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10 books match the query 'Nineteenth - Century United States'

cover of An Actor's Tale: Theater, Culture, and Everyday Life in the Nineteenth-Century United States

An Actor's Tale

Theater, Culture, and Everyday Life in the Nineteenth-Century United States

Amy Hughes

University of Michigan Press, 2025

Harry Watkins was no one special. During a career that spanned four decades, this nineteenth-century actor yearned for fame but merely skirted the edges of it. He performed alongside the brightest stars, wrote scores of plays, and toured the United States and England, but he never became a household name. Inspired by this average performer’s life and labor, An Actor’s Tale offers an alternative history of nineteenth-century theater, focusing on the daily rhythms and routines of theatrical life rather than the celebrated people, plays, and exceptional events that tend to dominate histories of US theater and performance. In the process, Hughes asks uncomfortable questions about the existence, predominance, and erasure of White male mediocrity in US culture, both in the past and present. When historians focus only on performers and plays with artistic “merit,” what communities, perspectives, and cultural trends remain invisible? How did men like Watkins advance themselves professionally, despite their mediocrity? Why did men like Watkins embrace and perpetuate myths like the American Dream, the “self-made man,” and meritocracy, and how have these ideals shaped casting, producing, and celebrity worship in today’s US entertainment industry? 

Ultimately, Hughes reveals how this actor’s tale illuminates the widespread tendency to ignore, deny, and forgive White male mediocrity in US culture, and how a deeper understanding of people like Watkins can transform our understanding of the past—and our understanding of ourselves.

 
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cover of Ballads Beyond Borders: How the Irish Diaspora Shaped Music in the Nineteenth-Century United States

Ballads Beyond Borders

How the Irish Diaspora Shaped Music in the Nineteenth-Century United States

Sarah Gerk

University of Illinois Press, 2026

This is a study of how Irish diaspora shaped musical practice in nineteenth-century America. Moving beyond a focus on the transmission of elements of Irish traditional music to music in the US, or the ways in which Irish Americans used US musical practices to negotiate identities in the New World, Sarah Gerk explores the role played by Irish immigration, as a sociological and cultural phenomenon, and by Irish immigrants themselves in shaping the musical life of the United States. This work offers revealing opportunities to understand race—particularly access to white privilege— diaspora, and musical life in the nineteenth century, as well as to understand how particular musical sounds themselves became bound up with certain diasporic communities and spaces.
Gerk opens by considering the popularity of Thomas Moore’s iconic collection Irish Melodies in relation to the history of British colonization shared by the US and Ireland, arguing that these songs modeled what the music of an Anglo-Celtic republic could sound like. She considers blackface minstrelsy’s complicated relationship with both Irish-American performers and theatrical stereotypes of Irish people, and positions Irish-American performers and audiences as a primary driving force in new musical styles in 1840s sheet music, in which minstrelsy’s resemblances to Anglo-Celtic traditional music disappeared. She examines the legacy of the Great Famine in music of the US Civil War, considering how that music’s role in emotional life offers robust source material for understanding famine memory. She explores the increasingly elaborate sketches in the 1870s and 1880s of the variety duo Harrigan and Hart, highlighting ways in which violent conflict between the Black community and the Irish lies at the very heart of the Mulligan entertainments. Finally, she contextualizes the work of Irish-American tenor Chauncey Olcott, showing how a number of confluent trends—the growing wealth and social status of Irish-American middle classes, the Gaelic revival, new immigration patterns, and the consolidation of the US’s sheet music industry—allowed Olcott to perform an elevated version of Irish-American musical culture, influenced by superficial elements of Italian operatic music.
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cover of 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

Lara Langer Cohen

Duke University Press, 2023

First popularized by newspaper coverage of the Underground Railroad in the 1840s, the underground serves as a metaphor for subversive activity that remains central to our political vocabulary. In Going Underground, Lara Langer Cohen excavates the long history of this now familiar idea while seeking out versions of the underground that were left behind along the way. Outlining how the underground’s figurative sense first took shape through the associations of literal subterranean spaces with racialized Blackness, she examines a vibrant world of nineteenth-century US subterranean literature that includes Black radical manifestos, anarchist periodicals, sensationalist exposés of the urban underworld, manuals for sex magic, and the initiation rites of secret societies. Cohen finds that the undergrounds in this literature offer sites of political possibility that exceed the familiar framework of resistance, suggesting that nineteenth-century undergrounds can inspire new modes of world-making and world-breaking for a time when this world feels increasingly untenable.
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cover of How the Earth Feels: Geological Fantasy in the Nineteenth-Century United States

