A Mass Sporting Industry

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth Cohen
Keyword(s):  
Mass Culture ◽  
White Men ◽  
The Political ◽  
Sporting Events ◽  
Early National Period ◽  
Sporting Culture ◽  
Early National ◽  
Antebellum Period ◽  
National Period ◽  
Panic Of 1837

The political and financial potential of a commercialized sporting culture led to an explosion of sporting businesses in the antebellum period. Competition, along with a contraction caused by the Panic of 1837, led investors and professionals to reorganize the sporting industry yet again in the 1840s and 1850s. By re-establishing distinctively genteel, middling, and rough sporting spaces (after they had gotten muddled by the democratic accessibility introduced in the early national period), the backers and managers of sporting events specialized their enterprises and transformed sporting culture into the country’s earliest version of mass culture – a set of specialized, standardized, accessible, anonymous, commercial experiences intended to sell democracy to white men irrespective of their wealth or ethnicity.

Sporting Cultures

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth Cohen
Keyword(s):  
Equal Opportunity ◽  
White Male ◽  
White Men ◽  
Sporting Events ◽  
Early National Period ◽  
Sporting Culture ◽  
Mass Politics ◽  
Early National ◽  
Cultural Mobility

The final chapter explores the experience of participating in mass sporting culture. It begins by introducing the notion of “cultural mobility,” a concept which describes how white men took advantage of both the accessibility created in the early national period as well as the re-introduction of standardized genteel and rough sporting spaces to challenge class stereotypes by moving easily between claims of genteel and raw masculine superiority. Political parties then drew from the cultural mobility at sporting events to appeal to the white male electorate through a new “mass politics” that continued to borrow heavily from sporting culture to emphasize democratic experiences despite widening disparities of wealth and hardening class lines. In the end, then, white men negotiated a sporting culture that rejected elitism but excluded others while crafting a reverence for wealth and a sense of equal opportunity. Because of sporting culture’s political salience in the white male republic, understanding this negotiation helps us understand not just the nature of sport but the nature and limits of democracy and power in the early nineteenth century.

Prestige or Profit

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth Cohen
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
White Male ◽  
White Men ◽  
Early National Period ◽  
For Profit ◽  
Racial Barriers ◽  
Early National ◽  
Economic Culture ◽  
History Of ◽  
National Period

Although investors in the early national period originally hoped to build a sporting culture that granted them both profit and prestige, the demand for profit-seeking created by the economic culture of the post-Revolutionary years ultimately forced them to decide whether to maximize revenue by appealing to the largest possible audience or craft prestige for themselves by making sure that venues and content emphasized exclusivity and celebrated the elite. The social history of attending sporting events in the early national period reveals how demands from nonelite audiences pushed investors and professionals to prioritize profit over prestige. It then concludes by detailing how white men united to limit the confrontation that resulted from broader accessibility by erecting gender and racial barriers to full participation, and how politicians then borrowed from sport to construct a white male republic rooted in the pursuit of manhood and profit. In sum, then, this chapter highlights how elites and investors responded to popular opposition to exclusive elitism by conceding their desire for social and cultural authority and focusing on deference earned through wealth and white male brotherhood.

“Christians Love the Jews!” The Development of American Philo-Semitism, 1790-1860

1996 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 225-259 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert K. Whalen
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Political ◽  
Religious Literature ◽  
Revolutionary Era ◽  
Early National Period ◽  
Early National ◽  
Social Views ◽  
British Research

Philo-Semitism is America's enduring contribution to the long, troubled, often murderous dealings of Christians with Jews. Its origins are English, and it drew continuously on two centuries of British research into biblical prophecy from the seventeenth Century onward. Philo-Semitism was, however, soon “domesticated” and adapted to the political and theological climate of America after independence. As a result, it changed as America changed. In the early national period, religious literature abounded that foresaw the conversion of the Jews and the restoration of Israel as the ordained task of the millennial nation—the United States. This scenario was, allowing for exceptions, socially and theologically optimistic and politically liberal, as befit the ethos of a revolutionary era. By the eve of Civil War, however, countless evangelicals cleaved to a darker vision of Christ's return in blood and upheaval. They disparaged liberal social views and remained loyal to an Augustinian theology that others modified or abandoned.

Abandoned Quarries

2018 ◽  
pp. 129-136
Author(s):  
Seth Perry
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Religious History ◽  
American Religious History ◽  
Early National Period ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Early National ◽  
American National Identity ◽  
History Of ◽  
National Period

This concluding chapter discusses the consequences of biblicism in the early national period for subsequent American religious history. It considers bible culture in the later nineteenth century, with particular emphasis on how the corporatization of religious printing amplifed the Bible's status as an abstract commodity. Responding to the arguments put forward by W. P. Strickland in his 1849 History of the American Bible Society, the chapter argues that attaching the Bible's importance to American national identity could not leave the Bible unchanged, because that is not how scripturalization works. It also explains how the Bible's availability for citation and re-citation fundamentally changed the desire, effectiveness, and circumstances of its citation. Finally, it uses the abandoned quarry—empty because it has flled other places—as a figure for the themes of citation, performance, and identity explored in this book.

The Development of American Laissez Faire

1943 ◽  
Vol 3 (S1) ◽  
pp. 51-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frederick K. Henrich
Keyword(s):  
Public Policy ◽  
Economic Life ◽  
Important Influence ◽  
Early National Period ◽  
The Public ◽  
Legislative Action ◽  
Political Group ◽  
Early National ◽  
Laissez Faire ◽  
National Period

The pamphlet literature and the public documents of our early national period show that in spite of repeated instances of governmental interference in economic life, a great deal of thinking was being done along laissez-faire lines. This thought was unsystematic. It was pragmatic rather than philosophical, never doctrinaire, concerned primarily with defending and attacking specific measures of public policy. Nevertheless, it was serious thought, and in many instances had an important influence on legislative action. It was not restricted to any political group, but pervaded to a greater or less degree the thinking of all leaders of the community. Owing little to the teachings of contemporary European economists, American libertarianism deserves analysis as an indigenous body of theory, growing out of, and adjusted to American conditions.

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