Reimagining the “Lost Men” of the Gilded Age: Perspectives on the Late Nineteenth Century Presidents

2002 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 225-257 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles W. Calhoun
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Progressive Era ◽  
Gilded Age ◽  
Bright Light ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
Dark Ages ◽  
Late Nineteenth

For much of the twentieth century, scholars treated the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era as starkly contrasting phases in the unfolding of the American story: the post-Civil War dark ages followed by the bright light of the early twentieth century. More recently, historians have recognized the oversimplification if not downright wrongheadedness of that dichotomy. The past few decades have witnessed an explosion of studies on a variety of topics with coverage dates roughly from the 1870s to the 1920s. Most of these newer works underscore the continuities between the two periods and the relatively seamless evolution of forces and institutions.

A Century of Synergy in Termite Symbiosis Research: Linking the Past with New Genomic Insights

2021 ◽  
Vol 66 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-43
Author(s):  
Michael E. Scharf ◽  
Brittany F. Peterson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Symbiotic Associations ◽  
The Past ◽  
Gas Utilization ◽  
Biochemical Studies ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Symbiosis Research ◽  
Culture Dependent

Termites have long been studied for their symbiotic associations with gut microbes. In the late nineteenth century, this relationship was poorly understood and captured the interest of parasitologists such as Joseph Leidy; this research led to that of twentieth-century biologists and entomologists including Cleveland, Hungate, Trager, and Lüscher. Early insights came via microscopy, organismal, and defaunation studies, which led to descriptions of microbes present, descriptions of the roles of symbionts in lignocellulose digestion, and early insights into energy gas utilization by the host termite. Focus then progressed to culture-dependent microbiology and biochemical studies of host–symbiont complementarity, which revealed specific microhabitat requirements for symbionts and noncellulosic mechanisms of symbiosis (e.g., N2 fixation). Today, knowledge on termite symbiosis has accrued exponentially thanks to omic technologies that reveal symbiont identities, functions, and interdependence, as well as intricacies of host–symbiont complementarity. Moving forward, the merging of classical twentieth-century approaches with evolving omic tools should provide even deeper insights into host–symbiont interplay.

Politics, Social Movements, and the Periodization of U.S. History

2009 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 461-473 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Edwards
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Progressive Era ◽  
Gilded Age ◽  
Recent Literature ◽  
Mark Twain ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Considerable Doubt

It may be perilous for a member of the Society of Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era to propose, in the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, that we cease using the term “Gilded Age” as a label for the late nineteenth century. Since I admire Mark Twain, who famously coined the term in a novel that he cowrote with Charles Dudley Warner, such a suggestion feels disloyal if not downright un-American. But in struggling recently to write a synthesis of the United States between 1865 and 1905 (cutoff dates that I chose with considerable doubt), it became apparent to me that “Gilded Age” is not a very useful or accurate term. Intended as an indictment of the elite, it captures none of the era's grassroots ferment and little of its social and intellectual complexity. A review of recent literature suggests that periodizing schemes are now in flux, and a reconsideration may be in order.

The Heterochronic Past and Sidewise Historicity: T. S. Eliot, Pablo Picasso and Murray Leinster

2019 ◽  
pp. 35-78
Author(s):  
Charles M. Tung
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Evolutionary History ◽  
Alternative Conceptions ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Pablo Picasso ◽  
Time Compression ◽  
The Past ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Time Culture

At the beginning of the twentieth century, primitivism and paleomodernism appeared to reflect primarily those conditions out of which both modernism and SF have been shown to emerge: evolutionary and imperial conceptions of history. Modernism’s complex engagement with late-nineteenth-century time culture went beyond a simple turn toward the past and produced alternative conceptions of time and history. This chapter explores the idea of heterochrony derived from evolutionary biology’s knowledge of the body’s hodgepodge of disjunctive timings and times in order to reexamine two canonical orientations toward the past—Eliot’s tradition and Picasso’s primitivism. Drawing a connection with Murray Leinster’s “Sidewise in Time” (1934), which features a jumbled and patchwork geography comprising a “Post-Cambrian jungle left in eastern Tennessee,” a Russian Alaska and California, and preindustrial Chinese settlements around the Potomac, this chapter reconfigures modernist “pastism” against the notion of a single, progressive, evolutionary history justifying racist imperial schemes, as well as the shallowing of time by capitalist space-time compression.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Matthew E. Stanley
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
Labor Movement ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Democrats ◽  
War Memory ◽  
Civil War Memory ◽  
Late Nineteenth

The introduction outlines the book’s major arguments and argues for the importance of collective memory. The late nineteenth-century US labor movement was “abolitionized,” as land reformers, socialists, anarchists, labor agitators, social democrats, and populists all elicited the Civil War veteran. The labor movement’s wielding of Civil War memory achieved at least five often overlapping principal functions: ideology, recruitment, nostalgia, assimilation, and nationalism. Palpable tensions between modes of commemoration rooted in nationalism and reform and revolutionary memories centered more on internationalism and socialism revealed and influenced broader political currents between the Civil War and the first decades of the twentieth century.

