3703 books match the query '19th Century' and 78 start with o

cover of Oriental Shadows: The Presence of the East in Early American Literature

Oriental Shadows

The Presence of the East in Early American Literature

Jim Egan

The Ohio State University Press, 2011

Through the use of several iconic early American authors (Anne Bradstreet, James Kirkpatrick, Benjamin Franklin, and Edgar Allan Poe), Jim Egan’s Oriental Shadows: The Presence of the East in Early American Literature explores the presence of “the East” in American writing.

The specter of the East haunted the literature of colonial British America and the new United States, from the earliest promotional pamphlets to the most aesthetically sophisticated works of art of the American Renaissance. Figures of Persia, China, Arabia, and other Oriental people, places, and things played crucial roles in many British American literary works, serving as key images in early American writers’ efforts to demonstrate that early American culture could match—and perhaps even surpass—European standards of refinement. These writers offered the East as a solution to America’s perceived inferior civilized status by suggesting that America become more civilized not by becoming more European but instead by adopting aesthetic styles and standards long associated with an East cast as superior aesthetically to both America and Europe.

In bringing to light this largely overlooked archive of images within the American literary canon, Oriental Shadows suggests that the East played a key role in the emergence of a distinctively American literary tradition and, further, that early American identity was born as much from figures of the East as it was from the colonists’ encounters with the frontier.
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cover of Orientalists, Propagandists, and Ilustrados: Filipino Scholarship and the End of Spanish Colonialism

Orientalists, Propagandists, and Ilustrados

Filipino Scholarship and the End of Spanish Colonialism

Megan C. Thomas

University of Minnesota Press, 2012

The writings of a small group of scholars known as the ilustrados are often credited for providing intellectual grounding for the Philippine Revolution of 1896. Megan C. Thomas shows that the ilustrados’ anticolonial project of defining and constructing the “Filipino” involved Orientalist and racialist discourses that are usually ascribed to colonial projects, not anticolonial ones. According to Thomas, the work of the ilustrados uncovers the surprisingly blurry boundary between nationalist and colonialist thought.

By any measure, there was an extraordinary flowering of scholarly writing about the peoples and history of the Philippines in the decade or so preceding the revolution. In reexamining the works of the scholars José Rizal, Pardo de Tavera, Isabelo de los Reyes, Pedro Paterno, Pedro Serrano Laktaw, and Mariano Ponce, Thomas situates their writings in a broader account of intellectual ideas and politics migrating and transmuting across borders. She reveals how the ilustrados both drew from and refashioned the tools and concepts of Orientalist scholarship from Europe.

Interrogating the terms “nationalist” and “nationalism,” whose definitions are usually constructed in the present and then applied to the past, Thomas offers new models for studying nationalist thought in the colonial world.

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cover of Original Copy: Ekphrasis, Gender, and the National Imagination in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Original Copy

Ekphrasis, Gender, and the National Imagination in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Christa Holm Vogelius

University of Massachusetts Press, 2025

When critics of poet Phillis Wheatley, the first African American to publish a collection of poetry, dismiss her work as derivative, they fail to see her writing as part of a new creative pantheon, sitting alongside other works that, like the popular copybooks in antebellum America, are structured as a conversation between artistic allies. Different kinds of copying in this period were distinctly feminized practices, such as artistic copying, pedagogical recitation, and literary imitation. Ekphrasis, the literary description of a work of visual art, reveals a particularly interesting form of copying, as the artwork in question becomes a kind of mediated space between author and reader; this practice, then, becomes the emblematic form of literature as collective production.

Original Copy frames ekphrasis and other forms of literary and visual copy-work as key concepts for understanding the discussions of nationalism, originality, and gender that dominated US literary circles during the first half of the nineteenth century. Christa Holm Vogelius focuses on four major writers of the period—Phillis Wheatley, Margaret Fuller, Sophia Hawthorne, and Henry Longfellow—to offer a narrative of a self-consciously feminine antebellum literary culture that was equally invested in literary nationality and convention. The explicitly feminized forms of the copy between and within media, she argues, became a productive means by which writers across a variety of genres interrogated the ill-defined but ubiquitous idea of an “original” American literature. Original Copy bridges three bodies of scholarship that have remained largely distinct—studies of literary nationalism and transnationalism, scholarship on gender in nineteenth century literary culture, and aesthetic and media theory—to argue for the significance of both imitation and intimate author-reader relations to the development of an American literature. 

