Licentious Gotham

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Licentious Gotham

Author : Donna Dennis
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 410 pages
File Size : 54,5 Mb
Release : 2009-07-31
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 0674053737

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Licentious Gotham by Donna Dennis Pdf

Licentious Gotham, set in the streets, news depots, publishing houses, grand jury chambers, and courtrooms of the nation's great metropolis, delves into the stories of the enterprising men and women who created a thriving transcontinental market for sexually arousing books and pictures. The experiences of fancy publishers, flash editors, and racy novelists, who all managed to pursue their trade in the face of laws criminalizing obscene publications, dramatically convey nineteenth-century America's daring notions of sex, gender, and desire, as well as the frequently counterproductive results of attempts to enforce conventional moral standards. In nineteenth-century New York, the business of erotic publishing and legal attacks on obscenity developed in tandem, with each activity shaping and even promoting the pursuit of the other. Obscenity prohibitions, rather than curbing salacious publications, inspired innovative new styles of forbidden literature--such as works highlighting expressions of passion and pleasure by middle-class American women. Obscenity prosecutions also spurred purveyors of lewd materials to devise novel schemes to evade local censorship by advertising and distributing their products through the mail. This subterfuge in turn triggered far-reaching transformations in strategies for policing obscenity. Donna Dennis offers a colorful, groundbreaking account of the birth of an indecent print trade and the origins of obscenity regulation in the United States. By revealing the paradoxes that characterized early efforts to suppress sexual expression in the name of morality, she suggests relevant lessons for our own day.

Children, Media, and American History

Author : Margaret Cassidy
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 118 pages
File Size : 44,6 Mb
Release : 2017-10-02
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781317532989

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Children, Media, and American History by Margaret Cassidy Pdf

Printed poison. Pernicious stuff. Since the nineteenth century, these are some of the many concerned comments critics have made about media for children. From dime novels to comic books to digital media, Cassidy illustrates the ways children have used "old media" when they were first introduced as "new media." Further, she interrogates the extent to which different conceptions of childhood have influenced adults’ reactions to children’s use of media. Exploring the history of American children and media, this text presents a portrait of the way in which children and adults adapt to a constantly changing media environment.

An Indispensable Liberty

Author : Mary M. Cronin
Publisher : SIU Press
Page : 311 pages
File Size : 46,7 Mb
Release : 2016-03-09
Category : History
ISBN : 9780809334728

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An Indispensable Liberty by Mary M. Cronin Pdf

"This collection of eleven essays examines nineteenth-century legal and extralegal attempts to restrict freedom of speech and the press as well as the efforts of others to push back against those restrictions"--

The New England Watch and Ward Society

Author : P. C. Kemeny
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 409 pages
File Size : 55,8 Mb
Release : 2018
Category : BUSINESS & ECONOMICS
ISBN : 9780190844394

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The New England Watch and Ward Society by P. C. Kemeny Pdf

The New England Watch and Ward Society provides a new window into the history of American Protestantism during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By suppressing obscene literature, gambling, and prostitution, the moral reform organization embodied Protestant efforts to shape public morality in an increasing intellectually and culturally diverse society.

Sex and the Civil War

Author : Judith Giesberg
Publisher : UNC Press Books
Page : 152 pages
File Size : 50,8 Mb
Release : 2017-02-07
Category : History
ISBN : 9781469631288

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Sex and the Civil War by Judith Giesberg Pdf

Civil War soldiers enjoyed unprecedented access to obscene materials of all sorts, including mass-produced erotic fiction, cartes de visite, playing cards, and stereographs. A perfect storm of antebellum legal, technological, and commercial developments, coupled with the concentration of men fed into armies, created a demand for, and a deluge of, pornography in the military camps. Illicit materials entered in haversacks, through the mail, or from sutlers; soldiers found pornography discarded on the ground, and civilians discovered it in abandoned camps. Though few examples survived the war, these materials raised sharp concerns among reformers and lawmakers, who launched campaigns to combat it. By the war's end, a victorious, resurgent American nation-state sought to assert its moral authority by redefining human relations of the most intimate sort, including the regulation of sex and reproduction—most evident in the Comstock laws, a federal law and a series of state measures outlawing pornography, contraception, and abortion. With this book, Judith Giesberg has written the first serious study of the erotica and pornography that nineteenth-century American soldiers read and shared and links them to the postwar reaction to pornography and to debates about the future of sex and marriage.

