Late Nineteenth-century America Research Articles

Kerosene Is King: Kerosene Consumers and the Antitrust Movement against Standard Oil, 1859–1911

AbstractIn the late nineteenth-century United States, kerosene became a universal illuminant for artificial lighting, providing its users with a shared material environment. While kerosene users employed the fluid not only for lighting but also for washing, cooking, and cleaning, they had to deal with the material’s risks, such as fires and explosions. With the help of chemists and domestic advisors, American consumers adapted to this ambivalent material condition, weaving kerosene into their economic life and social thought. In so doing, some consumers identified as a “professional class” that navigated within this material environment through their own expertise—which paralleled their economic struggle within a rapidly growing but volatile political economy during the Gilded Age. As Standard Oil’s monopolization of the kerosene business became a substantial issue in national politics, this social consciousness among kerosene users attracted anti-monopolists like Ida Tarbell. Because Standard Oil had lowered the consumer price, these reformers sought an alternative rationale to persuade kerosene-consuming households to participate in the antitrust movement against the company. Examining how these progressive reformers turned kerosene consumers’ social identity to their political ends, this article sheds new light on the relationship between the energy transition, consumer culture, and American capitalism.

On the Origins of the Young Men’s Catholic Association as a Response to the Protestant Recreation Ethic in the United States, 1854–1909

In 1854 Reverend Bernard J. McQuaid set forth the outline behind his ideals for a young men’s Catholic association. Similar to the existing Protestant-rooted Young Men’s Christian Association which had arrived in the United States three years prior, McQuaid’s ambitions could be seen as one of many concurrent attempts to embrace the idea of Muscular Christianity and general reform movements of the late nineteenth century. However, to do so, would do an injustice to the ground-breaking, innovative, and controversial, methods embraced by McQuaid. He was one of the first in the Unted States to propose that sports and games of chance were not ‘evil’. Though his association eventually faltered under the weight of his lofty ambitions, he remains an underappreciated figure in the world of sport history. The Young Men’s Catholic Association offered a legitimate challenge to the often unwelcome Protestant morality of the YMCA in urban immigrant communities in the late nineteenth century United States. This paper argues that McQuaid’s recreation aims in Rochester developed as a reaction against the YMCA. McQuaid’s association, the Young Men’s Catholic Association, presented itself to the city’s immigrant, Catholic, working-class population as an alternative to the Protestant-inspired, ‘cult of strenuosity’.

Singers and managers: women and the operatic stage in late nineteenth-century America

ABSTRACT Most scholars of American history are completely unaware that opera – in particular opera performed in English – was an extraordinarily successful style of popular entertainment in the United States during the nineteenth century. In this article, we will investigate both the activities of the most important and successful English-language companies of the time as well as the confident, ambitious, skilled, and determined women who managed them. In the process, readers will learn about an almost completely overlooked element of American popular culture of the second half of the century and gain new insight into changing gender roles in the United States during this period.

Convenient Frailty: Medical Contestations of Asthma and Hay Fever in African Americans in Late Nineteenth-Century America.

Post-Emancipation medical and social science scholars extensively theorized Black susceptibility to illness, disease, and death. Most studies of late nineteenth-century medical ideas about the relationship between race and disease have highlighted the construction of medical beliefs that associated Black physical weakness with a proclivity to ill health. This study presents an alternate narrative, one where certain diseases - asthma and hay fever - reflected an opposing racialized understanding of disease that instead centered on White frailty. Based on an examination of turn-of-the-century asthma and hay fever medical literature produced by George Miller Beard, the professionalization of the United States Hay Fever Association, and the publication and dismissal of the first recorded case of asthma in an African American man in 1884, this article argues that late nineteenth-century asthma and hay fever physicians, who themselves often suffered from the conditions, defined the typical asthma patient along racial lines to protect the exclusivity of their own professional and social identities. As a result, asthma and hay fever in Black communities, particularly in the North, where asthma and hay fever scholars primarily lived and worked, remained obscured and untreated until the mid-twentieth century.

