Nineteenth Century United States

‘Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory’: The Cinematic Adaptation of American Poetry

by Michael Devine

Adaptation 5.1 (March 2012): 1-17

This essay reconstructs a forgotten crisis in American letters and film: President Theodore Roosevelt's unpopular... more This essay reconstructs a forgotten crisis in American letters and film: President Theodore Roosevelt's unpopular campaign to make ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’ the nation's poem in 1908 and the poem's popular film adaptation in 1911. As the cinematic response to poetry's failure as a national art, the Vitagraph film became a collectivist hymnal for the nation's dream of assimilation. Featured prominently in American poet Vachel Lindsay's pioneering work of film theory, The Art of the Moving Picture (1915), the adaptation effectively reasserted the popular roots of the otherwise genteel ‘Battle Hymn’ poem and by doing so helped to modernize poetry's communal function and the nation's literary tradition.

Nationalism and Personal Identity in Indonesian Novels By Aprinus Salam

by aprinus salam

The Sutro Tunnel Company, 1866-1878

by Chip Schroeder

The story of the Sutro Tunnel Company is one that weaves together social, economic, and political forces in the... more The story of the Sutro Tunnel Company is one that weaves together social, economic, and political forces in the Western United States in the 1860s and 1870s. Beginning in 1865, Adolph Sutro began soliciting investment in a tunnel that would drain and ventilate mines along the Comstock Lode in Nevada. In the thirteen years from 1865 to 1878, Sutro journeyed from Nevada to San Francisco to Washington DC to Europe in search of political and financial support. As the project’s feasibility and potential profitability became clear in 1866, the Bank of California tried to obstruct Sutro’s plan, which sparked a great rhetorical battle with the Sutro Tunnel Company. The debate highlights a pervasive suspicion of fraudulent business plans, profiteering and monopoly. Sutro attempted to accuse the Bank of California of monopolization of the Comstock mining industry, and portray himself as the victim of their avarice. While the Bank of California was unscrupulous in their opposition to the Sutro tunnel, Sutro was not the honest and reliable CEO that he tried to hard to portray himself as for thirteen years. Sutro’s stock liquidation in the Sutro Tunnel Company soon after the tunnel’s completion proved him to be a profiteer who reaped the benefit of the hype he created over the future profitability of the company, which never materialized.

The Boom Heard round the World

by Geoffrey Schramm

The multicultural dimension of the California Gold Rush.

In this article I write about the multicultural dimension of the California Gold Rush explored in an episode of PBS's... more In this article I write about the multicultural dimension of the California Gold Rush explored in an episode of PBS's "American Experience."

Whitman's Lifelong Endeavor: Leaves of Grass at 150.

by Geoffrey Schramm

In this article I write about new advances in Whitman studies, particularly web-based projects such as The Walt... more In this article I write about new advances in Whitman studies, particularly web-based projects such as The Walt Whitman Archive.

Poster Children of the Sun: Aztecs As Mormon Propaganda In the Paintings of George Martin Ottinger

by Breanne Robertson

“‘Enslaving You, Body and Soul’: The Uses of Temperance in Uncle Tom’s Cabin and ‘Anti-Tom’ Fiction”

by Ryan Cordell

The Precipice of Disunion: The Nullification Crisis of 1832-3

by Chip Schroeder

The Nullification Crisis was a controversy ostensibly caused by the federal government’s tariffs of 1828 and 1832 that... more The Nullification Crisis was a controversy ostensibly caused by the federal government’s tariffs of 1828 and 1832 that strained the Southern economy more than it was already being hurt by the recession that began in 1819. The passage of these tariffs in Congress—one under President John Quincy Adams; the other under President Andrew Jackson—proved to some South Carolinians that their interests were being surrendered to the will of the majority. South Carolinians therefore looked back into the nation’s history to find a way to restore their liberties under the flag of Thomas Jefferson’s Kentucky Resolutions and James Madison’s Virginia Resolutions. The resulting conflict divided South Carolina between nullifiers and unionists, brought the nation to the precipice of disunion, and laid the roots for a country divided on sectional lines.

The Strike Imagined: The Atlantic and Interpretive Voyages of Robert Koehler’s Painting The Strike

by Christopher Phelps

Journal of American History, 98:3, 670-98.

Labor historians have long explored aspects of working-class culture ranging from religion to ethnicity, and cultural... more Labor historians have long explored aspects of working-class culture ranging from religion to ethnicity, and cultural and intellectual historians have begun to trace themes of labor and class in American literature and thought. Christopher Phelps asserts that a more intensive and fruitful rapprochement of intellectual and labor history is revealed by the story of Robert Koehler’s 1886 painting The Strike. The work of a Milwaukee-educated German American inspired by the Pittsburgh strike of 1877, The Strike was completed in Munich based on sketches made in England, unveiled in New York and honored in Paris, and crisscrossed the Atlantic in both its conceptualization and audiences. The reception of the painting reflected, Phelps argues, the nexus of modern liberal beliefs about labor in the epoch of rapidly industrializing capitalism and, after a long lapse into obscurity, the radicalism of the 1960s in the moment of its rediscovery.

