The Early Life and Career of the "Black Patti": The Odyssey of an African American Singer in the Late Nineteenth Century

2000 ◽  
Vol 53 (3) ◽  
pp. 543-596 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Graziano
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Rhode Island ◽  
Early Life ◽  
Mixed Race ◽  
The United States ◽  
Early Career ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
The Caribbean

The early career of the African American singer Matilda Sissieretta Jones (1868-1933), known as the "Black Patti," was unique in nineteenth-century America. Reviewers gave high praise to her singing, and she attracted large mixed-race audiences to her concerts across the country. Her fame was such that, during the early 1890s, she appeared as the star of several companies in which she was the only black performer. This article documents her early life in Portsmouth, Virginia, and Providence, Rhode Island; her two tours, in 1888 and 1890, to the Caribbean and South America; and her varied concert appearances in the United States and Europe up to the formation of the Black Patti Troubadours in the fall of 1896.

Seeking Influence Abroad

2020 ◽  
pp. 209-253
Author(s):  
Atul Kohli
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Central America ◽  
The United States ◽  
Poor Quality ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Imperial Power ◽  
Pacific Asia ◽  
The Caribbean

Born an anticolonial nation, the United States burst upon the global scene as an imperial power at the end of the nineteenth century. This chapter analyzes the American expansion into the Caribbean, Central America, and Pacific Asia. When the United States became a major industrial power in the late nineteenth century, it sought profit and power overseas, especially new economic opportunities. The United States experimented with colonialism but settled on creating stable but subservient regimes in peripheral countries as the main mechanism of control. Benefits to the United States included gains in trade, opportunities for foreign investments, and profitable loans. Countries under US influence, including the Philippines, Cuba, and Nicaragua, experienced some economic growth but became commodity exporters with sharp inequalities and poor-quality governments.

In The Shadow Of Yung Wing

2005 ◽  
Vol 74 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-58 ◽  
Author(s):  
EDWARD J. M. RHOADS
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
New England ◽  
The United States ◽  
Early Career ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Educational Mission ◽  
Qing Government ◽  
Late Nineteenth

The Chinese Educational Mission (CEM) was one of the �rst efforts at "self-strengthening," China's late nineteenth-century attempt at modernization. Beginning in 1872, the Qing government sent 120 boys to live and study in New England for extended periods. The mission was the brainchild of Yung Wing (1828-1912), known as a pioneering Chinese in America. This article contends that Zeng Laishun (ca. 1826-1895), the CEM's original interpreter, was no less a pioneer. It examines Zeng's education in Singapore, New Jersey, and New York; his early career as, successively, a missionary assistant, a businessman, and a teacher at a naval school in China; his concurrent roles as the English translator for the CEM in the United States and (with his family) as a cultural interpreter of China to New England's elite; and brie�y, following his return to China in 1874, his association with Li Hongzhang as his chief English secretary.

AMERICANIZATION BY CATHOLIC MEANS: FRENCH CANADIAN NATIONALISM AND TRANSNATIONALISM, 1889–1901

2017 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 284-301
Author(s):  
Patrick Lacroix
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
The United States ◽  
Roman Catholic Church ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
French Canadian ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
The North ◽  
Canadian Immigration ◽  
American Society

The age of nationalities and nationalism associated with nineteenth-century Europe also found expression in North America in the same period: French Canadians developed a national consciousness charged with a religious and providential mission. As these Canadians crossed into the United States in ever-rising numbers and established permanent “colonies” during the Gilded Age, they carried with them a cultural ideology that kept them apart from mainstream American society—and apart from their Irish American coreligionists and coworkers. Claiming the freedoms promised to them by the Constitution, these immigrants from the North battled for accommodation not only in political conventions or state legislatures, but also in the Roman Catholic Church, whose leaders seemed intent on doing away with foreign languages and customs. The religious battle came to a head as lay and clerical Catholics gathered in Baltimore, in 1889, to reassert the Church's unity as well as its patriotic credentials. By drawing attention to French Canadian immigration, often overlooked in immigration studies, this article refocuses the question of Americanization on the Catholic Church, which proved one of the most powerful agents of acculturation in late nineteenth-century America.

The Factory

1994 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert B. Gordon ◽  
Patrick M. Malone
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Rhode Island ◽  
Capital Expenditure ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Structural Development ◽  
Textile Mill ◽  
Early American ◽  
Industrial Buildings

With Samuel Slater’s textile mill (1793, in Pawtucket, Rhode Island) and Eli Whitney’s armory (1798, in Whitneyville, Connecticut), American entrepreneurs began to make in factories products that had formerly been made in homes or craft shops. Another new concept in manufacturing, the principle of uniformity (sometimes described as “interchangeability”), was also winning converts in America. Factories making uniform products increasingly used power-driven machinery in the production process. However, it is a mistake to conflate mechanization, factories, and uniformity. Mechanization was used in colonial craft shops as well as in nineteenth-century factories. Until the late nineteenth century, factory managers achieved uniformity primarily through improved handwork skills and gauging rather than with machinery. Chapter 9 will cover the mechanization of work in factories as well as efforts to achieve uniformity in machine parts. Many of the best examples of early American factories are in New England, where there was a serendipitous combination of water power, entrepreneurial capital, and the artisanal skills necessary to build mills and machinery. The textile mills erected there had a powerful influence on the evolution of American factory architecture. As we look closely at a number of New England mills, remember that similar patterns of structural development can be found in other regions of the United States and that the basic forms of the textile factory were readily adapted for other types of industry, including the manufacture of wood, metal, and paper products. Factories were not the first industrial buildings in America, nor did they represent more capital expenditure than some of the early and costly ironworks. Two processes of textile manufacturing and finishing, the carding of fibers and the fulling of woven cloth, had been powered by waterwheels (and occasionally by draft animals) before the first successful factory was built in Pawtucket in 1793. Proprietors of shops and country mills usually operated their enterprises directly with little of the managerial hierarchy and division of labor that would appear in the full-blown factory system. Shops lacked the factory’s sequential organization of powered machinery and its extensive mechanization through multiple stages of production.

scholarly journals Chinese Plantation Workers and Social Conflict in Peru in the late Nineteenth Century

1989 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 385-424 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael J. Gonzales
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Capital Accumulation ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Capitalist System ◽  
The World ◽  
African Slaves ◽  
Cheap Alternative ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Coffee Estates

As the world capitalist system developed during the nineteenth century non-slave labour became a commodity that circulated around the globe and contributed to capital accumulation in metropolitan centres. The best examples are the emigration of millions of Asian indentured servants and European labourers to areas of European colonisation. Asians replaced emancipated African slaves on plantations in the Caribbean and South America, supplemented a declining slave population in Cuba, built railways in California, worked in mines in South Africa, laboured on sugarcane plantations in Mauritius and Fiji, and served on plantations in southeast Asia. Italian immigrants also replaced African slaves on coffee estates in Brazil, worked with Spaniards in the seasonal wheat harvest in Argentina, and, along with other Europeans, entered the growing labour market in the United States. From the perspective of capital, these workers were a cheap alternative to local wage labour and, as foreigners without the rights of citizens, they could be subjected to harsher methods of social control.1

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