19th Century America Research Articles

Floodpath: the deadliest man-made disaster of 20th-century America and the making of modern Los Angeles

Floodpath: the deadliest man-made disaster of 20th-century America and the making of modern Los Angeles

Inside the Castle. Law and the Family in 20th Century America, J. L. Grossman et L. M. Friedman

Inside the Castle. Law and the Family in 20th Century America, J. L. Grossman et L. M. Friedman

A Force to be Reckoned With: Women Amateur Musicians in 20th Century America

A Force to be Reckoned With: Women Amateur Musicians in 20th Century America

Invisibility and Sexual Violence in Indo-European Mythology

Is invisibility in the eye or in the mind? Is it a force for good or for evil? And does it work equally well for men and for women? These are questions to which we might seek answers in the mythologies of ancient Greece and India, medieval Germany, and 20th and 21st century America. Many of these texts seem to regard invisibility as a subjective mental state, subject to suggestion and the projection of ideas, while others think of it as a more physical, scientific phenomenon, residing in the eye and subject to chemical or electric forces or the projection of rays of light. The two views combine when myths treat invisibility as the projection of a false or absent self from the mind and/or eyes of the magician into the mind and/or eyes of the beholder. In both cases, invisibility often shades off into masquerade and shapeshifting, as shadows, doubles, reflections, or camouflage hide the one true self from the observer or confuse the object of the gaze with the background or with another person.

The Geography of Strenuousness: “America” In William James' Narrative of Moral Energy

Strenuous effort on behalf of moral ideals was a life-long concern for William James. Growing out of his own well-documented personal struggles as a young man, it was also a cultural phenomenon in late 19th century America. For many, the cause of the problem of depleted moral energy was environmental. Herbert Spencer’s definition of mind as the correspondence of inner relations to outer relations lent intellectual support to this reduction of moral lethargy to environmental factors and writers such as George Beard and Theodore Roosevelt seemed to be in agreement. While many employed America as an environment in this cultural discussion, William James resisted this environmental reductionism and instead employed “America” as a metaphorical trope around which he organized his thoughts on moral energy. This was no mere literary device on James’ part, but instead a reflection of his own disagreements with Spencer that led James to articulate his own groundbreaking model of consciousness as reflex action. As the framework for addressing the issue of moral strenuousness.

The Patriarch’s Balls: Class-Consciousness, Violence, and Dystopia in George Saunders’ Vision of Contemporary America

In late 19th Century America, the elite of wealthy New York families were united by the Patriarch’s Balls. The Society of the Patriarch organized lavish balls to foster a content class-consciousness among the society of “The Four Hundred” who mattered, in contrast to the rest who did not. In 21st Century America, the tables have been turned and the class conscious are less able to enjoy the fruits of their labor sans guilt (or the realization of a nasty pun). As Slavoj Zizek asserts in Six Sideways Glances on Violence, contemporary America’s “culture of capital” is marked by the systemic violence that allows the West to maintain its First World status and North American writer George Saunders, for one, knows it. This paper will look at how Saunders returns to those East Coast, greater New York communities in the 21st Century, communities that are now more egalitarian and “open” yet just as worried about keeping up with the Joneses. Writing their stories with a dystopic twist, he intimately explores the anxieties that plague their communities, while also maintaining a sense of the universal in his work that allows for its wider interpretation and relevance to the American national identity in general. Saunders writes as the moral conscience of a community that while “successful” according to American standards, cannot help but feel all the dirtier after the help have cleaned the kitchen.

Cutting Calories and TXNIP From the Skeletal Muscle to Restore Insulin Sensitivity.

It is quite possible that if she had seen but a glimpse of her young country’s future while writing “The New Colossus” in late 19th-century America, Emma Lazarus might have modified her famous line to read “Give me your…huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” well-nourished and long-lived . And indeed, at a time when food shortage and famine were sources of great suffering throughout much of the world, such a persuasive line would have seemed very compelling to the “masses.” How strange might it also have been for people at that time to be told of what we now know, which is that overnourishment typically prohibits a person from living a long and healthy life. Evidence of this fact is manifested in the rapidly rising rates of obesity-related pathologies, particularly cardiovascular disease and metabolic syndrome/type 2 diabetes, which of course are hardly unique to the U.S. as recent reports show that rates of obesity and related cardiometabolic diseases are escalating worldwide, with the highest rates in developing countries across Africa and the Middle East (1,2). Lifestyle interventions to combat this epidemic are increasingly being prioritized by health care professionals who recognize that, unless action is taken, the tidal wave of associated costs and resource demands placed on hospitals and primary care providers will wash over us all with devastating consequences. Caloric restriction (CR) is an intervention that consistently leads to …

Cultural Negotiations: Jazz and the West in the New Millennium

It is common to talk of such things as Western culture, African culture, Oriental culture, etc. as though they described culturally coherent entities. If we look closely at the evolution of jazz in 20th century America, however, we see that this division between “the West and the Rest” is incoherent. For example, the idea that jazz is specifically American in character arose in propaganda during WWII and was not a result of cultural analysis. The idea of Western culture seems to be ideologically driven and is only loosely related to the details of cultural origin and practice.

