scholarly journals “So many foolish virgins”: nuns and anti-Catholicism from Maria Monk to the Know-Nothings

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Cassandra L. Yacovazzi
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Civil War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Party Politics ◽  
Second Best ◽  
American Popular Culture ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Maria Monk

This dissertation examines opposition to nuns and convent life in America as it was expressed through vigilante violence, propaganda literature, and party politics. While nuns may seem like an unlikely target of hostility, a vast cohort of Americans singled them out as a serious threat to the republic. Between 1830 and 1860 anti-convent propaganda, including Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu by “escaped nun” Maria Monk, flooded the literary market. Monk’s work warned of a Catholic conspiracy in the United States through the cloister, depicted alleged horrors of convent life, and cast nuns variously as masculine tyrants, foolish slaves, and whores. Investigators quickly unveiled Maria Monk as an impostor, but her book became the second best-seller after Uncle Tom’s Cabin before the Civil War, and it has never gone out of print. In order to “protect” American women from the nun’s life, mobs stormed convents from Massachusetts to Maryland. By the 1850s, suspicion of nuns became formally politicized by Know-Nothing legislators who established “Nunnery Committees” for convent investigations. Although the Civil War quieted the outcry against nuns for a time, the campaign against convents had far-reaching implications. Members of the second Ku Klux Klan relied on anti-convent propaganda to buttress their positions, and common stereotypes of nunsâ€"first evident in nineteenth-century convent narrativesâ€"have also persisted in popular culture. This dissertation argues that the campaign against nuns and convent life was a much greater part of nineteenth-century American popular culture and politics than previous historians have recognized.

To 1750

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
William H. McNeill
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
American History ◽  
East Coast ◽  
The United States ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
Columbian Exposition ◽  
The Republic

IN THE LATTER part of the nineteenth century, east coast city dwellers in the United States had difficulty repressing a sense of their own persistent cultural inferiority vis-à-vis London and Paris. At the same time a great many old-stock Americans were dismayed by the stream of immigrants coming to these shores whose diversity called the future cohesion of the Republic into question almost as seriously as the issue of slavery had done in the decades before the Civil War. In such a climate of opinion, the unabashed provinciality of Frederick Jackson Turner's (1861-1932) paper "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," delivered at a meeting of the newly founded American Historical Association in connection with the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago (1892), began within less than a decade to resound like a trumpet call, though whether it signalled advance or retreat remained profoundly ambiguous....

Epilogue

2018 ◽  
pp. 167-176
Author(s):  
Erik Mathisen
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
The United States ◽  
National State ◽  
The Republic

Though the fusion of loyalty and citizenship in Civil War America proved short lived, the mark that it left on the republic would endure. While former Confederates would benefit from the uncoupling of loyalty from citizenship by the later decades of the nineteenth century, the treason at the heart of the Civil War and the collective memory of that conflict would live on every time a politician waved the memory of the war before the electorate in a bid for votes. The national state would experience a hollowing out of its wartime powers in the decades that followed the Civil War, but the experience of Reconstruction would set the nation against individual states. And for more than a century after the war, former slaves and their descendants bore the hardship and galling discrimination in the nation’s military, to prove and prove again their allegiance to the United States through their service as soldiers in war.

Ballet and Popular Culture in America

Ballet Class ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 277-304
Author(s):  
Melissa R. Klapper
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
The United States ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
American Popular Culture ◽  
Cultural Spaces ◽  
The Subject

Ballet’s popularity as entertainment has grown steadily in the United States since the early nineteenth century, and it has appeared in a wide variety of cultural spaces. Three arenas of American popular culture where ballet has consistently been important are movies, television, and the ubiquitous holiday performances of The Nutcracker. Dance was the subject of some of the earliest movies ever filmed and has remained a frequent theme. Millions of Americans have seen ballet on television, and as many have also seen performances of The Nutcracker. Over the course of the twentieth century many Americans have been inspired to take ballet classes or send their children to ballet classes as a result of their engagement with ballet in popular culture.

Epilogue

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cassandra L. Yacovazzi
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Popular Media ◽  
The Public ◽  
Monastic Life ◽  
The Common ◽  
Public Imagination ◽  
Maria Monk ◽  
People Today

Nuns in popular media today are a staple of kitsch culture, evident in the common appearance of bobble-head nuns, nun costumes, and nun caricatures on TV, movies, and the stage. Nun stereotypes include the sexy vixen, the naïve innocent, and the scary nun. These types were forged in nineteenth-century convent narratives. While people today may not recognize the name “Maria Monk,” her legacy lives on in the public imagination. There may be no demands to search convents, but nuns and monastic life are nevertheless generally not taken seriously. This epilogue traces opposition to nuns from the Civil War to the present, analyzing the various images of nuns in popular culture as they relate to the antebellum campaign against convents. It argues that the source of the misunderstanding about nuns is rooted in the inability to categorize these women either as traditional wives and mothers or as secular, career-driven singles.

scholarly journals Road to the Civil War: The Missouri Compromise

Perceptions ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 5
Author(s):  
Julius Nathan Fortaleza Klinger
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Research Paper ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
True Solution ◽  
Secondary Sources ◽  
The Us ◽  
Underlying Causes

The purpose of this paper is to explore the question of whether or not early nineteenth-century lawmakers saw the Missouri Compromise of 1820 as a true solution to the question of slavery in the United States, or if it was simply a stopgap solution. The information used to conduct this research paper comes in the form of a collation of primary and secondary sources. My findings indicate that the debate over Missouri's statehood was in fact about slavery in the US, and that the underlying causes of the Civil War were already quite prevalent four whole decades before the conflict broke out.