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cover of Origins of Instability in Early Republican Mexico

Origins of Instability in Early Republican Mexico

Donald F. Stevens

Duke University Press, 1991

In the decades following independence, Mexico was transformed from a strong, stable colony into a republic suffering from economic decline and political strife. Marked by political instability—characterized by Antonio López de Santa Anna’s rise to the presidency on eleven distinct occasions—this period of Mexico’s history is often neglected and frequently misunderstood.
Donald F. Stevens’ revisionist account challenges traditional historiography to examine the nature and origins of Mexico’s political instability. Turning to quantitative methods as a way of providing a framework for examining existing hypotheses concerning Mexico’s instability, the author dissects the relationship between instability and economic cycles; contradicts the notion that Mexico’s social elite could have increased political stability by becoming more active; and argues that the principal political fissures were not liberal vs. conservative but were among radical, moderate, and conservative.
Ultimately, Stevens maintains, the origins of that country’s instability are to be found in the contradictions between liberalism and Mexico’s traditional class structure, and the problems of creating an independent republic from colonial, monarchical, and authoritarian traditions.
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cover of Origins of Liberal Dominance: State, Church, and Party in Nineteenth-Century Europe

Origins of Liberal Dominance

State, Church, and Party in Nineteenth-Century Europe

Andrew C. Gould

University of Michigan Press, 1999

How did liberal movements reshape the modern world? Origins of Liberal Dominance offers a revealing account of how states, churches, and parties joined together in France, Belgium, Switzerland, and Germany to produce fundamentally new forms of organization that have shaped contemporary politics.
Modern political life emerged when liberal movements sought to establish elections, constitutions, free markets, and religious liberty. Yet liberalism even at its height faced strong and often successful opposition from conservatives. What explains why liberals overcame their opponents in some countries but not in others? This book compares successful and unsuccessful attempts to build liberal political parties and establish liberal regimes in France, Belgium, Switzerland, and Germany from 1815 to World War I.
Andrew Gould argues that relations between states and churches set powerful conditions on any attempt at liberalization. Liberal movements that enhanced religious authority while reforming the state won clerical support and successfully built liberal institutions of government. Furthermore, liberal movements that organized peasant backing around religious issues founded or sustained mass movements to support liberal regimes.
Origins of Liberal Dominance offers striking new insights into the emergence of modern states and regimes. It will be of interest to political scientists, sociologists, comparative historians, and those interested in comparative politics, regime change and state-building, democratization, religion and politics, and European politics.
Andrew C. Gould is Assistant Professor of Government and Kellogg Institute Fellow, University of Notre Dame.
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cover of Origins of the War with Mexico: The Polk-Stockton Intrigue

Origins of the War with Mexico

The Polk-Stockton Intrigue

By Glenn W. Price

University of Texas Press, 1967

In the spring of 1846 James K. Polk announced that the Mexican Army had invaded United States territory and had “shed American blood upon the American soil.” This political rhetoric, as Glenn W. Price establishes in Origins of the War with Mexico: The Polk-Stockton Intrigue, is part of the myth of American innocence. It represents the “internal contradiction between professed values and patterns of action,” perpetuated by American historical writing that emphasizes national consequences of the acquisition of foreign territory and minimizes both its international significance and the importance of the diplomatic and military methods used.

A conflict with Mexico, leading to territorial expansion of the United States, was not unwanted. California was Polk’s prime objective from the beginning of his administration, and this Mexican province was to be acquired by conquest in a war initiated on the Texas-Mexican border. To this end Polk sent several agents to Texas, but the man at the center of the war intrigue was Commodore Robert F. Stockton, independently wealthy, prominent in politics, and the head of great business enterprises.

Sufficient evidence exists to substantiate in every important particular the steps in Polk’s path of intrigue: his attempts to bribe Mexican officials; his efforts to encourage revolutionary forces in the Mexican provinces; his use of the threat of force to frighten Mexico into selling California; his attempt to initiate a war by proxy through the government of Texas and Anson Jones.

If Polk was unwilling to assume responsibility for aggressive war, Stockton was not; he arrived in Galveston with a squadron of naval vessels in May of 1845, prepared to finance an army of three thousand men from his personal funds to avoid the overt involvement of the government of the United States. But, says Price, for all the internationally dangerous implications of such a maneuver, the two men who played the chief roles in the war intrigue of 1845 are representative in their written and spoken expression of faith in American righteousness of action and in the American tradition of the divine mission.

Based on extensive research into the written and spoken words of the people who were involved, directly and indirectly, in the events, this analysis (which will be considered revisionist) of the origins of the War with Mexico is the result of the kind of objective approach to national history for which the author makes a plea in his preface and conclusion and in his interpretive comments throughout the work. The historian, Price believes, “has the extraordinary advantage of being able to examine mankind from that distance and elevation and detachment which so often reveals, as it is designed to reveal, the gulf between pretension and performance.”

