Nineteenth-Century America Research Articles

Book Review: The Garden Politic: Global Plants and Botanical Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century America by Mary Kuhn

Book Review: <i>The Garden Politic: Global Plants and Botanical Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century America</i> by Mary Kuhn

Consistent Democracy: The "Woman Question" and Self-Government in Nineteenth-Century America by Leslie Butler (review)

Consistent Democracy: The "Woman Question" and Self-Government in Nineteenth-Century America by Leslie Butler (review)

New Materialism

Abstract This review essay focuses on how the year’s work in new materialism builds on a vibrant discourse in literary studies and nascent, growing trends in postcolonial and indigenous new materialisms. A variety of new materialist works published in 2023, from the monographs Earthly Things: Immanence, New Materialisms, and Planetary Thinking and The Garden Politic: Global Plants and Botanical Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century America, to the journal article ‘New Materialism and Posthumanism in Roman Archaeology’, explore the ways in which the pillars of new materialist thought, such as the agentic capacity of vibrant matter, ‘speaking objects’, and entanglement, can lead to decolonial revelations about human culture and history. The essay is grouped according to common themes addressed in this year’s body of work: 1. Introduction; 2. Literature and Beyond; 3. Colonial Plants and Enslaved Objects; 4. New Materialism and Eco-Marxism; 5. Immanence and Planetary Thinking; 6. New (Materialist) Topics of Conversation in Science; and 7. Conclusion. The varied scholarship surveyed points to the conclusion that what was once seen as new materialism’s ethical weakness—its focus on matter over human beings—is now becoming a decolonial strength.

Going Underground: Race, Space, and the Subterranean in the Nineteenth-Century United States

Going Underground: Race, Space, and the Subterranean in the Nineteenth-Century United States

Staging Haiti in Nineteenth-Century America: Revolution, Race and Popular Performance by Peter P. Reed (review)

Staging Haiti in Nineteenth-Century America: Revolution, Race and Popular Performance by Peter P. Reed (review)

Citizens of a Stolen Land: A Ho-Chunk History of the Nineteenth-Century United States by Stephen Kantrowitz (review)

Citizens of a Stolen Land: A Ho-Chunk History of the Nineteenth-Century United States by Stephen Kantrowitz (review)

Sect and Superstition: The Protestant Framework of American Codification

Abstract Elite lawyers who debated codification in the nineteenth-century United States treated codification as inseparable from a liberal Protestant textualism that had taken hold in the early national era. Legislators declared codification to be the necessary final step of the Protestant Reformation and frequently characterized common law lawyers as beholden to ‘superstition’ and ‘priestcraft’. Their opponents denounced the codifiers’ idea that texts alone could adequately convey common meanings and delighted to point out the endlessly fracturing glosses on supposedly ‘clear’ texts that divided the positivists into an ever-increasing number of sects. Many works have addressed the relationship between populism and positivism over the course of the codification debates in the United States. What these works have missed is the Protestantism. Understanding how lawyers of another generation approached these questions can help us to appreciate the varieties of American textualism, and the fact that today’s textualism may be as foreign to textualisms of the past as to other methods entirely. Rather than the forerunners of a modern, rationalist ‘Republic of Statutes’, the codifiers were the literal and figurative sons of a post-Calvinist generation that was unquenchably optimistic about the clarity of texts and the common sense of individuals reading them. This lens also helps us better understand the defenders of the common law, who were not so much the retrograde servants of property rights and judicial supremacy as they are often presented, but were more often practically minded lawyers who understood the limits to which legislative texts could change the complex practices of law on the ground.

Polygamy on Trial: Analyzing Anti-Polygamy Legislation in Nineteenth-Century United States

This study examines nineteenth-century United States anti-polygamy legislation, focusing on its intersections with multiculturalism and minority rights. By analyzing the historical and legal aspects of these laws, we identify their impact on Mormon communities and immigrant groups, aimed at enforcing cultural assimilation. Our findings reveal tensions between religious freedom and societal concerns over polygamy, particularly in Christian contexts. The research highlights a paradox in liberal democracies, where safeguarding minority rights often clashes with societal values, leading to legislation against practices seen as disruptive. It emphasizes the delicate balance between cultural pluralism, multiculturalism, minority rights, and societal cohesion in nineteenth-century America, shedding light on the ongoing relevance of these debates today. This study calls for further exploration of arguments against culturally or religiously inspired practices in Western democracies.

Less-entrepreneurial groups reconsidered: the case of French- and English-Canadians in the late nineteenth-century United States

Less-entrepreneurial groups reconsidered: the case of French- and English-Canadians in the late nineteenth-century United States

The Problem of Immigration in a Slaveholding Republic: Policing Mobility in the Nineteenth-Century United States by Kevin Kenny (review)

The Problem of Immigration in a Slaveholding Republic: Policing Mobility in the Nineteenth-Century United States by Kevin Kenny (review)

Faith in Exposure: Privacy and Secularism in the Nineteenth-Century United States by Justine S. Murison (review)

Faith in Exposure: Privacy and Secularism in the Nineteenth-Century United States by Justine S. Murison (review)

