Joining the club: a Tongan ‘akau in New England

Curatopia ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 176-190
Author(s):  
Ivan Gaskell

This chapter examines the place of Oceanic clubs in New England collections. During the nineteenth century, they occupied an equivocal position in the New England mental repertory as indices of savage sophistication, and as souvenirs of colonial childhood or travel. Focusing on a Tongan ‘akau tau in the collection of the Chatham Historical Society on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, this chapter traces what can be known of its history as a highly regarded prestige gift item among New Englanders from the middle of the nineteenth century until its entry into the museum. As a thing that an early owner could alienate legitimately, its presence in Chatham is not unethical, yet it nonetheless imposes stewardship responsibilities—consultation with the originating community—that such a small institution is poorly placed to meet. This requires understanding and patience rather than disapprobation.

1992 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Tyson

Several authors have suggested that a particular managerial component was needed before cost accounting could be fully used for accountability and disciplinary purposes. They argue that the marriage of managerialism and accounting first occurred in the United States at the Springfield Armory after 1840. They generally downplay the quality and usefulness of cost accounting at the New England textile mills before that time and call for a re-examination of original mill records from a disciplinary perspective. This paper reports the results of such a re-examination. It initially describes the social and economic environment of U.S. textile manufacturing in New England in the early nineteenth century. Selected cost memos and reports are described and analyzed to indicate the nature and scope of costing undertaken at the mills in Lowell, Massachusetts, in the late 1820s and early 1830s. The paper discusses how particular cost information was used and speculates why certain more modern procedures were not adopted. Its major finding is that cost management practices fully measured up to the business complexities, economic pressures, and social forces of the day.


2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-102
Author(s):  
Melike Tokay-Ünal

This article illustrates American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions’ support of the “missionary matrimony”, mid-nineteenth-century New England women’s perceptions of the missionary career obtained through matrimony, and their impressions of the Oriental mission fields and non-Christian or non-Protestant women, who were depicted as victims to be saved. A brief introduction to New England women’s involvement in foreign missions will continue with the driving force that led these women to leave the United States for far mission fields in the second part of the paper. This context will be exemplified with the story of a New England missionary wife. The analysis consists of the journal entries and letters of Seraphina Haynes Everett of Ottoman mission field. The writings of this woman from New England give detailed information about the spiritual voyage she was taking in the mid-nineteenth century Ottoman lands. In her letters to the United States, Everett described two Ottoman cities, Izmir (Smyrna) and Istanbul (Constantinople), and wrote about her impressions of Islam and Christianity as practiced in the Ottoman empire. Everett’s opinions of the Ottoman empire, which encouraged more American women to devote themselves to the education and to the evangelization of Armenian women of the Ottoman empire in the middle of the nineteenth century, conclude the paper.


Fragmentology ◽  
10.24446/dlll ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 73-139
Author(s):  
Scott Gwara

Using evidence drawn from S. de Ricci and W. J. Wilson’s Census of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the United States and Canada, American auction records, private library catalogues, public exhibition catalogues, and manuscript fragments surviving in American institutional libraries, this article documents nineteenth-century collections of medieval and Renaissance manuscript fragments in North America before ca. 1900. Surprisingly few fragments can be identified, and most of the private collections have disappeared. The manuscript constituents are found in multiple private libraries, two universities (New York University and Cornell University), and one Learned Society (Massachusetts Historical Society). The fragment collections reflect the collecting genres documented in England in the same period, including albums of discrete fragments, grangerized books, and individual miniatures or “cuttings” (sometimes framed). A distinction is drawn between undecorated text fragments and illuminated ones, explained by aesthetic and scholarly collecting motivations. An interest in text fragments, often from binding waste, can be documented from the 1880s.


2002 ◽  
Vol 57 (1) ◽  
pp. 64-99 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Knadler

This essay examines Rebecca Harding Davis's resistance to the Civil War discourse in the Atlantic Monthly in order to complicate the relation between nineteenth-century racism and sentimental fiction. While much revisionary work has been done on nineteenth-century women'sfiction and how it reinforced racial ideologies, the misleading question often asked is whether white women did or did not participate in the public arena of race. Yet this initial framing of the question denies the alternative possibility: that white women might have engaged in their own gendered forms of racial activity, or in a "female racism" (to use Vron Ware's term), that did not correspond to or act in complicity with a racism that is by default seen as public and masculine. By imagining her heroine as a "woman from the border" inWaiting for the Verdict (1868), Davis works to oppose and overturn a particular regional and gender-based inscription of whiteness that was being disseminated amid the war crises as an emergent New England-based national identity. In contrast, Davis creates a particular feminine and liminal version of white racial power, or a "miscegenated whiteness." But this fantasy of an imagined national community based on the "white mulatto" finally undoes itself in the novel's moments of narrative crises about a free and open female sexuality, and Davis'snovel seeks to restore the white female body to its "purity."


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