Charles Ellis Johnson and the Erotic Mormon Image

Author : Mary Campbell
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 234 pages
File Size : 54,8 Mb
Release : 2016-12-05
Category : History
ISBN : 9780226410173

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Charles Ellis Johnson and the Erotic Mormon Image by Mary Campbell Pdf

On September 25, 1890, the Mormon prophet Wilford Woodruff publicly instructed his followers to abandon polygamy. In doing so, he initiated a process that would fundamentally alter the Latter-day Saints and their faith. Trading the most integral elements of their belief system for national acceptance, the Mormons recreated themselves as model Americans. Mary Campbell tells the story of this remarkable religious transformation in Charles Ellis Johnson and the Erotic Mormon Image. One of the church’s favorite photographers, Johnson (1857–1926) spent the 1890s and early 1900s taking pictures of Mormonism’s most revered figures and sacred sites. At the same time, he did a brisk business in mail-order erotica, creating and selling stereoviews that he referred to as his “spicy pictures of girls.” Situating these images within the religious, artistic, and legal culture of turn-of-the-century America, Campbell reveals the unexpected ways in which they worked to bring the Saints into the nation’s mainstream after the scandal of polygamy. Engaging, interdisciplinary, and deeply researched, Charles Ellis Johnson and the Erotic Mormon Image demonstrates the profound role pictures played in the creation of both the modern Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the modern American nation.

Sensationalism

Author : David B. Sachsman
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 506 pages
File Size : 43,7 Mb
Release : 2017-07-05
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781351491464

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Sensationalism by David B. Sachsman Pdf

David B. Sachsman and David W. Bulla have gathered a colourful collection of essays exploring sensationalism in nineteenth-century newspaper reporting. The contributors analyse the role of sensationalism and tell the story of both the rise of the penny press in the 1830s and the careers of specific editors and reporters dedicated to this particular journalistic style.Divided into four sections, the first, titled "The Many Faces of Sensationalism," provides an eloquent Defense of yellow journalism, analyses the place of sensational pictures, and provides a detailed examination of the changes in reporting over a twenty-year span. The second part, "Mudslinging, Muckraking, Scandals, and Yellow Journalism," focuses on sensationalism and the American presidency as well as why journalistic muckraking came to fruition in the Progressive Era.The third section, "Murder, Mayhem, Stunts, Hoaxes, and Disasters," features a ground-breaking discussion of the place of religion and death in nineteenth-century newspapers. The final section explains the connection between sensationalism and hatred. This is a must-read book for any historian, journalist, or person interested in American culture.

Who Invented Oscar Wilde?

Author : David Newhoff
Publisher : U of Nebraska Press
Page : 375 pages
File Size : 51,6 Mb
Release : 2020-11
Category : Law
ISBN : 9781640123861

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Who Invented Oscar Wilde? by David Newhoff Pdf

Who Invented Oscar Wilde? provides a framework for understanding the development and purpose of creators' rights in the United States.

Capitalism by Gaslight

Author : Brian P. Luskey,Wendy A. Woloson
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
Page : 328 pages
File Size : 44,5 Mb
Release : 2015-03-18
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 9780812246896

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Capitalism by Gaslight by Brian P. Luskey,Wendy A. Woloson Pdf

While elite merchants, financiers, shopkeepers, and customers were the most visible producers, consumers, and distributors of goods and capital in the nineteenth century, they were certainly not alone in shaping the economy. Lurking in the shadows of capitalism's past are those who made markets by navigating a range of new financial instruments, information systems, and modes of transactions: prostitutes, dealers in used goods, mock auctioneers, illegal slavers, traffickers in stolen horses, emigrant runners, pilfering dock workers, and other ordinary people who, through their transactions and lives, helped to make capitalism as much as it made them. Capitalism by Gaslight illuminates American economic history by emphasizing the significance of these markets and the cultural debates they provoked. These essays reveal that the rules of economic engagement were still being established in the nineteenth century: delineations between legal and illegal, moral and immoral, acceptable and unsuitable were far from clear. The contributors examine the fluid mobility and unstable value of people and goods, the shifting geographies and structures of commercial institutions, the blurred boundaries between legitimate and illegitimate economic activity, and the daily lives of men and women who participated creatively—and often subversively—in American commerce. With subjects ranging from women's studies and African American history to material and consumer culture, this compelling volume illustrates that when hidden forms of commerce are brought to light, they can become flashpoints revealing the tensions, fissures, and inequities inherent in capitalism itself. Contributors: Paul Erickson, Robert J. Gamble, Ellen Gruber Garvey, Corey Goettsch, Joshua R. Greenberg, Katie M. Hemphill, Craig B. Hollander, Brian P. Luskey, Will B. Mackintosh, Adam Mendelsohn, Brendan P. O'Malley, Michael D. Thompson, Wendy A. Woloson.