How the Earth Feels

Geological Fantasy in the Nineteenth-Century United States

Dana Luciano

Duke University Press, 2024

In How the Earth Feels Dana Luciano examines the impacts of the new science of geology on nineteenth-century US culture. Drawing on early geological writings, Indigenous and settler accounts of earthquakes, African American antislavery literature, and other works, Luciano reveals how geology catalyzed transformative conversations regarding the intersections between humans and the nonhuman world. She shows that understanding the earth’s history geologically involved confronting the dynamic nature of inorganic matter over vast spans of time, challenging preconceived notions of human agency. Nineteenth-century Americans came to terms with these changes through a fusion of fact and imagination that Luciano calls geological fantasy. Geological fantasy transformed the science into a sensory experience, sponsoring affective and even erotic connections to the matter of the earth. At the same time, it was often used to justify accounts of evolution that posited a modern, civilized, and Anglo-American whiteness as the pinnacle of human development. By tracing geology’s relationship with biopower, Luciano illuminates how imagined connections with the earth shaped American dynamics of power, race, and colonization.
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cover of Law and the Conditions of Freedom in the Nineteenth-Century United States

Law and the Conditions of Freedom in the Nineteenth-Century United States

James Willard Hurst

University of Wisconsin Press, 1964

In these essays J. Willard Hurst shows the correlation between the conception of individual freedom and the application of law in the nineteenth-century United States—how individuals sought to use law to increase both their personal freedom and their opportunities for personal growth. These essays in jurisprudence and legal history are also a contribution to the study of social and intellectual history in the United States, to political science, and to economics as it concerns the role of public policy in our economy. The nonlawyer will find in them demonstration of how "technicalities" express deep issues of social values.

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cover of Law and the Conditions of Freedom in the Nineteenth-Century United States

Law and the Conditions of Freedom in the Nineteenth-Century United States

J. Willard Hurst

University of Wisconsin Press, 1956

In these essays J. Willard Hurst shows the correlation between the conception of individual freedom and the application of law in the nineteenth-century United States—how individuals sought to use law to increase both their personal freedom and their opportunities for personal growth. These essays in jurisprudence and legal history are also a contribution to the study of social and intellectual history in the United States, to political science, and to economics as it concerns the role of public policy in our economy. The nonlawyer will find in them demonstration of how "technicalities" express deep issues of social values.

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cover of Necro Citizenship: Death, Eroticism, and the Public Sphere in the Nineteenth-Century United States

Necro Citizenship

Death, Eroticism, and the Public Sphere in the Nineteenth-Century United States

Russ Castronovo

Duke University Press, 2001

In Necro Citizenship Russ Castronovo argues that the meaning of citizenship in the United States during the nineteenth century was bound to—and even dependent on—death. Deploying an impressive range of literary and cultural texts, Castronovo interrogates an American public sphere that fetishized death as a crucial point of political identification. This morbid politics idealized disembodiment over embodiment, spiritual conditions over material ones, amnesia over history, and passivity over engagement.

Moving from medical engravings, séances, and clairvoyant communication to Supreme Court decisions, popular literature, and physiological tracts, Necro Citizenship explores how rituals of inclusion and belonging have generated alienation and dispossession. Castronovo contends that citizenship does violence to bodies, especially those of blacks, women, and workers. “Necro ideology,” he argues, supplied citizens with the means to think about slavery, economic powerlessness, or social injustice as eternal questions, beyond the scope of politics or critique. By obsessing on sleepwalkers, drowned women, and other corpses, necro ideology fostered a collective demand for an abstract even antidemocratic sense of freedom. Examining issues involving the occult, white sexuality, ghosts, and suicide in conjunction with readings of Harriet Jacobs, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Frances Harper, Necro Citizenship successfully demonstrates why Patrick Henry's “give me liberty or give me death” has resonated so strongly in the American imagination.
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cover of Recovering Touch: Raised Print and Its Readers in the Nineteenth-Century United States