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cover of Orphan Trains to Missouri

Orphan Trains to Missouri

Michael D. Patrick & Evelyn Goodrich Trickel

University of Missouri Press, 1997

As an "orphan train" crossed the country, it left part of its cargo at each stop, a few children in one small town and a few in another. Even though farmers needed many hands for labor, most of the small farm communities could not or would not take all of the children on the train. As the train moved to its next stop, those children not taken feared no one would ever want them.

Early immigration laws encouraged the poor of Europe to find new hope with new lives in the United States. But sometimes the immigrants exchanged a bad situation in their native country for an even worse one on the streets of New York and other industrial cities. As a result, the streets were filled with crowds of abandoned children that the police called "street arabs." Many New York citizens blamed the street arabs for crime and violence in the city and wanted them placed in orphan homes or prisons.

In 1853 a man by the name of Charles Loring Brace, along with other well-to-do men in New York City, founded the Children's Aid Society. The society planned to give food, lodging, and clothing to homeless children and provide educational and trade opportunities for them. But the number of children needing help was so large that the Children's Aid Society was unable to care for them, and Brace developed a plan to send many of the children to the rural Midwest by train. He was convinced that the children of the streets would find many benefits in rural America. In 1854 he persuaded the board of the society to send the first trainload of orphans west. With this, the orphan trains were born.

Cheap fares, the central location of the state, and numerous small farming towns along the railroad tracks made Missouri the perfect hub for the orphan trains, even though many areas of the state were still largely unsettled. Researchers have estimated that from 150,000 to 400,000 children were sent out on orphan trains, with perhaps as many as 100,000 being placed in Missouri.

Orphan Trains to Missouri documents the history of the children on those Orphan Trains--their struggles, their successes, and their failures. Touching stories of volunteers who oversaw the placement of the orphans as well as stories of the orphans themselves make this a rich record of American and midwestern history.

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cover of Orphan Trains: The Story of Charles Loring Brace and the Children He Saved and Failed

Orphan Trains

The Story of Charles Loring Brace and the Children He Saved and Failed

Stephen O'Connor

University of Chicago Press, 2004

In mid-nineteenth-century New York, vagrant youth, both orphans and runaways, filled the streets. For years the city had been sweeping these children into prisons or almshouses, but in 1853 the young minister Charles Loring Brace proposed a radical solution to the problem by creating the Children's Aid Society, an organization that fought to provide homeless children with shelter, education, and, for many, a new family in the country. Combining a biography of Brace with firsthand accounts of orphans, Stephen O'Connor here tells of the orphan trains that, between 1854 and 1929, spirited away some 250,000 destitute children to rural homes in every one of the forty-eight contiguous states.

A powerful blend of history, biography, and adventure, Orphans Trains remains the definitive work on this little-known episode in American history.
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cover of Oscar Wilde Prefigured: Queer Fashioning and British Caricature, 1750-1900

Oscar Wilde Prefigured

Queer Fashioning and British Caricature, 1750-1900

Dominic Janes

University of Chicago Press, 2016

“I do not say you are it, but you look it, and you pose at it, which is just as bad,” Lord Queensbury challenged Oscar Wilde in the courtroom—which erupted in laughter—accusing Wilde of posing as a sodomite. What was so terrible about posing as a sodomite, and why was Queensbury’s horror greeted with such amusement? In Oscar Wilde Prefigured, Dominic Janes suggests that what divided the two sides in this case was not so much the question of whether Wilde was or was not a sodomite, but whether or not it mattered that people could appear to be sodomites. For many, intimations of sodomy were simply a part of the amusing spectacle of sophisticated life.

Oscar Wilde Prefigured is a study of the prehistory of this “queer moment” in 1895. Janes explores the complex ways in which men who desired sex with men in Britain had expressed such interests through clothing, style, and deportment since the mid-eighteenth century. He supplements the well-established narrative of the inscription of sodomitical acts into a homosexual label and identity at the end of the nineteenth century by teasing out the means by which same-sex desires could be signaled through visual display in Georgian and Victorian Britain. Wilde, it turns out, is not the starting point for public queer figuration. He is the pivot by which Georgian figures and twentieth-century camp stereotypes meet. Drawing on the mutually reinforcing phenomena of dandyism and caricature of alleged effeminates, Janes examines a wide range of images drawn from theater, fashion, and the popular press to reveal new dimensions of identity politics, gender performance, and queer culture.
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cover of Oscar Wilde and Modern Culture: The Making of a Legend

Oscar Wilde and Modern Culture

The Making of a Legend

Joseph Bristow

Ohio University Press, 2009

Oscar Wilde and Modern Culture: The Making of a Legend explores the meteoric rise, sudden fall, and legendary resurgence of an immensely influential writer’s reputation from his hectic 1881 American lecture tour to recent Hollywood adaptations of his dramas. Always renowned—if not notorious—for his fashionable persona, Wilde courted celebrity at an early age. Later, he came to prominence as one of the most talented essayists and fiction writers of his time.