Realism and Reconstruction: A Comparative Perspective

Realism and Reconstruction: A Comparative Perspective

Introduction to Fatal Years 30 Years Later: New Research On Child Mortality in the Past Special Issue

Abstract2021 marked the 30-year anniversary of the publication Fatal Years: Child Mortality in the late Nineteenth-Century United States, a pioneering work in historical demography by Samuel H. Preston and Michael R. Haines. This special issue showcases the current state of historical mortality studies through a collection of articles originally presented at two commemorative sessions at the 2021 meeting of the Social Science History Association. It provides new and more nuanced evidence on several of the major themes of Fatal Years in terms of the mortality experience and includes studies of a wide range of contexts, from North America, to Ireland, England and Wales, and continental Europe. They all bring new evidence and leverage the dramatic development that has taken place in availability of large-scale micro-level data in the 30 years since Fatal Years was published. This introduction first provides some background to the collection and then summarizes the main findings from the different articles included. Preston and Haines provide a coda to this collection with a short reflection article on researching and writing Fatal Years.

Capitalism, Protectionism, and Beer Wars in Rock Island, 1880–1900

Capitalism, Protectionism, and Beer Wars in Rock Island, 1880–1900

Theory after Practice

Theory after Practice

Synagogues of the South: Architecture and Jewish Identity. An Exhibit of Postcards from the William A. Rosenthall Judaica Collection by Samuel D. Gruber

Reviewed by: Synagogues of the South: Architecture and Jewish Identity. An Exhibit of Postcards from the William A. Rosenthall Judaica Collection by Samuel D. Gruber Jeanne Abrams (bio) Synagogues of the South: Architecture and Jewish Identity. An Exhibit of Postcards from the William A. Rosenthall Judaica Collection. 2022. Online exhibit (https://synagoguesofthesouth.cofc.edu/) produced under the auspices the Pearlstine/Lipov Center for Southern Jewish Culture (CSJC) at the College of Charleston and Addlestone Library's Jewish Heritage Collection (JHC). Curated by Samuel D. Gruber. Even before Covid-19 forced most cultural institutions to close to the public, curators and administrators of museums and archives had learned to appreciate the value of online exhibits. Not only do such exhibits enable organizations to reach a wider audience, but these types of projects also often generate financial support as well as donations of archival materials and artworks. Synagogues of the South: Architecture and Jewish Identity. An Exhibit of Postcards from the William A. Rosenthall Judaica Collection has made good use of this technological opportunity with a rich and colorful exhibit that explores the history of southern synagogues through the use of an often overlooked primary source: postcards. Synagogues of the South is ably researched and written by architectural historian Samuel D. Gruber. The online exhibit allows viewers to explore dozens of synagogues selected from the Rosenthall Collection at the College of Charleston. The parameters of "the South" are defined quite broadly, stretching from Maryland south to Florida and west to Missouri, Oklahoma, and Texas. Many of the exhibit images are of former synagogues, either now demolished or repurposed, making the postcards valuable as archival resources. The attractive display focuses on the early twentieth century, primarily synagogues located in urban settings and Reform temples, although there is a smattering of photographs of Orthodox or Conservative structures. Postcards became very popular in late-nineteenth century America. The cost of mailing at the time was only one cent. Synagogue postcards, which composed just a tiny fraction of architectural postcards, were not produced by Jews; rather, they were created as part of broader projects that displayed what were considered important buildings in American cities and towns. This historical context helps to explain why most of the postcards depict the more ornate, imposing southern Reform synagogues of the time, generally built by affluent, Americanized [End Page 329] congregations. Gruber, the exhibit curator, explains that interior images are relatively rare, but he provides descriptions of interiors when these descriptions are available. Online exhibits offer several advantages over traditional in-person museum shows. In most cases, online images can be manipulated and enlarged, allowing viewers access to more detailed, granular images. Audiences may also visit exhibits at their leisure in convenient time segments that allow the material to be more easily digested. This is certainly a plus for Synagogues of the South because the exhibit presents a wide variety of architectural styles, including federal, gothic revival, Romanesque, Moorish, classical, art deco, and modern. It also provides short introductory essays on each style, although the focus of the exhibit is approximately one hundred images of synagogue postcards. Viewing an exhibit like Synagogues of the South in person, including the detailed descriptions of the synagogues and the background essays, might have proven tedious or overwhelming in one visit. Synagogues of the South is not intended to be an all-inclusive online exhibit as it reflects neither all parts of the South nor all synagogue styles. It is also somewhat narrowly focused. As the introductory segment to Synagogues of the South asserts, "this exhibit is not a history of the Jewish communities of the South or even of their various congregations." Rather, the goals are to inspire "a more comprehensive picture of the built heritage of the Jewish South," to "identify and analyze" the synagogues pictured in the select postcards, and to "understand aspects of American and especially southern Jewish community development and identity." This is a rather tall order. The exhibit only partially succeeds in explicating these ambitious themes in the relatively brief spaces provided for text labels, which tend to focus on the histories of the respective synagogues. Still, this handsomely displayed exhibit reminds us that regional history provides context...

