for the assessment of western Africa’s long-run contribution to the process, the main subject of the article. It argues that the process began in the Atlantic basin in the sixteenth century; in the nineteenth, it gave rise to an integrated Atlantic economy, the nucleus of the modern global economy. The process involved the transformation of the predominantly subsistence economies of the Atlantic basin in 1450 to market-based economies before their integration by the Atlantic market could occur. Large-scale specialization of the plantation and mining economies of the Americas was central to the transformation process. Because of abundant land, large-scale plantation agriculture in the Americas was made possible by coerced African labour. In the end, the unique characteristics of the export slave trade that supplied coerced African labour to the Americas retarded the development of the market economy in western Africa and kept the region’s economies out of the integrated commodity production processes of the Atlantic economy until that trade ended in the mid-nineteenth century. The analysis of the commercializing process in the Atlantic basin and its causal link to England’s Industrial Revolution, with its new technologies, and to the establishment of the integrated nineteenth-century Atlantic economy presents a powerful argument that places Africa at the centre stage of the globalization process


1963 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-250 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marshall G. S. Hodgson

It has been long pointed out that the destinies of the various sections of mankind began to be interrelated long before the twentieth century, with its global wars and cold wars; or even the nineteenth century, the century of European world hegemony. Here we will study certain of the historical ways in which these destinies were intertwined; in this way we may distinguish more valid modes of tracing large-scale history and of comparing the societies involved in it, from a number of popular but unsound modes of trying to do so. I shall speak mostly of the ages before modern times, noting only briefly at the end of the paper certain crucial ways in which modern interrelations among human societies have been different from earlier ones.


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