In the years leading up to his two-year imprisonment, Wilde stood among the foremost dramatists in London. But after he was sent down for committing acts of “gross indecency” it seemed likely that social embarrassment would inflict irreparable damage to his legacy. As this volume shows, Wilde died in comparative obscurity. Little could he have realized that in five years his name would come back into popular circulation thanks to the success of Richard Strauss’s opera Salome and Robert Ross’s edition of De Profundi. With each succeeding decade, the twentieth century continued to honor Wilde’s name by keeping his plays in repertory, producing dramas about his life, adapting his works for film, and devising countless biographical and critical studies of his writings.

This volume reveals why, more than a hundred years after his demise, Wilde’s value in the academic world, the auction house, and the entertainment industry stands higher than that of any modern writer.

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cover of Oscar Wilde in America: The Interviews

Oscar Wilde in America

The Interviews

Edited by Matthew Hofer and Gary Scharnhorst

University of Illinois Press, 2013

Better known in 1882 as a cultural icon than a serious writer, Oscar Wilde was brought to North America for a major lecture tour on Aestheticism and the decorative arts. With characteristic aplomb, he adopted the role as the ambassador of Aestheticism, and he tried out a number of phrases, ideas, and strategies that ultimately made him famous as a novelist and playwright. This exceptional volume cites all ninety-one of Wilde's interviews and contains transcripts of forty-eight of them, and it also includes his lecture on his travels in America.
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cover of Oscar Wilde's Decorated Books

Oscar Wilde's Decorated Books

Nicholas Frankel

University of Michigan Press, 2000

Oscar Wilde's Decorated Books addresses Wilde's obsession with the visual appearance or "look" of his published writings. It examines the role played by graphic designers in the production of Wilde's writings and demonstrates how marginal and decorative elements of the printed book affect interpretation. Nicholas Frankel approaches Wilde's writings as graphical or "printed" phenomena that reveal their significance through the beautiful and elaborate decorations with which they were published in Wilde's own lifetime. With extensive reference to and exposition on Wilde's theoretical writings and letters, the author shows that, far from being marginal elements of the literary text, these decorative devices were central to Wilde's understanding of his own writings as well as to his "aesthetic" theory of language. Extensive illustrations support Frankel's arguments. The first part of the book lays out a broadly historical view of Wilde’s writings, emphasizing their volatility at the hands of time as well as Wilde’s changing conceptions of his own work. The second part demonstrates the significance that Wilde and his publishers attached to the process of graphic design, showing how marginal and decorative elements of the printed book affect interpretation. Both parts stress the importance of late-Victorian publishing practices to our understanding of Wilde’s writings. The book further challenges the prevailing view of Wilde as essentially a playwright, demonstrating the importance of poetry to Wilde’s own understanding of himself as an author.The book attempts to do justice to Wilde’s own valorization of literature as one of the decorative arts. By emphasizing the visual and collaborative dimensions of Wilde’s texts, Frankel argues that visual decoration was central to Wilde’s theory of language as well as his practice as a writer. Anticipating Baudrillard's distinctionbetween appearance and the transparency, of the sign, Wilde’s writings argue that literary language is both a visual and a material phenomenon — what Wilde himself would call a “beautiful untrue thing” — that demands to be read with the eye as much as the brain.This book will appeal to specialists of Oscar Wilde and the Victorian fin de siècle, to textual and literary scholars, art historians, and linguistic philosophers interested in the graphical nature of the linguistic sign.
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cover of Other Mothers: Beyond the Maternal Ideal

Other Mothers

Beyond the Maternal Ideal

Edited by Ellen Bayuk Rosenman and Claudia C. Klaver

The Ohio State University Press, 2008

Other Mothers, edited by Ellen Bayuk Rosenman and Claudia C. Klaver, offers a range of essays that open a conversation about Victorian motherhood as a wide-ranging, distinctive experience and idea. In spite of its importance, however, it is one of the least-studied aspects of the Victorian era, subsumed under discussions of femininity and domesticity.