Forging a Ritual: Conflicting Influences on the Indianapolis Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument and its Meaning, 1889-1902

Recent scholarship on Civil War memory in the late nineteenth-century United States emphasizes conflicting interpretations of sectional struggle deployed by different groups in society. Stanley Schwartz offers a cultural history that relies on the concept of ritual to unravel a wider range of localized influences that shaped one manifestation of Civil War memory: the Indiana State Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument in Indianapolis. Tracing the monument's rise reveals veterans and community leaders confronted with pluralistic debate over the meaning of the obelisk and its surrounding statuary. The attempt to produce a lasting, shared knowledge of the Civil War rooted in soldiers' sacrificial valor required compromises and reevaluations. Using the monument commission's design instructions, reports, and internal notes, Schwartz analyzes how the monument's symbolism developed in relation to quotidian construction decisions. Newspapers and secondary works provide key interpretive links to Indiana's culture. Battles over the monument's construction and ritual demonstrated tensions around Civil War memory linked to the monument's meaning in Gilded Age Indiana.

Arai Ōsui and the Transnational Reimagination of Civilization in the Late Nineteenth-Century United States

AbstractCivilization discourse hierarchically ordered nation-states and people of different traits, including race and gender, in the Western modern concept of progress. This civilizational ideology of modern nation-states has underpinned narratives of many historical works, including transnational historical studies. This article showcases the ideas and practices of transnationalism that challenged such civilization discourse and pursued a more egalitarian and mutually interdependent vision of the world at the non-state level. This article does so by focusing on the Brotherhood of the New Life, a mixed-race religious agricultural community in late nineteenth-century rural America, and one of its Japanese members, Arai Ōsui, who joined the community after his defeat in Japan's Boshin Civil War. I argue that this non-state transnational perspective illuminates the Brotherhood members’ endeavour to free gender and race – the key conceptual underpinnings of the ideology of civilization – from this very discourse. This article further reveals, through Ōsui, that the community's egalitarian ethos developed to instigate new, anti-imperialist, and anti-hierarchical thoughts and actions in early twentieth-century Japan, in opposition to the state's imperialist endeavour to progress.

Modernism's Visible Hand: Architecture and Regulation in America by Michael Osman (review).