Surviving history: Kate Chopin

Abstract Bearing witness to the colonial and anti-feminist atmosphere of 19th-century America, Kate Chopin created her works against a background of all kinds of repression reigning over social life. Likewise, Désirée’s Baby focuses mainly on a young woman’s marital life and the social/familial problems she confronts because of her personal background and imperial and gender-based oppression surrounding her life. Through a new historicist reading, the story has several humane elements to be taken into account. Reflecting the periphery and the repressed, Désirée’s Baby is a significant anticanonical writing with an inspiring human touch and a historically excluded work which depicts the dramatic existential problems of the time

Book Review: Onishi, Transpacific Antiracism: Afro-Asian Solidarity in 20th-Century Black America, Japan, and Okinawa, by Chris Dixon

Book Review: Onishi, Transpacific Antiracism: Afro-Asian Solidarity in 20th-Century Black America,Japan, and Okinawa , by Chris DixonTranspacific Antiracism: Afro-Asian Solidarity in 20th-Century Black America, Japan, andOkinawa by Yuichiro OnishiReview by: Chris DixonPacific Historical Review, Vol. 84, No. 2 (May 2015), pp. 256-257Published by:

Imagining Freedom in a Post-Emancipation “Pigmentocracy”

This article focuses on the above mentioned artists’ endeavors to imagine, advocate, and/or articulate freedom in a “pigmentocra[tic],” 20th-century America. As any definition of freedom is reciprocally determined—to imagine freedom is to imagine freedom from something—I will specify what that something is (or somethings are) and assess the relative successes and failures of the variously presented strategies of resistance, destruction, and/or escape. For example, Pecola in The Bluest Eye imagines that emancipation from the quotidian familial violence she is a victim of pivots on a change in her appearance or her absolute disappearance. By contrast, in the same novel, Claudia exhibits a precocious capacity to recognize the potentially harmful power of grand narratives. I have chosen “imagining” in the title as it acknowledges freedom’s conceptual dynamism and subjectivity, that it is being explored (mainly) through fiction, and crucially, that freedom–for some African Americans– remains a fiction.

Health and wellness in 19th-century America

This book provides a comprehensive description of what being sick and receiving medical care was like in 19th-century America, allowing modern readers to truly appreciate the scale of the improvements in healthcare theory and practice.

Prospecting for dinosaurs on the mining frontier: The value of information in America's Gilded Age.

How much is a dinosaur worth? This essay offers an account of the way vertebrate fossils were priced in late 19th-century America to explore the process by which monetary values are established in science. Examining a long and drawn-out negotiation over the sale of an unusually rich dinosaur quarry in Wyoming, I argue that, on their own, abstract market principles did not suffice to mediate between supply and demand. Rather, people haggling over the price of dinosaur bones looked to social norms from the mineral industry for cues on how to value these rare and unusual objects, adopting a set of negotiation tactics that exploited asymmetries in the distribution of scarce information to secure the better end of the deal. On the mining frontier in America's Gilded Age, dinosaurs were thus valued in much the same way as any other scarce natural resource one could dig out of the ground, including gold, silver, and coal.

Alcohol Prohibition and Homicide: Evidence from Early 20th-Century United States of America

Alcohol Prohibition and Homicide: Evidence from Early 20th-Century United States of America

How medicine became modern The Remedy Robert Koch, Arthur Conan Doyle, and the Quest to Cure Tuberculosis Thomas Goetz Gotham Books, 2014. 320 pp.