This collection addresses this void, revealing the extraordinary diversity of Victorian motherhood. Exploring diaries, novels, and court cases, with contexts ranging from London to Egypt to Australia, these varied accounts take the collection “beyond the maternal ideal” to consider the multiple, unpredictable ways in which motherhood was experienced and imagined in this formative historical period.

Other Mothers joins revisionist approaches to femininity that now characterize Victorian studies. Its contents trace intersections among gender, race, and class; question the power of separate spheres ideology; and insist on the context-specific nature of social roles. The fifteen essays in this volume contribute to the fields of literary criticism, history, cultural studies, and history.
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cover of Ottoman Izmir: The Rise of a Cosmopolitan Port, 1840-1880

Ottoman Izmir

The Rise of a Cosmopolitan Port, 1840-1880

Sibel Zandi-Sayek

University of Minnesota Press, 2011

Between 1840 and 1880, the Eastern Mediterranean port of Izmir (Smyrna) underwent unprecedented change. A modern harbor that welcomed international steamships and new railway lines that transported a cornucopia of products transformed the physical city. Migrants, seasonal workers, and transient sailors thronged into an already diverse metropolis, helping to double the population to 200,000. Simultaneously, Ottoman officials and enterprising citizens vied to control and reform the city’s administrative and legal institutions. 


Ottoman Izmir
examines how urban space, institutional structures, and everyday practices shaped one another in the thriving seaport of Izmir during a volatile period of growth. Sibel Zandi-Sayek investigates a variety of urban actors—Muslims and non-Muslims, Ottomans and Europeans, newcomers and native residents, merchants, investors, civil servants, and press reporters—who were actively engaged in restructuring the city. Concentrating on the workings of urban committees and on laws and policies that were written, rewritten, but never fully implemented, Zandi-Sayek exposes how modern interventions sought to impose clear-cut concepts of public and private, safety and danger, and hygiene on a city that previously had a wide range of customary regulations. 

Ottoman Izmir shows how Izmir’s various stakeholders contested its built environment. In so doing, it offers a new view of the dynamics of urban modernization.

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cover of Our Lady Of Victorian Feminism: The Madonna in the Work of Anna Jameson, Margaret Fuller, and George Eliot

Our Lady Of Victorian Feminism

The Madonna in the Work of Anna Jameson, Margaret Fuller, and George Eliot

Kimberly VanEsveld Adams

Ohio University Press, 2000

Our Lady of Victorian Feminism is about three nineteenth-century women, Protestants by background and feminists by conviction, who are curiously and crucially linked by their extensive use of the Madonna in arguments designed to empower women.

In the field of Victorian studies, few scholars have looked beyond the customary identification of the Christian Madonna with the Victorian feminine ideal—the domestic Madonna or the Angel in the House. Kimberly VanEsveld Adams shows, however, that these three Victorian writers made extensive use of the Madonna in feminist arguments. They were able to see this figure in new ways, freely appropriating the images of independent, powerful, and wise Virgin Mothers.

In addition to contributions in the fields of literary criticism, art history, and religious studies, Our Lady of Victorian Feminism places a needed emphasis on the connections between the intellectuals and the activists of the nineteenth-century women's movement. It also draws attention to an often neglected strain of feminist thought, essentialist feminism, which proclaimed sexual equality as well as difference, enabling the three writers to make one of their most radical arguments, that women and men are made in the image of the Virgin Mother and the Son, the two faces of the divine.

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cover of Our Sisters' Keepers: Nineteenth-Century Benevolence Literature by American Women

Our Sisters' Keepers

Nineteenth-Century Benevolence Literature by American Women

Edited by Jill Bergman and Debra Bernardi

University of Alabama Press, 2005

Essays on the roles played by women in forming American attitudes about benevolence and poverty relief

American culture has long had a conflicted relationship with assistance to the poor. Cotton Mather and John Winthrop were staunch proponents of Christian charity as fundamental to colonial American society, while transcendentalists harbored deep skepticism towards benevolence in favor of Emersonian self-reliance and Thoreau’s insistence on an ascetic life. Women in the 19th century, as these essays show, approached issues of benevolence far differently than their male counterparts, consistently promoting assistance to the impoverished, in both their acts and their writings. 
 
These essays address a wide range of subjects: images of the sentimental seamstress figure in women’s fiction; Rebecca Harding Davis’s rewriting of the “industrial” novel; Sarah Orne Jewett’s place in the transcendental tradition of skepticism toward charity, and her subversion of it; the genre of the poorhouse narrative; and the philanthropic work and writings of Hull House founder Jane Addams. 
 
