Wondrous Depths: Judging the Mind in Nineteenth-Century America

2019 ◽  
Vol 44 (03) ◽  
pp. 828-849
Author(s):  
Catherine L. Evans
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Criminal Responsibility ◽  
The Self ◽  
Psychological Consequences ◽  
American Democracy ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
Modern Mind ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Mind

Susanna L. Blumenthal’sLaw and the Modern Mind: Consciousness and Responsibility in American Legal Culture(2016) is a history of the self in nineteenth-century America. When judges considered a person’s criminal responsibility or civil capacity in court, they created a body of legal and political thought about the self, society, the economy, and American democracy. This essay uses Blumenthal’s book to explore recent work on law and the mind in Britain and North America, and argues that abstract questions about free will, the self, and the mind were part of the everyday jurisprudence of the nineteenth century. Debates about responsibility were also debates about the psychological consequences of capitalism and the borders of personhood and citizenship at a time of rapid economic, political, and social change.

Working Jews: Hazanim and the Labor of Religion in Nineteenth-Century America

2015 ◽  
Vol 25 (02) ◽  
pp. 178-217 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shari Rabin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Labor Markets ◽  
The United States ◽  
Economic Factors ◽  
Religious Institutions ◽  
Religious Leaders ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
Institutional Infrastructure ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
History Of

Abstract This article uses the case of hazanim, nonordained Jewish religious functionaries, to explore how religious work operated as a market activity in the nineteenth century. Building on recent work at the intersection of religion, class, and capitalism, it recasts ministers, rabbis, and other religious leaders as contracted workers who sought ways to acquire wages through the specific marketing of ritual authority. Scholars have described the history of the American ministry as a path toward professionalization, seen as the outcome of clerical self-assertion in the aftermath of disestablishment. These accounts, however, ignore the everyday social and economic factors shaping the development of American religious institutions, which were particularly challenging for Jews, who had specific needs for religious labor, no existential distinction between ministers and congregants, and no institutional infrastructure to oversee qualifications and placement. As Jews founded congregations in the United States, they required particular human resources, which were acquired through unregulated contracts and unreliable credentials. These complex conditions contributed to the possibility of religious exploitation, personal fraud, communal instability, interpersonal distrust, and social conflict, which shifted in meaning and intersected with notions of religious authenticity. In this context, Jews increasingly prioritized preaching and teaching and founded national institutions, which together would make religious work more specialized, labor markets more efficient, and the resultant professionals more reliable in their work. Understanding religious workers in this way encourages us to see how religion was, and is, labor.

The American Catholic Minority in the Later Nineteenth Century

1953 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 275-302 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas T. McAvoy
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Church And State ◽  
The United States ◽  
Roman Law ◽  
American Democracy ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
Hierarchical Arrangement ◽  
Great Culture ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
American Catholic

The factors that caused the Roman authorities to insist on a Plenary Council of the American Bishops in 1884 have not been sufficiently explained. Perhaps the role of the American prelates in opposing the opportuneness of the definition of the doctrine of infallibility had some influence. Undoubtedly the reports of the bishops in their ad limina visits to Rome did little to subdue any fears that may have arisen. The frequent appeals of recalcitrant clergymen against their bishops were going directly to Rome because there was no intermediate court. The Instruction of 1878 makes this quite clear. Rome had shown its dissatisfaction with the condition of Catholic education by its interrogatory and its Instruction of 1875. The renewed condemnation of the Fenians had some American effects; and the renewed condemnation of the Masons with applications to certain other American social organizations indicated that all was not well in the social conditions of Catholics in the United States. Had the prelates in Rome understood American democracy and American conditions they would have had to have been much better informed than most Europeans in the nineteenth century. America was to Europe a land of great physical possibility, but a land without any great culture or religious accomplishments. Even European liberals did not understand the manhood suffrage of American democracy. The Catholic leaders of southern Europe, so generally aligned with conservative and monarchist parties, could have little understanding of American democracy in the religious sphere. In Rome where the hierarchical arrangement had not been fully dissociated from monarchical government and where Roman law with its insistence on the union of Church and State was the basis of most political thought, even the most sympathetic seemed to have some misgivings about the manifest loyalty of the American Catholics to the Holy See.

scholarly journals Children, Emotion, Identity and Empire: Views from the Blechyndens' Calcutta Diaries (1790–1822)

2006 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 175-201
Author(s):  
PETER ROBB
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Structural Analysis ◽  
Family History ◽  
Middle Level ◽  
The Self ◽  
British Library ◽  
Domestic Life ◽  
Imperial Identity ◽  
History Of

The voluminous Blechynden diaries, in the British Library, offer incomparable opportunities for studying (among other things) domestic life among middle-level British residents of Calcutta around the start of the nineteenth century. This paper is concerned with a small part of the history of the Blechynden household, focusing on Arthur Blechynden, son of Richard and his successor as superintendent of roads. Richard's diary runs to more than 70 volumes and Arthur's to seven. These sources permit none of the structural analysis that was made the basis of family history by Peter Laslett and others; but they touch several points of the richer canvas painted by Laurence Stone, and those genres that are concerned with individual lives, with emotion, with relationships, and with identity, the kinds of subject approached by the contributors to Roy Porter's collection Rewriting the Self. In this paper some of these issues will be taken up, with particular reference to ideas of individuality and of race. That discussion will then lead on to another, on the construction of British imperial identity outside Britain and in the context of the formation of empire, an aspect that seems worthy of more attention than it has received.

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