The First Phase of the Empire State’s “Triple Transition”: Banks’ Influence on the Market, Democracy, and Federalism in New York, 1776–1838

1997 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 521-558
Author(s):  
Robert E. Wright
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Well Being ◽  
The United States ◽  
Party Politics ◽  
Market Forces ◽  
Bank Account ◽  
Access To Credit ◽  
Market Democracy

The story usually goes something like this: Colonial Americans lived in a world very different from that of the generation that fought the Civil War. Locals wielded the tools of government most of the time; rarely did distant officials attempt control, and when they did they were usually roundly rebuffed. Politicians “stood” for positions of honor rather than “running” for lucrative posts. A man’s surname was a crucial determinant of his socioeconomic well-being. Artisans and yeomen deferred to gentlemen. Barter predominated as little “cash” circulated. Custom and family, not market forces, dictated the allocation of credit. Change of all types occurred slowly. By Martin Van Buren’s presidency some threescore years later, America was a very different place. Though still evolving, the United States exuded modernity, at least in its general outlines. Politicians and bureaucrats in state capitals, and even Washington, increasingly affected Americans’ everyday lives. Party politics and patronage took on increased importance as plutocrats plied for patronage posts. A man’s bank account meant more than his lineage. Gentlemen feared the artisans and yeomen they once easily ruled. Cash was abundant, and the market determined most access to credit. Societal conditions changed apace. Generally speaking, over these decades America is described as becoming less “aristocratic” and “mercantile,” or even “feudal,” and more “democratic” and “capitalist.”

Anti-Americanism in Retreat: Jack Lang, Cultural Imperialism, and the Anti-Anti-Americans

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard F. Kuisel
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Mexico City ◽  
The United States ◽  
Cultural Imperialism ◽  
American Film ◽  
Film Festival ◽  
American Popular Culture ◽  
Movie Star

This chapter details the rise of anti-Americanism in France, in particular French socialist minister of culture Jack Lang's attack against American popular culture. Lang began by refusing to attend the American film festival at Deauville in September 1981; several months later he gave a notorious address denouncing American cultural imperialism at a UNESCO conference in Mexico City; and then he tried to organize a global “crusade” to combat cultural imports from the United States. Lang was a flamboyant young politician whose movie-star good looks, iconic pink jacket, dramatic initiatives, and hyperactive ways won him both admiration and ridicule. He presided over the Ministry of Culture from 1981 to 1986 and again from 1988 to 1993.

The Oriental Monk in American Popular Culture

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jane Naomi Iwamura
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Tibetan Buddhism ◽  
The United States ◽  
Current Image ◽  
Dalai Lama ◽  
American Popular Culture ◽  
Asian Religions ◽  
History Of

This chapter analyzes the history of representation that has contributed to the current image of the Dalai Lama. We “know” the Dalai Lama, not simply because of the fact that we may understand his views and admire his actions, but also because we are familiar with the particular role he plays in the popular consciousness of the United States—the type of icon he has become—the icon of the “Oriental Monk.” To get a sense of what makes the Dalai Lama so popular, we need to get a sense of the history of this icon and how it has been used to express and manage our sense of Asian religions. The chapter asks: How did the Dalai Lama come to represent all that he does for Americans? Indeed, what exactly does he represent? How have we come to “know” him? Is our ability to embrace someone and something (Tibetan Buddhism) once considered so foreign, anything other than a testimony to a newfound openness and progressive understanding?

Beyond the Iconoclastic Republic

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Thomas J. Brown
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Military Service ◽  
Early Republic ◽  
American Culture ◽  
The United States ◽  
Public Monuments ◽  
Compulsory Military Service

This introduction traces antebellum American skepticism about public monuments to the distrust of standing armies that was central to the ideology of the American Revolution. The popularity of Independence Day illustrates the iconoclasm of the early republic, which paralleled a widespread resistance to compulsory military service. Remembrance of the Civil War vastly increased the number of public monuments in the United States. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, these memorials became a vehicle for the militarization of American culture.

Abolition, Chinese Indentured Labor, and the State: Cuba, Peru, and the United States during the Mid Nineteenth Century

2019 ◽  
Vol 76 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-40 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin N. Narváez
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Labor Relations ◽  
The United States ◽  
Spanish America ◽  
Slave Labor ◽  
Us South ◽  
Free Labor ◽  
Indentured Labor

Abolition forced planters in the post-Civil War US South to consider new sources and forms of labor. Some looked to Spanish America for answers. Cuba had long played a prominent role in the American imagination because of its proximity, geostrategic location, and potential as a slave state prior to the Civil War. Even as the United States embraced abolition and Cuba maintained slavery, the island presented Southern planters with potential labor solutions. Cuban elites had been using male Chinese indentured workers (“coolies” or colonos asiáticos) to supplement slave labor and delay the rise of free labor since 1847. Planters in coastal Peru similarly embraced Chinese indentured labor in 1849 as abolition neared. Before the Civil War, Southerners generally had noted these developments with anxiety, fearing that coolies were morally corrupt and detrimental to slavery. However, for many, these concerns receded once legal slavery ended. Planters wanted cheap exploitable labor, which coolies appeared to offer. Thus, during Reconstruction, Southern elites, especially in Louisiana, attempted to use Chinese indentured workers to minimize changes in labor relations.

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