As the editors of Our Sisters’ Keepers argue, the vulnerable and marginal positions occupied by many women in the 19th century fostered an empathetic sensitivity in them to the plight of the poor, and their ability to act and write in advocacy of the impoverished offered a form of empowerment not otherwise available to them. The result was the reformulation of the concept of the American individual.
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cover of Out of due time: Wilfrid Ward and the Dublin review

Out of due time

Wilfrid Ward and the Dublin review

Paschal Scotti

Catholic University of America Press, 2006

Following the tradition of the great literary quarterlies, the journal discussed every aspect of human endeavor, and Out of Due Time offers a fine opportunity to view the best of the Catholic mind in an extraordinary period.
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cover of Out of the Dead House: Nineteenth-Century Women Physicians and the Writing of Medicine

Out of the Dead House

Nineteenth-Century Women Physicians and the Writing of Medicine

Susan Wells

University of Wisconsin Press, 2001

In the last decades of the nineteenth century, two thousand women physicians formed a significant and lively scientific community in the United States. Many were active writers; they participated in the development of medical record-keeping and research, and they wrote self-help books, social and political essays, fiction, and poetry. Out of the Dead House rediscovers the contributions these women made to the developing practice of medicine and to a community of women in science.
    Susan Wells combines studies of medical genres, such as the patient history or the diagnostic conversation, with discussions of individual writers. The women she discusses include Ann Preston, the first woman dean of a medical college; Hannah Longshore, a successful practitioner who combined conventional and homeopathic medicine; Rebecca Crumpler, the first African American woman physician to publish a medical book; and Mary Putnam Jacobi, writer of more than 180 medical articles and several important books. Wells shows how these women learned to write, what they wrote, and how these texts were read.
    Out of the Dead House also documents the ways that women doctors influenced medical discourse during the formation of the modern profession. They invented forms and strategies for medical research and writing, including methods of using survey information, taking patient histories, and telling case histories. Out of the Dead House  adds a critical episode to the developing story of women as producers and critics of culture, including scientific culture.
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cover of Out of the Wilderness: THE LIFE OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN

Out of the Wilderness

THE LIFE OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN

William Hanchett

University of Illinois Press, 1994

        In Out of Darkness William Hanchett, a leading Lincoln Scholar,
        follows Abraham Lincoln from his birth and chronicles his thirst for education,
        his achievements as a lawyer and congressman, his presidency, and his
        assassination.
      Hanchett gives readers a deeper understanding of how Lincoln's self-directed
        study and clear thinking offset his lack of a formal education, enabling
        him to become a respected and successful attorney. He also shows how Lincoln's
        uncanny leadership helped him to end slavery and still keep the divided
        North sufficiently united to win the Civil War. By focusing on a variety
        of roles and settings, Hanchett invites readers to get to know Lincoln
        as a president, as well as a lover, husband, father, and friend.
      "Excellent! Hanchett is a fine writer, and his biography of Lincoln
        is succinct and thought-provoking."
        -- Frank J. Williams, president, Abraham Lincoln Association
 
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cover of Outcasts from Evolution: Scientific Attitudes of Racial Inferiority, 1859 - 1900

Outcasts from Evolution

Scientific Attitudes of Racial Inferiority, 1859 - 1900

John S. Haller, Jr.

Southern Illinois University Press, 1996

In the only book to date to explore the period between the 1859 publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species and the discovery in 1900 of Gregor Mendel’s experiments in genetics, John S. Haller, Jr., shows the relationship between scientific "conviction" and public policy. He focuses on the numerous liberally educated American scientists who were caught up in the triumph of evolutionary ideas and who sought to apply those ideas to comparative morality, health, and the physiognomy of nonwhite races.

During this period, the natural and social scientists of the day not only accepted without question the genetic and cultural superiority of the Caucasian; they also asserted that the Caucasian race held a monopoly on evolutionary progress, arguing that "inferior races" were no more than evolutionary survivors doomed by their genetic legacy to remain outcasts from evolution.

Hereditarians and evolutionists believed that "less fit" human races were perishing from the rigors of civilization’s struggle and competition. Indeed, racial inferiority lay at the very foundation of the evolutionary framework and, remaining there, rose to the pinnacle of "truth" with the myth of scientific certainty.

