Nineteenth-Century America Research Articles

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

Felicity M. Turner. <i>Proving Pregnancy: Gender, Law, and Medical Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century America</i>.

All That Is Solid Bursts into Flame: Capitalism and Fire in the Nineteenth-Century United States

Abstract Industrial capitalism arrived in Europe as great urban fires were already retreating. The United States, however, was generously timbered and far more reliant on wooden construction. As a result, its infernos continued, and even increased, well into its age of capital. They especially struck places of intense commodification: hastily built settler towns, slave cities, financial centres and sites of mineral extraction. Noting the connection between fire and capitalism, a class of upwardly mobile strivers came to appreciate fires for their ability to disrupt social hierarchies, reset property relations and nurture economic dynamism. Oddly, many who had suffered fires even interpreted them as ‘blessings in disguise’. This pyrophilia was not universal, however, and the richest men of the Gilded Age strenuously opposed it, seeking instead to fireproof the environment. The clash between pyrophobes and pyrophiles was between economic incumbents and economic insurgents, and it touched on many areas of late nineteenth-century culture. Familiar Gilded Age artefacts such as Chicago’s White City and L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz can be productively understood in terms of this widespread fight over the value of fire, and thus the shape of capitalism.

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)

:Proving Pregnancy: Gender, Law, and Medical Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century America

:<i>Proving Pregnancy: Gender, Law, and Medical Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century America</i>

The Garden Politic: Global Plants and Botanical Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century America by Mary Kuhn (review)

The Garden Politic: Global Plants and Botanical Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century America by Mary Kuhn (review)

A Feminist Abolitionist reads Plutarch, Euripides, and Plato: Periclean Athens and Nineteenth Century America in Lydia Maria Child’s Philothea (1836)

In writing her 1836 novel Philothea, the abolitionist Lydia Maria Child drew on careful reading of Plutarch’s Life of Pericles, Euripides’ Ion, and Plato’s Republic. The novel’s plot, organized around Pericles’ law that both parents must be Athenian citizens for their child to have citizenship, shares features with arguments for the abolition of slavery and for women’s rights that Child made in other writings throughout her lifetime. Child combined a sentimental romance narrative about an enslaved woman that encourages readers to become abolitionists with allusions to Plato’s Republic that affirm the abolitionist conviction that slavery is absolutely unjust. Previous scholarship has treated Child’s use of Greek material in a rather general way. This article demonstrates just how precisely she incorporated elements of Plutarch, Euripides and Plato into the abolitionist story she chose to tell. By expanding understanding of Child’s engagement with the classical past that her gender kept her from learning about in a university setting, this study also contributes to the growing body of knowledge about how women did get access to — and put to use — classical learning.

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’.

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)

"Four Corners and a Void": Idiocy and Childhood Disability in Nineteenth-Century America.

Over the second half of the nineteenth century, thousands of Americans were admitted to schools for so-called idiotic children, later known as institutions for the feebleminded and linked to the Eugenics movement. While idiocy is often presumed to be the antecedent of intellectual disability, an analysis of the stories of three hundred children admitted to one such institution over a forty-year period demonstrates an unexpected diversity of appearances, abilities, and behaviors. Within the walls of the institution, idiocy was composed of children whose perceived abilities deviated from the expectations of their social position. Families further shaped the diagnosis of idiocy by negotiating the timing of admission for their children, influenced not only by personal factors, but by shifting educational and employment opportunities, and cultural tolerance of diversity. Consequently, idiocy became the broadest descriptor of disability during the nineteenth century.

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)

Citizens of a Stolen Land: A Ho-Chunk History of the Nineteenth-Century United States. By Stephen Kantrowitz

Citizens of a Stolen Land: A Ho-Chunk History of the Nineteenth-Century United States. By Stephen Kantrowitz

The Bewildering Affect of Representative Democracy: Sheppard Lee's "Confusion of Characters, Propensities, and Associations"

Abstract: This essay examines how Robert Montgomery Bird's Sheppard Lee (1836) uses the political affect of "democratic confusion" to detail the potentials and pitfalls of representation in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century America. Bird's novel describes the journeys of Sheppard Lee, a man who discovers he can move his consciousness into corpses and reanimate them. Instead of focusing solely on Lee, the novel uses the conceit of metempsychosis to depict Lee's transformation into six other characters, adapting Ancient Greek definitions of "character" that stressed the concept's exemplifying power. Yet with each transformation, Lee experiences bafflement, and these states of confusion provide an analogy to the political representation of a variegated constituency by an official. For Bird, representation depends on what Alexis de Tocqueville called a "confused clamour"; indeed, personifying voters could not occur without it. At the same time, this article charts out Bird's limitations for this vision of a prolific, if complicated, democracy. The novel ultimately contends that representatives could not comprehend voters without this affective state, even as Bird curtails its productive nature along racial lines. By the ending of the novel, private bewilderment moves into the public domain in a scene of mass racial violence that clarifies the tension Bird identifies in democratic confusion.

Creating a User-Inventor Community: How Disabled People Innovated and Marketed Disability in Early Nineteenth-Century America.

Early nineteenth-century America's robust trade in medical and health care products is richly documented, yet many scholars have overlooked just what role people with impairments played in that industry as inventors and retailers, forming relationships with clients based on their shared experiences of disability. A study of newspaper advertisements, patents, organizational records, medical accounts, and objects suggests that many impaired and formerly impaired producers marketed products to impaired consumers, creating an organic and unselfconscious network of disabled people who made, sold, and bought knowledge and devices about and for disability. Recovering this world of disabled inventors, retailers, and their clients reveals how disability fueled innovation in early nineteenth-century America, expanding scholarly understandings of who participated in and profited from the burgeoning medical and health care economy. This study also suggests that the market was an early venue of disability community where people came together around their common bond.

John Bunyan in Abolitionist Print Culture

John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) was enormously popular in the nineteenth-century United States. This article shows that abolitionists appropriated that text, as well as the reputation and biography of its author, as a guide to their own political action. References to Bunyan and The Pilgrim’s Progress in abolitionist print culture, including newspapers and book-length responses to The Pilgrim’s Progress, reveal that abolitionists saw Bunyan as a virtuous progenitor who helped to legitimate and unify their political movement while representing both political commitment and religious toleration.

:Faith in Exposure: Privacy and Secularism in the Nineteenth-Century United States

:<i>Faith in Exposure: Privacy and Secularism in the Nineteenth-Century United States</i>

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

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

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

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

Felicity Turner, Proving Pregnancy: Gender, Law, and Medical Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century America

Felicity Turner, <i>Proving Pregnancy: Gender, Law, and Medical Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century America</i>

Angel on a Freight Train: A Story of Faith and Queer Desire in Nineteenth-Century America by Peter C. Baldwin (review)

Angel on a Freight Train: A Story of Faith and Queer Desire in Nineteenth-Century America by Peter C. Baldwin (review)

Gossip at the Quilting Bee: A Crucial Form of Solidarity in Nineteenth-Century America

Abstract: Just as the cloth was transformed and became defined as a quilt, so, too, the special qualities of the quilting bee supported the transformation of quilters into defined, agential groups. Indeed, the historical context of both quilting bees and quilt-making is significant, the activities at their peak of popularity in the mid-nineteenth century, the same time as the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention—generally marked as the formal birth of the organized women's rights movement.