7. Letter-Writing Instruction in 19th Century Schools in the United States

Author(s):  
Lucille M. Schultz
Public Voices ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 68 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jens Ivo Engels

The so-called “long 19th century”, from the French Revolution to the First World War, ranks as the crucial phase in the genesis of the modern world. In the Western countries this period was characterized by the differentiation of the public and the private spheres, the birth of the modern bureaucratic state and the delegitimation of early modern practices such as clientelism and patronage. All these fundamental changes are, among other things, usually considered important preconditions for the modern perception of corruption.This paper will concentrate on this crucial phase by means of a comparative analysis of debates in France, Great Britain and the United States, with the aim to elucidate the motives for major anti-corruption movements. The questions are: who fights against corruption and what are the reasons for doing so? I will argue that these concerns were often very different and sometimes accidental. Furthermore, an analysis of political corruption may reveal differences between the political cultures in the countries in question. Thus, the history of corruption serves as a sensor which enables a specific perspective on politics. By taking this question as a starting point the focus is narrowed to political corruption and the debates about corruption, while petty bribery on the part of minor civilservants, as well as the actual practice in the case of extensive political corruption, is left aside.


Author(s):  
Marjorie Lamberti

The much admired school system of 19th-century Germany served as a model for the educational systems of many other countries, including Britain and the United States. In this illuminating study of German primary schools, Lamberti examines an educational tradition that was the object of wide emulation, but which was often misinterpreted by its admirers. Lamberti also explores the political significance of German educational policies in the Kulturkampf, in the suppression of Polish nationalism in the eastern provinces, and more generally in the struggle between the competing strands of liberalism and authoritarianism in the German state.


Author(s):  
Mark Newman

The popular media often illustrate black nationalism with images of Malcolm X and black leather-jacketed, Afro-wearing, armed Black Panthers in the 1960s, and, in later decades, Louis Farrakhan and hip-hop artists such as Public Enemy. Although historians disagree about black nationalism’s composition and origins, they argue that it has a long pedigree in American history, traceable at least to the first half of the 19th century, if not earlier. While men were most often black nationalism’s public exponents, and some emphasized manhood and female subordination, black nationalism also appealed to many black women, some of whom also exercised leadership and organizational skills in its service. Marcus Garvey, a Jamaican, led the first mass black nationalist organization in the United States, the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), during the 1920s. Like 19th-century black nationalists, Garvey advocated an independent state for people of African descent, black uplift, and the “civilizing” of Africa. Although not original to him, his emphasis on the right to self-defense, independent black economic development, and pride in African history boosted the UNIA’s popularity. Garvey fell victim to state oppression in the United States, but some former Garveyites joined the Moorish Science Temple of America (MSTA) and probably also the Nation of Islam (NOI), both of which rejected Christianity, identified blacks as Asiatics, and adopted particularist interpretations of Islam. In the 1950s and 1960s, Malcolm X, the charismatic son of Garveyite parents, became the Nation’s chief recruiter. Personal differences with Elijah Muhammad, the Nation’s leader since the 1930s, eventually led to Malcolm X’s departure in 1964. Although he was assassinated in 1965, Malcolm X’s calls for armed self-defense, self-determination and black pride, and identification with anticolonial struggles heavily influenced Black Power advocates. Some civil rights organizations and workers, who were disillusioned by intransigent white racism and distrustful of white liberals, championed Black Power, which was multifaceted and sometimes more reformist than nationalist. In the early 1990s, polls suggested that black nationalist ideas were more popular than during their supposed heyday in the late 1960s, before internal dissension and state repression undermined many Black Power groups.


Author(s):  
Christoph Nitschke ◽  
Mark Rose

U.S. history is full of frequent and often devastating financial crises. They have coincided with business cycle downturns, but they have been rooted in the political design of markets. Financial crises have also drawn from changes in the underpinning cultures, knowledge systems, and ideologies of marketplace transactions. The United States’ political and economic development spawned, guided, and modified general factors in crisis causation. Broadly viewed, the reasons for financial crises have been recurrent in their form but historically specific in their configuration: causation has always revolved around relatively sudden reversals of investor perceptions of commercial growth, stock market gains, monetary availability, currency stability, and political predictability. The United States’ 19th-century financial crises, which happened in rapid succession, are best described as disturbances tied to market making, nation building, and empire creation. Ongoing changes in America’s financial system aided rapid national growth through the efficient distribution of credit to a spatially and organizationally changing economy. But complex political processes—whether Western expansion, the development of incorporation laws, or the nation’s foreign relations—also underlay the easy availability of credit. The relationship between systemic instability and ideas and ideals of economic growth, politically enacted, was then mirrored in the 19th century. Following the “Golden Age” of crash-free capitalism in the two decades after the Second World War, the recurrence of financial crises in American history coincided with the dominance of the market in statecraft. Banking and other crises were a product of political economy. The Global Financial Crisis of 2007–2008 not only once again changed the regulatory environment in an attempt to correct past mistakes, but also considerably broadened the discursive situation of financial crises as academic topics.


1996 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 417-434 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jorge Arditi

This paper explores the opening of a discursive space within the etiquette literature in the United States during the 19th century and how women used this space as a vehicle of empowerment. It identifies two major strategies of empowerment. First, the use or appropriation of existing discourses that can help redefine the “other” within an hegemonic space. Second, and more importantly, the transformation of that space in shifting the lines by which differentiation is produced to begin with. Admittedly, these strategies are neither unique nor the most important in the history of women's empowerment. But this paper argues that the new discourses formulated by women helped forge a new space within which women ceased being the “other,” and helped give body to a concept of womanhood as defined by a group of women, regardless of how idiosyncratic that group might have been.


Author(s):  
Mohammed Bashir Salau

The two versions of the autobiography that Nicholas Said published offer insight into 19th-century conditions in five continents as well as insight into life as a child, slave, manservant, and teacher. As a child in the 1830s, Said was enslaved in Borno, marched across the Sahara Desert, and passed from hand to hand in North Africa and the Middle East. After serving as a slave in various societies, Said was freed by a Russian aristocrat in the late 1850s after accompanying the aristocrat in question to various parts of Europe. In the 1850s, Said also traveled as a manservant for a European traveler to South and North America. Ultimately he settled in the United States, where he authored two versions of his autobiography, served as a teacher and soldier, got married, and disappeared from sight. This article compares the two versions of the autobiography that Said published, provides an overview of Said’s life, charts the development of scholarly works on Said, and draws attention to the primary sources related to the study of Said and his autobiography.


Author(s):  
Brandi L Holley ◽  
Dale L. Flesher

ABSTRACT: The 19th century brought on much economic growth and advancement in accounting in the United States. The teaching of accounting began to veer away from rules and instead sought the logical underpinnings of the system. It was a time when accounting evolved into accountancy through the development of theory, such as the proprietary theory and the theory of two-account series. The Townsend Journal (1840-1841), which chronicles the joint venture between two young men in the Boston maritime trade, is a case study of this progression in commerce and accounting during this pivotal time. B. F. Foster's contemporaneous Boston publications on bookkeeping provide the framework to understand this evolution in accountancy, as well as the recordings in the Townsend Journal. Through the examination of the Townsend Journal alongside B. F. Foster's texts, this paper preserves and illustrates a historical link in the evolution of the field.


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