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cover of Outliers and American Vanguard Art

Outliers and American Vanguard Art

Lynne Cooke

University of Chicago Press, 2017

Since the last century, the relationship between vanguard and self-taught artists has been defined by contradiction. The established art world has been quick to make clear distinctions between trained and untrained artists, yet at the same time it has been fascinated by outliers whom it draws selectively and intermittently into its orbits. For a new exhibition launching at the National Gallery of Art, curator Lynne Cooke explores shifting conceptualizations of the American outlier across the twentieth century, drawing on the inherent sociality of the exhibition in her installation of these works. This companion catalog, Outliers and American Vanguard Art, offers a fantastic opportunity to consider works by schooled and self-taught creators in relation to each other and defined by historical circumstance.

The art works in Outliers and American Vanguard Art come from three distinct periods when the intersections between mainstream and outlier artists were most dynamic and productive, ushering in exhibitions of art based on various degrees of co-existence, inclusion, and assimilation. Works by such diverse artists as Charles Sheeler, Christina Ramberg, and Matt Mullican are set in conversation with a range of works by such self-taught artists as Horace Pippin, Janet Sobel, and Henry Darger. Cooke also examines a recent increase of radically expressive work that challenges what it means to be an outlier today. She reveals how these distinctions have been freighted with a particularly American point of view as she investigates our assumptions about creativity, artistic practice, and the role of the artist in contemporary culture.
 
Outliers and American Vanguard Art is the most comprehensive show ever to examine outliers in dialogue with their established peers.   It is sure to inspire vigorous conversation about how artists and the work they make are represented.
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cover of Outside the Hacienda Walls: The Archaeology of Plantation Peonage in Nineteenth-Century Yucatán

Outside the Hacienda Walls

The Archaeology of Plantation Peonage in Nineteenth-Century Yucatán

Allan Meyers

University of Arizona Press, 2012

The Mexican Revolution was a tumultuous struggle for social and political reform that ousted an autocrat and paved the way for a new national constitution. The conflict, however, came late to Yucatán, where a network of elite families with largely European roots held the reins of government. This privileged group reaped spectacular wealth from haciendas, cash-crop plantations tended by debt-ridden servants of Maya descent. When a revolutionary army from central Mexico finally gained a foothold in Yucatán in 1915, the local custom of agrarian servitude met its demise.

Drawing on a dozen years of archaeological and historical investigation, Allan Meyers breaks new ground in the study of Yucatán haciendas. He explores a plantation village called San Juan Bautista Tabi, which once stood at the heart of a vast sugar estate. Occupied for only a few generations, the village was abandoned during the revolutionary upheaval. Its ruins now lie within a state-owned ecological reserve.

Through oral histories, archival records, and physical remains, Meyers examines various facets of the plantation landscape. He presents original data and fresh interpretations on settlement organization, social stratification, and spatial relationships. His systematic approach to "things underfoot," small everyday objects that are now buried in the tropical forest, offers views of the hacienda experience that are often missing in official written sources. In this way, he raises the voices of rural, mostly illiterate Maya speakers who toiled as laborers. What emerges is a portrait of hacienda social life that transcends depictions gleaned from historical methods alone.

Students, researchers, and travelers to Mexico will all find something of interest in Meyers's lively presentation. Readers will see the old haciendas—once forsaken but now experiencing a rebirth as tourist destinations—in a new light. These heritage sites not only testify to social conditions that prevailed before the Mexican Revolution, but also remind us that the human geography of modern Yucatán is as much a product of plantation times as it is of more ancient periods.
 
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cover of Outsiders in 19th-Century Press History: Multicultural Perspectives

Outsiders in 19th-Century Press History

Multicultural Perspectives

Frankie Hutton

University of Wisconsin Press, 1995

This anthology of journalism history brings together essays on the early Black press, pioneer Jewish journalism, Spanish-language newspapers, Native American newspapers, woman suffrage, peace advocacy, and Chinese American and Mormon publications. It shows how marginal groups developed their own journalism to counter the prejudices and misconceptions of the white establishment press. The essays address the important questions of freedom of expression in religious matters as well as the domains of race and gender.
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cover of Over The Rim: The Parley P. Pratt Exploring Expedition to Southern Utah, 1849-50

Over The Rim

The Parley P. Pratt Exploring Expedition to Southern Utah, 1849-50

edited by William B. Smart and Donna T. Smart

Utah State University Press, 1999

Over the Rim is the first book about an important but little-known expedition sent by Brigham Young to explore southern Utah. Led by Mormon apostle Parley P. Pratt, the party traveled from Salt Lake City south across the rim of the Great Basin to the Virgin River near future St. George. They brought back to Mormon leaders their first detailed portrait of the country to the south that the church planned to settle.