![Figure][1] In 19th-century Europe and North America, consumption, as tuberculosis was then known, was the most common cause of death. It was so common and disease progression so torpid—patients could often expect to live years, if not decades, with this malady—that the idea that consumption was contagious was unfathomable. A diagnosis of tuberculosis was considered a death sentence, and, although many cures had been proposed, from cod-liver oil to sanatoriums, none of them worked. In The Remedy , science journalist Thomas Goetz describes much more than the fascinating quest to find a cure for tuberculosis. He chronicles the emergence of modern medical science through the pioneering work of Robert Koch and the life of author Arthur Conan Doyle. ![Figure][1] PHOTO: THINKSTOCK The story begins in the 1870s with Robert Koch, then a young provincial doctor in Germany, performing his first experiments to demonstrate that bacteria were the causative agents of anthrax. His meticulous work would lead to the widespread acceptance of the germ theory, the then-radical proposition that diseases are caused by microorganisms (and not by miasma, a pernicious form of “bad air”). The author exposes how breakthroughs do not occur in a vacuum, that discoveries are attributed to those who succeed in convincing others, and how scientists themselves often resist innovation. The book also goes to lengths in describing Koch's rivalry with Louis Pasteur, fueled by French-German antagonism and personal ambition, and how it catalyzed research efforts leading to Koch's discovery of tuberculosis's infective cause, Mycobacterium tuberculosis . This finding was hailed as a revolution as it finally opened the door for a cure. There was even more excitement when Koch announced, a few years later, the discovery of a remedy. This is where Koch and Conan Doyle, also a physician by training, crossed paths. The latter traveled to Berlin and visited patients receiving this mysterious treatment. “Using Koch's own model of logic and analysis,” Conan Doyle attacked this remedy as spoof, noting that Koch's substance had no effect in treating the disease. Goetz posits that Koch “provided the template for Sherlock Holmes's fascination with minuscule detail.” As much as the author would like to convince us, his case remains disputable, as the two men never actually met. Conan Doyle himself said that his inspiration for the famous detective was his former professor, Joseph Bell. That and some digressions on the antivivisectionist and modern antivaccination movements are the book's shortcomings. Despite this, Goetz's pungent account of some of the 19th century's landmark medical discoveries, from antiseptic surgery to the anthrax vaccine, is definitely worth a read. Hopscotching through time and countries, he brilliantly narrates the rise of the two protagonists and how their embrace of deductive logic and scientific methods embodied the spirit of the time. [1]: pending:yes

Pain in the Prairies

The Purchase Linda Spalding Sandstone Press Ltd, 2013 PB, 368pp, £8.99, 978-1908737519 PG Wodehouse this ain’t! With undeniable literary skill, Spalding has exhumed her dead ancestors and presents a fictionalised misery memoir to beat them all. This is a story of unremitting trouble, toil, and travail played out against the backdrop of the bleak Virginia frontier of 18th century America. The bleakness of the landscape and the harsh choices it imposes are an appropriate backdrop to a novel essentially about circumstances, choices, and consequences. Daniel Dickinson, the novel’s central character, is an abolitionist and widowed father forced by circumstance to take a young orphan girl as his wife to look …

Risk sharing and risk shifting: An historical perspective

Islam prohibits risk shifting and encourages risk sharing. Consequently, Muslims have developed over the centuries a highly sophisticated know-how of risk sharing partnerships which was the envy of the world. When Europe borrowed this know-how from the 10th century onwards, it entered into the era of “commercial revolution”. 13th century Venice, 19th century Germany and the 20th century United States are the three western cases presented in this article, which demonstrate the dramatic achievements of risk sharing in the West. Thus, the wisdom of the Islamic prohibition is confirmed by these Western examples. The paper then examines how Muslims can re-introduce risk sharing techniques into the modern Islamic finance.

Noel Lester, Piano Portraits from 19th-Century America. Centaur 2250, 1995./Maria Ferrente and Lincoln Mayorga, Best Kept Secrets: A Treasury of Passionate American Song Heard in 19th Century American Salons and Concert Venues. Massachusetts: Maria Ferrante, 2007.

Noel Lester, <i>Piano Portraits from 19th-Century America</i>. Centaur 2250, 1995./Maria Ferrente and Lincoln Mayorga, <i>Best Kept Secrets: A Treasury of Passionate American Song Heard in 19th Century American Salons and Concert Venues</i>. Massachusetts: Maria Ferrante, 2007.

Book Review: Idle Threats: Men and the Limits of Productivity in 19th-Century America

Book Review: Idle Threats: Men and the Limits of Productivity in 19th-Century America

Race, Rights and Rebellion in the Custodial State: A Post-Los Angeles Marxian Reconstruction

America’s new race/class contradictions erupted in the 1992 Los Angeles rebellion, providing an impetus to think through the dialectic of political and human emancipation the young Marx articulated in Zur Judenfrage. For Stanford Lyman, the theoretical response to the assimilation of diasporic Jews into modernizing 19th-century Europe was appropriated by American sociologists responding to 20th-century America’s ‘ethnoracial mix’. At the text’s four discursive sites, history contextualizes theory and theory contextualizes history, beginning with a recollection of the authoritarian custodial state and Third World America that came screaming to life with the LA rebellion. At the second site, Black Studies, post-LA, found itself on the discursive frontline of this neoliberal turn. The third site is the intersection of religion, race and rights, where we reconstruct Marx’s theses on the Jewish Question, revealing the undisclosed biopolitics of a racial formation theory embedded in his writings of the 1850s and 1860s on the US Civil War and Capital. The fourth site of this post-LA reconstruction is a discussion of the state and the limits of black political empowerment.