Sincerely Held

Author : Charles McCrary
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 309 pages
File Size : 55,9 Mb
Release : 2022-04-08
Category : Law
ISBN : 9780226817958

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Sincerely Held by Charles McCrary Pdf

"If you read Supreme Court opinions on cases involving First Amendment religion issues, you're likely to encounter the ubiquitous phrase "sincerely held religious belief." The "sincerity test" of religious belief has become a cornerstone of US jurisprudence, determining what counts as legitimate grounds for First Amendment claims in the eyes of the law. In Sincerely Held, Charles McCrary provides an original account of how "sincerely held religious belief" became the primary standard for determining what legally counts as genuine religion. McCrary traces the interlocking histories of sincerity, religion, and secularism in the US, starting in the mid-nineteenth century. He then shows how, in the 1940s, as the courts expanded the concept of religious freedom, they incorporated the notion of sincerity as a key element in determining religious freedom protections. The legal sincerity test was part of a larger trend in which the category "religion" became largely individualized and correlated with "belief." This linking of religion and belief, with all its Protestant underpinnings, is a central concern of critical secularism studies. McCrary contributes to this conversation by revealing the history of how sincerity and sincerely held religious belief developed as technologies of secular governance, constraining the type of subject one has to be in order to receive protections from the state"--

American Literature in Transition, 1820–1860: Volume 2

Author : Justine S. Murison
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 765 pages
File Size : 47,9 Mb
Release : 2022-06-23
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781108675567

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American Literature in Transition, 1820–1860: Volume 2 by Justine S. Murison Pdf

The essays in American Literature in Transition, 1820-1860 offer a new approach to the antebellum era, one that frames the age not merely as the precursor to the Civil War but as indispensable for understanding present crises around such issues as race, imperialism, climate change, and the role of literature in American society. The essays make visible and usable the period's fecund imagined futures, futures that certainly included disunion but not only disunion. Tracing the historical contexts, literary forms and formats, global coordinates, and present reverberations of antebellum literature and culture, the essays in this volume build on existing scholarship while indicating exciting new avenues for research and teaching. Taken together, the essays in this volume make this era's literature relevant for a new generation of students and scholars.

Intimate States

Author : Margot Canaday,Nancy F. Cott,Robert O. Self
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 363 pages
File Size : 40,8 Mb
Release : 2021-09-06
Category : History
ISBN : 9780226794891

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Intimate States by Margot Canaday,Nancy F. Cott,Robert O. Self Pdf

Fourteen essays examine the unexpected relationships between government power and intimate life in the last 150 years of United States history. The last few decades have seen a surge of historical scholarship that analyzes state power and expands our understanding of governmental authority and the ways we experience it. At the same time, studies of the history of intimate life—marriage, sexuality, child-rearing, and family—also have blossomed. Yet these two literatures have not been considered together in a sustained way. This book, edited and introduced by three preeminent American historians, aims to close this gap, offering powerful analyses of the relationship between state power and intimate experience in the United States from the Civil War to the present. The fourteen essays that make up Intimate States argue that “intimate governance”—the binding of private daily experience to the apparatus of the state—should be central to our understanding of modern American history. Our personal experiences have been controlled and arranged by the state in ways we often don’t even see, the authors and editors argue; correspondingly, contemporary government has been profoundly shaped by its approaches and responses to the contours of intimate life, and its power has become so deeply embedded into daily social life that it is largely indistinguishable from society itself. Intimate States makes a persuasive case that the state is always with us, even in our most seemingly private moments.

Lust on Trial

Author : Amy Werbel
Publisher : Columbia University Press
Page : 589 pages
File Size : 40,7 Mb
Release : 2018-04-17
Category : History
ISBN : 9780231547031

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Lust on Trial by Amy Werbel Pdf