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cover of Over the Alleghenies: Early Canals and Railroads of Pennsylvania

Over the Alleghenies

Early Canals and Railroads of Pennsylvania

Robert J. Kapsch

West Virginia University Press, 2013

Between 1826 and 1858 the state of Pennsylvania built and operated the largest and most technologically advanced system of canals and railroads in North America–almost one thousand miles of transport that stretched from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh and beyond.
 
The construction of this ambitious transportation system was accompanied by great euphoria. It was widely believed that the revenue created from these canals and railroads would eliminate the need for all taxes on state citizens. Yet with the Panic of 1837, a financial crisis much like boom and bust cycle that ended in 2008, a deep recession fell across the country.
By 1858, Pennsylvania had sold all canals and railroads to private companies, often for pennies-on-the-dollar.
 
Over the Alleghenies: Early Canals and Railroads of Pennsylvania is the definitive history of the state of Pennsylvania’s incredible canal and railroad system. Although often condemned as a colossal failure, this construction effort remains an innovative, magnificent feat that ushered in modern transportation to Pennsylvania and the entire country. With extensive primary research, over one hundred illustrations, newspapers clippings, and charts and graphs, Over the Alleghenies examines and dissects the infrastructure project that bankrupted the wealthiest state in the Union. 
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cover of Overcoming All Obstacles: The Women of the Académie Julian

Overcoming All Obstacles

The Women of the Académie Julian

Becker, Jane R

Rutgers University Press, 1999

Overcoming All Obstacles: The Women of the Académie Julian is the first book to examine late nineteenth-century Paris's most famous training ground for the leading women artists of the period. The Académie Julian was founded in Paris in 1868, initially to prepare students for entry to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, the nineteenth-century's preeminent art school. Because women could not study at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts until 1897, Julian itself became an international equivalent for many of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century's most important women artists.

Not only does Overcoming All Obstacles introduce the reader to many works by women artists-both famous and lesser known-but the essays offer a cultural and historical context in which to appreciate their art. Gabriel Weisberg's essay concentrates on the rigorous training methods enforced by Rodolphe Julian and the teachers at the Academy. Jane Becker explores the competitive environment of the Julian Academy as it affected the Ukrainian painter Marie Bashkirtseff and the Swiss painter Louise-Catherine Breslau. Essays by Catherine Fehrer, the leading scholar of the Académie Julian, and Tamar Garb, an art historian who focuses on the training of women artists, give us a richer understanding of the Académie Julian's place in the sphere of art education in late nineteenth-century Paris.

Generously illustrated with both color and black-and-white images, this volume includes documentary photographs and caricatures that have never before been reproduced. The core of the book draws on the large collection of the Académie Julian Del Debbio, the Académie Julian's successor institution in Paris. This publication accompanied an exhibition organized by the Dahesh Museum in New York that opened after its exhibition at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown.  The exhibition subsequently continued to the Dixon Gallery and Gardens, Memphis.

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cover of Owen Lovejoy and the Coalition for Equality: Clergy, African Americans, and Women United for Abolition

Owen Lovejoy and the Coalition for Equality

Clergy, African Americans, and Women United for Abolition

Jane Ann Moore and William F. Moore

University of Illinois Press, 2019

Antislavery white clergy and their congregations. Radicalized abolitionist women. African Americans committed to ending slavery through constitutional political action. These diverse groups attributed their common vision of a nation free from slavery to strong political and religious values. Owen Lovejoy’s gregarious personality, formidable oratorical talent, probing political analysis, and profound religious convictions made him the powerful leader the coalition needed.

Owen Lovejoy and the Coalition for Equality examines how these three distinct groups merged their agendas into a single antislavery, religious, political campaign for equality with Lovejoy at the helm. Combining scholarly biography, historiography, and primary source material, Jane Ann Moore and William F. Moore demonstrate Lovejoy's crucial role in nineteenth-century politics, the rise of antislavery sentiment in religious spaces, and the emerging congressional commitment to end slavery. Their compelling account explores how the immorality of slavery became a touchstone of political and religious action in the United States through the efforts of a synergetic coalition led by an essential abolitionist figure.

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cover of Ozark Vernacular Houses: A Study of Rural Homeplaces in the Arkansas Ozarks, 1830-1930

Ozark Vernacular Houses

A Study of Rural Homeplaces in the Arkansas Ozarks, 1830-1930

Jean Sizemore

University of Arkansas Press, 1991

Over 160 photographs, drawings, and maps provide examples of the four traditional Ozark house types and reveal the unity of a distinctive Arkansas culture that bears identity with all hill peoples. Of importance to architects, folklorists, cultural historians, and anyone interested in the Ozarks, this fascinating examination of the Ozark house is a way toward understanding the mind of the inhabitants and their entire way of life.
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