Recovering Touch

Raised Print and Its Readers in the Nineteenth-Century United States

Amanda Stuckey

University of Massachusetts Press, 2027

Constructing a disability history of reading through the embossed books that shaped and constrained it

When the Maryland Institution for the Instruction of the Blind opened in 1853, its charter defined blindness as the inability to read ink. Embedded in that same document was a small rectangle of embossed roman letters—a “specimen of printing” that encapsulated decades of experimentation and a central contradiction: that a form of print designed to liberate visually impaired readers also asked them to read like sighted ones.

In Recovering Touch, Amanda Stuckey traces raised print developments from the first embossed book in the United States—the Gospel of St. Mark, embossed in 1833—through the late nineteenth-century War of the Dots, the contested debates among educators and administrators over which type system visually impaired readers should use. Focusing predominantly on raised roman letter systems, Stuckey brings visually impaired readers into nineteenth-century histories of reading, connecting individual acts of touch-based reading to broader histories of disability, schooling, and print culture. Embossed books promised to open the world of the printed word to readers marginalized from inked text. Yet educators often deployed these materials as tools to assimilate visually impaired students into the reading, learning, and labor standards of the sighted world.

Recovering Touch constructs a disability history of reading that centers the material conditions of touch-based reading: the paper that had to be felt rather than seen, the types that dulled over time, and the readers who adapted, repurposed, and at times defied the assimilationist expectations built into the books beneath their fingertips.

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cover of Revivalism and Cultural Change: Christianity, Nation Building, and the Market in the Nineteenth-Century United States

Revivalism and Cultural Change

Christianity, Nation Building, and the Market in the Nineteenth-Century United States

George M. Thomas

University of Chicago Press, 1989

The history of Christianity in America has been marked by recurring periods of religious revivals or awakenings. In this book, George M. Thomas addresses the economic and political context of evangelical revivalism and its historical linkages with economic expansion and Republicanism in the nineteenth century. Thomas argues that large-scale change results in social movements that articulate new organizations and definitions of individual, society, authority, and cosmos. Drawing on religious newspapers, party policies and agendas, and quantitative analyses of voting patterns and census data, he claims that revivalism in this period framed the rules and identities of the expanding market economy and the national policy.

"Subtle and complex. . . . Fascinating."—Randolph Roth, Pennsylvania History

"[Revivalism and Cultural Change] should be read with interest by those interested in religious movements as well as the connections among religion, economics, and politics."—Charles L. Harper, Contemporary Sociology

"Readers old and new stand to gain much from Thomas's sophisticated study of the macrosociology of religion in the United States during the nineteenth century. . . . He has given the sociology of religion its best quantitative study of revivalism since the close of the 1970s."—Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion
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cover of The Lyceum and Public Culture in the Nineteenth-Century United States

The Lyceum and Public Culture in the Nineteenth-Century United States

Angela G. Ray

Michigan State University Press, 2005

Angela Ray provides a refreshing new look at the lyceum lecture system as it developed in the United States from the 1820s to the 1880s. She argues that the lyceum contributed to the creation of an American "public" at a time when the country experienced a rapid change in land area, increasing immigration, and a revolution in transportation, communication technology, and social roles.
     The history of the lyceum in the nineteenth century illustrates a process of expansion, diffusion, and eventual commercialization. In the late 1820s, a politically and economically dominant culture—the white Protestant northeastern middle class—institutionalized the practice of public debating and public lecturing for education and moral uplift. In the 1820s and 1830s, the lyceum was characterized by organized groups in cities and towns, particularly in the Northeast and the Old Northwest (now the Midwest). These groups were established to promote debate, to create a setting for study, and to provide a forum for members’ lecturing. By the 1840s and 1850s, however, most lyceums concentrated on the sponsorship of public lectures, presented for institutional profit as well as public instruction and entertainment. Eventually, lyceum lectures became a commercial enterprise and desirable platform for celebrities who wished to expand their incomes from lecturing.

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