“Wax Coquettes: Elizabeth Whitman, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and the Nineteenth- Century Traveling Waxwork Exhibition.” Canadian Review of American Studies 40.3, 2010. (373-389)

by Jennifer Harris

En su “calidad de viajera distinguida”: La constitución de una voz femenina del viaje en Recuerdos de viaje (1882) de Eduarda Mansilla.

by JP Spicer-Escalante

Book chapter. Mansilla de García, Eduarda. Recuerdos de viaje (1882). Ed. J.P. Spicer-Escalante. Buenos Aires: StockCero, Inc., 2006. vii-xxvi.

En esta obra, prototípica del género de viajes femenino latinoamericano, se despliegan los detalles de la vida típica... more En esta obra, prototípica del género de viajes femenino latinoamericano, se despliegan los detalles de la vida típica del Estados Unidos decimonónico –en particular la de la mujer, incluyendo sus nociones sobre la moda, peculiaridades domésticas, comportamiento social y aspiraciones profesionales– observados por la autora a través del prisma de su propia cultura y de su aguda capacidad de análisis.

En su estudio preliminar, el Prof. J.P. Spicer-Escalante examina la evolución del género de viajes en el mundo occidental en general, y la aparición y la relevancia de los textos de viaje femeninos latinoamericanos en particular. En su análisis de la obra de Mansilla de García, explora la intersección entre la vida de la escritora y su producción literaria, focalizando la génesis de Recuerdos de viaje , la voz y el estilo literario que adopta la autora en la obra y las valiosas peripecias sociopolíticas que la obra contiene, con una reflexión sobre el papel que la autora ayuda a crear para la mujer escritora hispanoamericana en general.

Extraterritorialidad y Transculturación Recuerdos de viaje de Eduardo Mansilla (1882)

by JP Spicer-Escalante

Reprint:

http://webserver.rcp.net.pe/cemhal/Viajeras%20entre%20dos%20mundos.pdf

Book chapter. First published in Viajeras entre dos mundos. Ed. & Comp. Sara Beatriz Guardia, Lima: CEMHAL, 2011. 359-372.

The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in Nineteenth-Century America (review)

by Joseph M. Adelman

A Swiss traveler in the Creek Nation: the diary of Lukas Vischer, March 1824 (Notes and Documents)

by Robert Collins

The Alabama Review 59 (4) (October 2006): 243-84.

"Beauty and the Beast: 1862 New Orleans as a Class and Gender Battlefield"

by Will Hickox

A narrative paper on General Benjamin F. Butler's occupation of New Orleans and his scandalous "Woman Order."

Haunted by History's Ghostly Gaps: A Literary Critique of the Dred Scott Decision and Its Historical Treatments

by Allen Mendenhall

Georgetown Journal of Law & Modern Critical Race Perspectives, Vol. 1, No. 2 (2009)

In his opinion for the majority, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney eliminates Dred Scott the man from the text and divests... more In his opinion for the majority, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney eliminates Dred Scott the man from the text and divests Scott of a body, thereby transforming him into a sort of incorporeal ghost that signals the traces and tropes of slavery. Subsequent historians, journalists, and politicians have made Scott even more inaccessible by either relying on Taney’s text, which erases Scott, or by failing to recover Scott’s narrative. Taney’s opinion codified “the facts” of the case as official or authoritative despite a lack of reference to their human subject. Later writers relied on this received version despite its obvious gaps. In order to reconstruct Scott - to “recorporealize” him, so to speak - one must turn to the original Missouri court documents, the earliest and most detailed accounts of Scott available. This article considers these documents in conjunction with a particular N.Y. Times article, which seems to confirm that Irene Emerson, whom Scott sued, was not involved with Scott as a co-conspirator. This article also shows how historians, forced to imagine or allegorize Scott’s history, treated Scott as a ghost whose incomplete form was synecdochic of slavery itself. Their treatments inadvertently employ literary devices common in Gothic literature - allegory, the fantastic, confusion of the known and unknown - moving Gothicism beyond the bounds of genre and launching it from symbolic expression to actual historiography. The current version of Scott the man “signifies” very little - i.e., has no clear referent - and so Scott remains hauntingly absent, even ghostlike, in American memory.