Reviewed by: Modernism's Visible Hand: Architecture and Regulation in America by Michael Osman Anna-Maria Meister (bio) Modernism's Visible Hand: Architecture and Regulation in America By Michael Osman. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018. Pp. 280. This might not be a love story, but it is the tale of a contested relationship. At times abusive, at times symbiotic, architecture and regulation systems not only got together some time ago—here largely during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—but also learned how to support each other. But, as in many romantic stories, the honeymoon period soon shifts as they discover how to push each other's buttons. Michael Osman stresses early on in his multifaceted book that this is not a history of technology; neither, one might add, is it the history of modern architecture told through standardization (which insists on questions of modularity, units, and the logistics to aggregate them). The history Osman tells of regulation practices from late nineteenth century America is one of negotiations: between architecture's insides and outsides, between formal intention and technical necessity, and not least between bodies and the spaces they occupy. He takes systems such as the thermostat or paperwork not merely as narrative for progressivism, but as materialization of architecture's oldest function: to provide shelter in an increasingly self-constructed environment. As such, this could be slotted into a not-quite-expected contribution to the contested category of environmental history in architecture. Expanding histories of hermetic "closed worlds" (Lydia Kallipoliti, The Architecture of Closed Worlds, 2018) or climate and energy measures responding to planetary conditions (Daniel Barber, Modern Architecture and Climate, 2020), Osman understands environment as an interwoven category of porous, uncontrollable, self-made conditions with architectural constructions. Reminiscent of stories where American heroes are expected to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, here, modern American architecture draws on regulation mechanisms to counter the problems emerging from its own construction. Where industrial production polluted the air, ventilation systems and filters were installed, and where many bodies worked in accord, thermal conditioning became a requirement for ongoing productivity. The first two chapters make this network of bodies, technology, and labor directly apparent. In "The Thermostatic Interior and Household Management," Osman lays out the manifold connections between domestic work and its optimization, a process in constant reciprocity with the attempt to steady the (not only) thermal conditions of mass production. Here, the necessity for clean air oscillated between manual labor—opening and closing windows, for example—and automated filtering systems, when neither inside nor outside was reliable for providing it. In turn, this development [End Page 297] soon entered back into the domestic realm. Discussing "Cold Storage and the Speculative Market of Preserved Assets" in chapter two, Osman untangles the joint strands of economic and microbacterial stabilization through cooling: where food could not rot, prices fluctuated less. Properly outfitted architecture became a key player in this regulation of an ostensibly closed-off interior, one in fact sutured to its environment by metabolist and financial constructs. Warehouses became monumental displays of architectural control, manifesting the modernist aesthetic European architects would soon fawn over. As Osman reminds us, technological systems are only as societally impactful as their representation: what good is control if no one can see it? Where regulation had signaled its virtues through architecture, as Osman explicated in earlier chapters, its practice happened on paper as much as through pipes. In their aesthetic performativity of seemingly objective optimization efforts, the acts of "Representing" or "Imaging" of "Paper-work" in Osman's story are not medial layers distinct from architecture's constructions, but their key. Despite the actors' attempt to enforce dichotomies such as "inside and outside, life and death, profit and loss," what becomes apparent is the inseparability of these categories. While the main themes of this history of modern architecture sound familiar in many places, Osman's insistence on the entanglements between technology and its material representation, and between bodily acts and technified solutions, brings their fuzzy edges into focus. Regulation here is not merely aesthetically motivated nor simply technologically driven, but details a set of material practices in the world, continuously negotiating that which is on paper...

“Trash of the Veriest Sort”: Huck Finn's Missing Sex Life

Abstract Themes of marriage and family animate The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and its immediate sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, as well as later tales featuring these characters. While race remains a major point of interest in scholarship of Huckleberry Finn, it is also as a novel about children, childhood, and growing up. This essay traces a pattern of desexualizing Huck in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and subsequent stories. This picture of Huckleberry Finn, a “poor white” boy in the slaveholding South, reflects views then current in late nineteenth-century America. And to an extent, it reflects hesitation that Twain, the father of three daughters, may have felt in setting Huck on a path toward marriage and reproduction. Reading Huckleberry Finn in this context reveals a rich discourse on race and class distinct from (although related to) the issues of slavery and racism expressed in the novel.

