Education's Unfulfilled Promise: The Politics of Schooling for African American Children in Nineteenth Century New York City

2012 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 193-218
Author(s):  
Jane E. Dabel
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
African American ◽  
York City ◽  
African American Children ◽  
American Children

A Tale of Two Cities I

2019 ◽  
pp. 29-46
Author(s):  
Christopher J. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
African American ◽  
York City ◽  
Primary Source ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Experiences ◽  
Two Cities ◽  
English Speaking

The first of two companion chapters, this essay focuses especially on the historical meeting of European and African American movement vocabularies in English-speaking early-nineteenth-century contexts. It focuses particularly upon public music and dance in two creolized cities: Kingston, Jamaica, and New York City. Primary source evidence includes period illustrations (most notably, a ca. 1802 watercolor entitled A Grand Jamaica Ball) and period accounts of entertainments at lower Manhattan’s African Grove Theater; both are analyzed for the evidence they provide regarding the synthesis of creolized movement vocabularies and, by extension, cultural experiences. Methodology is drawn especially from iconography and kinesics.

Channelling the dead: A conversation on Desdemona with Tina Benko

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 305-318 ◽  
Author(s):  
Valentina Rapetti
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
African American ◽  
Toni Morrison ◽  
York City ◽  
Nobel Laureate ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
American Theatre ◽  
Broad Variety ◽  
Character Building

Tina Benko is an American stage, screen and television actress who has steadily trodden the Broadway boards for twenty years while starring in films and TV series and teaching acting and movement in New York City. An intensely focused and versatile performer, Benko has played in a broad variety of genres, ranging from screwball and Shakespearean comedies to realistic Russian, Scandinavian and American plays. In this interview, she discusses the factors that attracted her to drama and theatre, her acting training and approach to character-building, and theatre as a space for healing and reconciliation as she experienced it while working in Desdemona (2012), a cross-cultural theatre adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Othello staged by American theatre and opera director Peter Sellars, with texts by African American Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison, and music and lyrics by Malian singer-songwriter Rokia Traoré.

Hide and Seek: The Historian and Nineteenth-Century Social Accounting

1991 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 545-563 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donald A. DeBats
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
York City ◽  
Census Bureau ◽  
Political Issue ◽  
Social Accounting ◽  
The Law

The problem of census undercounts, a familiar political issue for modern groups or instrumentalities that consider themselves underrepresented in the Census Bureau statistics, has only recently attracted attention from historians. While the modern “miss rate” is potentially high among some groups (the reason for the emphasis on the homeless in the 1990 census), the general rate of underenumeration appears to have diminished in recent censuses. The bureau acknowledges a net undercount of 5.6% of the population in 1940; the error declined gradually to an estimated 1.4% in 1980 (Burnham 1986; Anderson 1988; Edmondson 1988).Nineteenth-century censuses no doubt contained more serious errors. Although he did not have underenumeration specifically in mind, the administrator for the 1870 census said that “the censuses of 1850, 1860, and of 1870 are loaded with bad statistics. There are statistics in the census of 1870,I am sorry to say, where some of the results are false to the extent of one-half. They had to be published then, because the law called for it; but I took the liberty of branding them as untrustworthy and in some cases giving the reasons therefore at some length” (quoted in Sharpless and Shortridge 1975: 411). Strikingly modern quarrels surrounded the accuracy of the 1840 Boston and New Orleans censuses, while the errors in the 1870 enumeration of New York City and Philadelphia were sufficient to cause recounts of both cities (ibid. ; Knights 1971: 145).

Lessons from the Past: Sicilian Mafiosi in New York City and Rosario, circa 1880–1940

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Federico Varese
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
York City ◽  
Social Stigma ◽  
American City ◽  
North American City ◽  
The Past ◽  
The North ◽  
History Of

From the mid-nineteenth century, many Sicilians, including members of the mafia, were on the move. After sketching the contours of the mafia in Sicily in the nineteenth century, this chapter outlines the parallel history of Italian migration and mafia activities in New York City and Rosario, Argentina, and offers an analytic account of the diverging outcomes. Only in the North American city did a mafia that resembled the Sicilian one emerge. The Prohibition provided an enormous boost to both the personnel and power of Italian organized crime. The risk of punishment was low, the gains to be made were enormous, and there was no social stigma attached to this trade.

The Challenge Dance

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
April F. Masten
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Working Class ◽  
York City ◽  
Cultural Exchange ◽  
African Dance ◽  
Antebellum Era ◽  
American Tradition ◽  
Blacks And Whites

This chapter examines the transnational origins of the challenge dance, a distinctly American tradition of brag dancing, and the ways in which Irish and African dance forms converged and collided in the taverns of New York City in the early nineteenth century. Part theater, part sport, challenge dances emerged in the antebellum era alongside boxing. Dance matches were the product of the intersecting diasporas and cultural exchange of Irish and African emigrants moving through the Atlantic world. The chapter first considers the compatibilities in African and Irish dance traditions before discussing the genealogy of challenge dancing. It then looks at challenge dance competitions held on streets and in taverns as part of white and blackface shows. It also describes a cultural space and moment in which working-class blacks and whites saw enough likeness in their dance traditions to frame a space of public, popular competition.

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