Anthony Comstock was America’s first professional censor. From 1873 to 1915, as Secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, Comstock led a crusade against lasciviousness, salaciousness, and obscenity that resulted in the confiscation and incineration of more than three million pictures, postcards, and books he judged to be obscene. But as Amy Werbel shows in this rich cultural and social history, Comstock’s campaign to rid America of vice in fact led to greater acceptance of the materials he deemed objectionable, offering a revealing tale about the unintended consequences of censorship. In Lust on Trial, Werbel presents a colorful journey through Comstock’s career that doubles as a new history of post–Civil War America’s risqué visual and sexual culture. Born into a puritanical New England community, Anthony Comstock moved to New York in 1868 armed with his Christian faith and a burning desire to rid the city of vice. Werbel describes how Comstock’s raids shaped New York City and American culture through his obsession with the prevention of lust by means of censorship, and how his restrictions provided an impetus for the increased circulation and explicitness of “obscene” materials. By opposing women who preached sexual liberation and empowerment, suppressing contraceptives, and restricting artistic expression, Comstock drew the ire of civil liberties advocates, inspiring more open attitudes toward sexual and creative freedom and more sophisticated legal defenses. Drawing on material culture high and low, including numerous examples of the “obscenities” Comstock seized, Lust on Trial provides fresh insights into Comstock’s actions and motivations, the sexual habits of Americans during his era, and the complicated relationship between law and cultural change.

Truth's Ragged Edge

Author : Philip F. Gura
Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Page : 354 pages
File Size : 43,6 Mb
Release : 2013-04-09
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781429951340

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Truth's Ragged Edge by Philip F. Gura Pdf

From the acclaimed cultural historian Philip F. Gura comes Truth's Ragged Edge, a comprehensive and original history of the American novel's first century. Grounded in Gura's extensive consideration of the diverse range of important early novels, not just those that remain widely read today, this book recovers many long-neglected but influential writers—such as the escaped slave Harriet Jacobs, the free black Philadelphian Frank J. Webb, and the irrepressible John Neal—to paint a complete and authoritative portrait of the era. Gura also gives us the key to understanding what sets the early novel apart, arguing that it is distinguished by its roots in "the fundamental religiosity of American life." Our nation's pioneering novelists, it turns out, wrote less in the service of art than of morality. This history begins with a series of firsts: the very first American novel, William Hill Brown's The Power of Sympathy, published in 1789; the first bestsellers, Susanna Rowson's Charlotte Temple and Hannah Webster Foster's The Coquette, novels that were, like Brown's, cautionary tales of seduction and betrayal; and the first native genre, religious tracts, which were parables intended to instruct the Christian reader. Gura shows that the novel did not leave behind its proselytizing purpose, even as it evolved. We see Catharine Maria Sedgwick in the 1820s conceiving of A New-England Tale as a critique of Puritanism's harsh strictures, as well as novelists pushing secular causes: George Lippard's The Quaker City, from 1844, was a dark warning about growing social inequality. In the next decade certain writers—Hawthorne and Melville most famously—began to depict interiority and doubt, and in doing so nurtured a broader cultural shift, from social concern to individualism, from faith in a distant god to faith in the self. Rich in subplots and detail, Gura's narrative includes enlightening discussions of the technologies that modernized publishing and allowed for the printing of novels on a mass scale, and of the lively cultural journals and literary salons of early nineteenth-century New York and Boston. A book for the reader of history no less than the reader of fiction, Truth's Ragged Edge—the title drawn from a phrase in Melville, about the ambiguity of truth—is an indispensable guide to the fascinating, unexpected origins of the American novel.

Prince of Darkness

Author : Shane White
Publisher : Macmillan + ORM
Page : 348 pages
File Size : 41,5 Mb
Release : 2015-10-13
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781466880719

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Prince of Darkness by Shane White Pdf

In the middle decades of the nineteenth century Jeremiah G. Hamilton was a well-known figure on Wall Street. Cornelius Vanderbilt, America's first tycoon, came to respect, grudgingly, his one-time opponent. The day after Vanderbilt's death on January 4, 1877, an almost full-page obituary on the front of the National Republican acknowledged that, in the context of his Wall Street share transactions, "There was only one man who ever fought the Commodore to the end, and that was Jeremiah Hamilton." What Vanderbilt's obituary failed to mention, perhaps as contemporaries already knew it well, was that Hamilton was African American. Hamilton, although his origins were lowly, possibly slave, was reportedly the richest colored man in the United States, possessing a fortune of $2 million, or in excess of two hundred and $50 million in today's currency. In Prince of Darkness, a groundbreaking and vivid account, eminent historian Shane White reveals the larger than life story of a man who defied every convention of his time. He wheeled and dealed in the lily white business world, he married a white woman, he bought a mansion in rural New Jersey, he owned railroad stock on trains he was not legally allowed to ride, and generally set his white contemporaries teeth on edge when he wasn't just plain outsmarting them. An important contribution to American history, Hamilton's life offers a way into considering, from the unusual perspective of a black man, subjects that are usually seen as being quintessentially white, totally segregated from the African American past.