Henry Hun and his family: Three foundational stories in the history of nineteenth-century American neurology, Part I. Thomas Hun (1808–1896): Nineteenth-century patriarch, neurophilosopher, and proto-neurologist

ABSTRACT Thomas Hun (1808–1896)—along with his sons Edward (1842–1880) and Henry (1854–1924)—were prime movers in establishing the clinical practice and academic discipline of neurology in the Hudson River Valley of New York in the ninteenth and early-twentieth centuries. This article outlines the life of the family’s semi-aristocratic patriarch, beginning with Thomas’s unusual educational background and his six-year post-graduate hiatus in Paris of the 1830s, where he came under the influence of P. C. A. Louis (1787–1872). It lays out his subsequent career as professor of the Institutes of Medicine and ultimately as dean of an American medical school that was not situated in a major metropolis. It also will demonstrate how Thomas Hun’s career as a medical practitioner, academician, neurophilosopher, and “proto-neurologist” recapitulates the evolution of clinical and academic neurology in nineteenth-century America.

Proving Pregnancy: Gender, Law, and Medical Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century America by Felicity M. Turner (review)

Proving Pregnancy: Gender, Law, and Medical Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century America by Felicity M. Turner (review)

Religion, Race, and Letterpress: Orthodox Christians in Nineteenth-Century New York City through the Lens of Kawkab America

Abstract Kawkab America (Star of America) is the first Arabic-language newspaper in America, published in New York City from 1892 to 1908. Founded by Orthodox Christians from Ottoman Syria, the newspaper reported on historical and contemporary events across the globe. In this article, I analyze the representations of religion in Kawkab to reconstruct the ways a Middle Eastern immigrant community perceived religious diversity in nineteenth-century America. Kawkab engaged the contemporary discourses about “world religions” by expanding this category’s boundaries. And by downplaying the theological distinctions between Christian denominations, it represented Syrians as members of an ecumenical Christianity. To further reinforce the value of the Orthodox community as worthy American subjects, the newspaper also commented on morality and piety as universal, cross-confessional norms, which Syrians abided by and guarded. Kawkab’s use of these literary strategies testifies to Syrian Christians’ negotiation of religion, race, and culture in a transnational, diasporic space.

Routinizing and scrutinizing: Divergent yet potentially complementary modes of valuing money's material forms

This essay contrasts and explores the complementarity between “routinizing” modes of valuation (relating money tokens to monetary value) that predominate in the contemporary global north with “scrutinizing” modes found in the past and on the periphery of more familiar forms. The former treat the relationship between pecuniary media and money value as independent from the physical condition of specific money tokens which are held to be universally fungible. By contrast, the latter foreground the characteristics of notes and coins as singularized objects that exist within and are potentially reconfigured semiotically by the workings of time upon their physical surfaces. Scrutinizing modes may in turn be divided between systems that seek pristine money tokens that elide their own historicity and those that treat wear and tear as indexical of previous instances of successful valuation. Ultimately the essay identifies three provisional ideal typical modes for practices of money's valuation. Two of these, the systems of routinization in the contemporary global north and of circulation-focal scrutinization, might be taken to be antithetical. By contrast, the third, the hybrid routinizing-scrutinizing model(s) we encounter on the peripheries of the contemporary state-money system or anywhere confidence about money's value starts to break down highlights the potential coexistence and complementarity of different monies within a single disjunctive system. Such complementarity often takes the form of routinized low value and scrutinized high value currencies, yet local, historically sedimented practices are foremost in the formation of such hybrid forms. Examples are drawn from nineteenth century America and China and from contemporary Southeast Asia.

American Catholics and the Quest for Equality in the Civil War Era

In American Catholics and the Quest for Equality in the Civil War Era, Robert Emmett Curran argues that nineteenth-century America did not offer equal opportunities for Blacks, Native Americans, Jews, Catholics, and women. Curran, a professor emeritus of history at Georgetown University, focuses on Catholics’ pursuit of equality from 1846 to 1877, showcasing their transformation from “internal aliens” to full-fledged citizens, which did not prevent them from seeking to deprive others, especially African Americans, of the same.

Jewish Sunday Schools: Teaching Religion in Nineteenth-Century America by Laura Yares (review)

Jewish Sunday Schools: Teaching Religion in Nineteenth-Century America by Laura Yares (review)

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.

Professors of racial medicine: imperialism and race in nineteenth-century United States medical schools.

This article examines some of the racist features of nineteenth-century medical school curricula in the United States and the imperial networks necessary to acquire the data and specimens that underpinned this part of medical education, which established hierarchies between human races and their relationship to the natural environment. It shows how, in a world increasingly linked by trade and colonialism, medical schools were founded in the United States and grew as the country developed its own imperial ambitions. Taking advantage of the global reach of empires, a number of medical professors in different states, such as Daniel Drake, Josiah Nott and John Collins Warren, who donated his anatomical collection to Harvard Medical School on his retirement in 1847, began to develop racial theories that naturalised slavery and emerging imperialism as part of their medical teaching.

Laura F. Edwards. Only the Clothes on Her Back: Clothing and the Hidden History of Power in the Nineteenth-Century United States.

Laura F. Edwards. <i>Only the Clothes on Her Back: Clothing and the Hidden History of Power in the Nineteenth-Century United States</i>.