The Mansana Collection. A Treasury of Japanese Art in Barcelona at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 180-209
Author(s):  
Ricard Bru
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Japanese Art ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Abstract Josep Mansana Dordan, a well-known Catalan late-nineteenth-century businessman, founded what is considered the finest collection of Japanese art established in Catalonia and in Spain at the turn of the century. In the early twentieth century, the Mansana Collection, as it was known, enjoyed popularity and prestige in Barcelona thanks to its constant expansion driven by the founder’s son, Josep Mansana Terrés, also an entrepreneur. The collection was well known at the time, but fell into oblivion after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936. It was not until 2013 that, on the occasion of the exhibition Japonisme. La fascinació per l’art japonès, the collection began to be rediscovered and studied. This article aims to present a first complete overview of the history and characteristics of the old Mansana Collection and its impact on Barcelona at and immediately after the turn of the twentieth century.

Ghetto Realism—and Beyond

2019 ◽  
pp. 200-218
Author(s):  
Lori Harrison-Kahan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Progressive Era ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Jewish American ◽  
Jewish American Literature ◽  
Late Nineteenth

By focusing on the reception of Yekl, Abraham Cahan’s 1896 novel of immigrant life in New York, this chapter considers the turn-of-the-twentieth-century controversy surrounding depictions of Jews in ghetto literature, arguing that this debate illuminates not only the challenges of ethno-racial representation and self-representation but also the slipperiness of realism itself. The chapter also posits a more inclusive interpretation of Jewish American realism by demonstrating the importance of an overlooked late nineteenth-century realist writer, Emma Wolf. It explores how Wolf’s novels Other Things Being Equal (1892) and Heirs of Yesterday (1900), which focus on experiences of Jewish families in San Francisco during the Progressive Era, offer important alternatives to the New York–centric ghetto genre, expanding the parameters of Jewish American literature in terms of region, class, gender, and religion.

Gazing on the Past (and Being Photobombed by Children)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sally Crawford ◽  
Katharina Ulmschneider
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Glass Plate ◽  
Recent Analysis ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Archaeological Record ◽  
The Past ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Many ◽  
Insight Into

Archaeologists often ignore the presence of children as a contributing factor in the archaeological record. However, recent analysis of a number of glass plate and film photographs taken by archaeologists at the end of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century shows that children were often incorporated into the photograph, either deliberately or inadvertently. These images provide not just a record of ancient sites and monuments, but also of the many local children who appear in the photographs. The children recorded by archaeologists offer an insight into children, their childhoods, their freedoms, and their place in society across a range of cultures in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, as well as raising questions about how archaeologists ‘saw’ the human subject in photographs where monuments and sites were the object.

To Gild or not to Gild? Revisiting the Transformations of American Capitalism

2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 278-284
Author(s):  
Noam Maggor
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Gilded Age ◽  
Empirical Work ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Public ◽  
American Capitalism ◽  
Economic Volatility ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Thomas Piketty

In what sense are we living in a “New Gilded Age”? Facile analogies between the late nineteenth century and our own era have proliferated in recent years. Pundits such as Paul Krugman inserted this analogy into the public conversation in the early 2000s, drawing on empirical work by economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez. In underscoring a parallel between the two “gilded” eras, these commentators sketched out two periods marked by economic inequality, with several “anomalous” decades of relative equality in the middle of the twentieth century. This basic U-shaped narrative template has inspired commentators in numerous venues, from The Nation to The Economist, to imagine the shifts of recent decades simply as “a return” to an earlier age. Evoking social, political, and cultural resemblances, these accounts have stressed the resurgence of unfettered markets, economic volatility, government inaction, and the plutocratic reign of money.

Dwelling in American Realism

2019 ◽  
pp. 410-425
Author(s):  
Elif S. Armbruster
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Gilded Age ◽  
Harriet Beecher Stowe ◽  
Edith Wharton ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This chapter examines the role of houses and interiors in American realist fiction and argues that realist authors were preoccupied with settings and houses in a way unique to their period, the late nineteenth century, when numerous technological and aesthetic developments coincided with the reproduction of “real life” in writing. Offering the lives and literature of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Edith Wharton as useful brackets around the realist genre, the chapter illustrates the degree to which these two authors made the motif of the home central to their fiction and nonfiction. It provides detailed readings of Stowe’s Pink and White Tyranny (1871), Wharton’s The House of Mirth (1905), and Wharton’s rural novel, Summer (1917) in order to showcase how houses personify and encapsulate their characters. In realist fiction, the chapter argues, houses can be read in order to understand the characters who move within them, just as characters can be read by their homes. Finally, the chapter reveals the degree to which Gilded Age excess was replaced by early twentieth-century simplicity, which, in turn, became the linchpin for the era of modernism that evolved in literature and architecture at this time.

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