Modernism and the Meaning of Corporate Persons by Lisa Siraganian

<i>Modernism and the Meaning of Corporate Persons</i> by Lisa Siraganian

Extra-illustration, preservation and libraries in the nineteenth-century United States

Extra-illustration, usually considered an eighteenth-century and early-nineteenth-century British phenomenon, is abundantly present in the creative book practices of the late nineteenth-century United States, but it is often overlooked in scholarship. Analysing the collecting, cutting and pasting habits of Massachusetts banker Nathaniel Paine, this article argues that extra-illustration was closely connected to the then emerging modes of information organization that have since shaped modern libraries. Paine added hundreds of mass-produced images of US president George Washington to the volumes in his library, including a group of pamphlets printed just after Washington died in 1799. This unusual group of pamphlets, as well as Paine’s other extra-illustrative supplements to his volumes and scrapbooks, reveal an effort not only to preserve a particular version of the past but also to develop an indexing scheme built around pictures.

From Pine Parthenons to Pocketbooks: Frank Kidder, MIT, and the Reinvention of American Timber ca. 1862–84

Resource conflicts in late nineteenth-century America transformed cultural and technical understandings of building materials as settlers and industrialists alike brought pressure to bear on the research university. Architect-engineer Frank Kidder and his Architectural Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology provide a window onto how these politics transformed the symbolic and pedagogical significance of timber. While the university’s engineers worked to expand logging amidst deforestation, its architects, like William Ware and Henry Van Brunt, devised an allied esthetics of materials that valorized forests and settlers in nationalist terms. Kidder brought these disciplines together, embodying the educated woodsman that Ware and Van Brunt sought to cultivate. His 1884 pocketbook promulgated their simultaneously rationalist and nostalgic view of timber among the new class of professional architects they trained.

Architecture, Religion, and the Forms of Nature in Turn-of-the-Twentieth-Century Chicago

The commercial architectural style that emerged in Chicago in the late nineteenth-century United States constituted a material gathering point for that century’s masculinities, religious histories, and conceptions of nature. This was especially true in the case of Louis Henri Sullivan (1856–1924), an inmuential lgure in crafting the aesthetic of this ‘Chicago School’ of architectural practice. Drawing on transcendentalist literature and recent innovations in architectural design, Sullivan outlined an ‘organic’ theory of architecture made famous in his pithy expression: form follows function. His design and theorization of free-standing structures offered gendered forms as the constitutive vocabulary of American architecture, with those very forms—not just the skyscraper but the free-standing structure writ-large—governing the relation of nature and its spirit to the masculinized landscape of urban commercial expansion. In Sullivan’s work, the gendered body became the vehicle for natural laws, both material and divine.

The "Controversial Cundurango Cure": Medical professionalization and the global circulation of drugs.

This article examines the medical and political discussions regarding a controversial medicinal bark from Ecuador - cundurango - that was actively sponsored by the Ecuadorian government as a new botanical cure for cancer in the late nineteenth century United States and elsewhere. The article focuses on the commercial and diplomatic interests behind the public discussion and advertising techniques of this drug. It argues that diverse elements - including the struggle for positioning scientific societies and the disapproval of the capacities of Ecuadorian doctors, US abolitionist history, regional and local political struggles - played a role in the quackery accusations against cundurango and its promoters. The development and international trade of this remedy offer interesting insights into the global history of drugs, particularly how medical knowledge was challenged during a period when scientific medicine was struggling for hegemony. It explores how newspapers expanded "the public interest" in a possible cancer cure.

Stage Irish and Boorish Boers

Although Olive Schreiner features in most literary criticism as a champion of the disenfranchised, her portrayal of ethnic differences is inflected by transatlantic racial politics. The Irish and Boers in The Story of an African Farm conform to the Anglo-Saxon definitions of race and citizenship not only in southern Africa but also in the United States. Schreiner’s interest in Emerson and Carlyle, her dislike of rigid religious doctrines, and her vocal feminism account for the one-dimensionality of her Irish and Boer characters in her early work. This essay describes the enlarged geography of Bonaparte Blenkins – the influences that place the Irish–South African connections in Schreiner’s writing within, among other things, the context of racialization of the Irish in the late nineteenth-century United States.

Warren, Samuel & Louis Brandeis. The Right to Privacy, 4 Harv. L. Rev. 193 (1890)

In late nineteenth century America, there were limited legal remedies when a person’s information or image was taken by people without permission. Sometimes a person did not even know that personal...