Fenians, Foreigners and Jury Trials in Ireland, 1865-70

by Niamh Howlin

(2010) 45 Irish Jurist 51-81

This paper examines the trial of Captain John McCafferty, a former Confederate soldier who later became an important... more This paper examines the trial of Captain John McCafferty, a former Confederate soldier who later became an important figure in the Irish nationalist movement. His trial for treason-felony in 1865 is a fascinating example of the use of what was known as a jury de medietate linguae; a mixed jury consisting of half locals and half aliens. It is significant because it appears to be the only recorded use of a mixed jury in Ireland, although interestingly, it attracted very little comment, despite the unusual nature of the tribunal. After a brief history of the origins and development of this unique tribunal, I compare the historical use of mixed juries in common law countries. McCafferty’s trial is then considered in the wider context of the Fenian organisation’s activities in the 1860s, and particularly in light of subsequent Fenian cases where mixed juries were sought.

Treasonous Patriots: The Secret Committee of Six and Violent Abolitionism

by Kristen Epps

Master's thesis, completed at The College of William and Mary in 2005.

In this thesis, I examine how the Secret Committee of Six, a group of radical abolitionists who funded John Brown’s... more In this thesis, I examine how the Secret Committee of Six, a group of radical abolitionists who funded John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry in 1859, defined their role in the greater movement for black emancipation.  I present a before-and-after picture of the guiding principles and motivations that drove these six men, particularly their growing acceptance of violent means.  I conclude that the Six perceived their role in abolitionism differently after the raid.  Before the incident at Harper’s Ferry, all of the Six were active in the abolitionist movement, and for the most part they remained active in the years after the raid.  After 1859, however, the nature of sectional relations had been altered so dramatically that abolitionists had to adjust their thinking.  Thus, the Six began to see their role in the movement in a new light.  Furthermore, the Six did not significantly alter their attitudes toward militant abolitionism—but, now that they had seen the far-reaching consequences of violence, they were somewhat less comfortable with its use.  Still, none of them denied that violence was indeed necessary for the downfall of the slave system.

Bound Together: Masters and Slaves on the Kansas-Missouri Border, 1825-1865

by Kristen Epps

My dissertation is available for download at http://kuscholarworks.ku.edu/dspace/handle/1808/6441.

“Bound Together” chronicles the rise and fall of the slave system on the Kansas-Missouri border from the earliest... more “Bound Together” chronicles the rise and fall of the slave system on the Kansas-Missouri border from the earliest years of American settlement in the 1820s to the end of the Civil War. This work uses nineteen counties along the border—a distinct site of conflict and turmoil over the extension of slavery—as a microcosm of how, in certain key ways, slavery in the American West resembled the established institution associated with the South. Although slavery on the border did not come in the form of large plantation complexes, the small-scale slaveholding that existed on this line very closely resembled slavery as it had developed in Upper South states such as Tennessee and Kentucky. This small-scale system was one characterized by an active slave hiring market, diverse forms of employment, a prevalence of abroad marriages, and closer contact between slaves and slaveholders.

Both slaveowners and non-slaveholding whites from the South effectively transplanted the customs and beliefs that had dominated the slaveholding culture in their home states and imposed them on a smaller institution. Yet, slave agency dictated that the struggle for control over slave mobility and physical spaces manifested itself as an intricate (and sometimes infinitely subtle) process of negotiation, not as a hegemonic institution of white control that left no room for middle ground. Slavery (not merely the political conversation over slavery’s expansion) was in fact central to the establishment of these frontier communities, making clear that enslaved African Americans were a significant presence in the narrative of Bleeding Kansas and the Civil War. The story of their experiences on the Kansas-Missouri line illustrates how chattel slavery could flourish—albeit briefly—in frontier communities on the periphery of Southern influence.

Slave Hiring, Gendered Divisions of Labor, and Female Domestics in Central Missouri, 1821-1861

by Kristen Epps

This paper examines the relationship between slave-hiring practices and gendered assumptions about male and female... more This paper examines the relationship between slave-hiring practices and gendered assumptions about male and female labor, focusing particularly on central Missouri during the antebellum period.  I argue that the popularity and availability of female domestics on the slave-hiring market raises profound questions about the unique benefits of female slave labor.  While the field labor of male slaves made a noticeable contribution to the status and wealth of their owner or temporary master, often a female slave domestic’s labor contributed little to their master’s economic solvency.  So why then, was the hiring of slave women as popular, if not more popular, than that of male slaves?  I contend that white mistresses in particular were keen on improving their social standing, seeing the addition of a female domestic to their work force as a means of lightening their own workload and adopting a managerial role.  Frequently for non-slaveholding families who lacked the means to purchase a slave, hiring provided them with passage—albeit fleeting passage—into the class of slaveholders.  Thus, slave hiring brought issues of race, gender and class together to form an intricate web of social relations.