Confidence Men and Painted Women

Confidence Men and Painted Women

Author: Karen Halttunen

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 1982-01-01

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13: 9780300037883

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Karen Halttunen draws a vivid picture of the social and cultural development of the upwardly mobile middle class, basing her study on a survey of the conduct manuals and fashion magazines of mid-nineteenth-century America. "An ingenious book: original, inventive, resourceful, and exciting. ... This book adds immeasurably to the current work on sentimental culture and American cultural history and brings to its task an inquisitive, fresh, and intelligent perspective. ... Essential reading for historians, literary critics, feminists, and cultural commentators who wish to study mid-nineteenth-century American culture and its relation to contemporary values."--Dianne F. Sadoff, American Quarterly "A compelling and beautifully developed study. ... Halttunen provides us with a subtle book that gently unfolds from her mastery of the subject and intelligent prose."--Paula S. Fass, Journal of Social History "Halttunen has done her homework--the research has been tremendous, the notes and bibliography are impressive, and the text is peppered with hundreds of quotes--and gives some real insight into an area of American culture and history where we might have never bothered to look."--John Hopkins, Times Literary Supplement "The kind of imaginative history that opens up new questions, that challenges conventional historical understanding, and demonstrates how provocative and exciting cultural history can be."--William R. Leach, The New England Quarterly "A stunning contribution to American cultural history."--Alan Trachtenberg


Confidence Men

Confidence Men

Author: Ron Suskind

Publisher: Harper Collins

Published: 2012-06-19

Total Pages: 809

ISBN-13: 0062225324

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“Savvy and informative. . . . The most ambitious treatment of this period yet. . . . Suskind’s book often reads like Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest. But the quagmire isn’t a neo-Vietnam like Afghanistan—it’s the economy.” — Frank Rich, New York “A searing new book. . . . Suskind has a flair for taking material he’s harvested to create narratives with a novelistic sense of drama.” — Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times “No book about the Obama presidency appears to have unnerved the White House quite so much as Confidence Men by Ron Suskind, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who has developed a niche in the specialized art of parting the curtain on presidential dealings.” — The Chicago Tribune “A truly groundbreaking inside account. . . . Penetrating in its analysis of why the administration’s approach to the country’s economic ills has been so lackluster. . . . An important addition to the growing library of books about this president.” — Joe Nocera, The New York Times Book Review “The book of the week, maybe the book of the month, is Ron Suskind’s Confidence Men. . . . A detailed narrative of the Administration’s response-sometimes frantic, sometimes sluggish, sometimes both-to the financial and economic catastrophe it inherited, as experienced from the inside.” — Hendrik Hertzberg, The New Yorker “The work that went into Confidence Men cannot be denied. Suskind conducted hundreds of interviews. He spoke to almost every member of the Obama administration, including the President. He quotes memos no one else has published. He gives you scenes that no one else has managed to capture.” — Ezra Klein, The New York Review of Books “Suskind’s account of the Obama administration is a marker of our times. It reveals a President unable to perform responsibly the duties of his high office. . . . Suskind’s contribution to this tale of woe is to give us a fine grained picture of Obama’s passive place in deliberations.” — Huffington PostThe Huffington Post “My Book of the Year. A narrative tour de force. . . . Journalism like this is all too rare in an ange in which reporters trade their critical faculties for access. And it’s even rarer that skeptical reporting is turned into something lasting.” — David Granger, Esquire “This inside account of the Obama economic team contains enough damning on-the-record quotes to give it the ring of truth despite White House efforts to discredit the narrative of infighting and missed opportunities. Read it and weep. It reminds me of the post-Iraq invasion books that documented a similar failure to rise to the enormity of the problem, whether the insurgency was in Iraq or on Wall Street.” — Eleanor Clift, Newsweek


The Mirror and the Palette

The Mirror and the Palette

Author: Jennifer Higgie

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2021-10-05

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 1643138049

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A dazzlingly original and ambitious book on the history of female self-portraiture by one of today's most well-respected art critics. Her story weaves in and out of time and place. She's Frida Kahlo, Loïs Mailou Jones and Amrita Sher-Gil en route to Mexico City, Paris or Bombay. She's Suzanne Valadon and Gwen John, craving city lights, the sea and solitude; she's Artemisia Gentileschi striding through the streets of Naples and Paula Modersohn-Becker in Worpswede. She's haunting museums in her paint-stained dress, scrutinising how El Greco or Titian or Van Dyck or Cézanne solved the problems that she too is facing. She's railing against her corsets, her chaperones, her husband and her brothers; she's hammering on doors, dreaming in her bedroom, working day and night in her studio. Despite the immense hurdles that have been placed in her way, she sits at her easel, picks up a mirror and paints a self-portrait because, as a subject, she is always available. Until the twentieth century, art history was, in the main, written by white men who tended to write about other white men. The idea that women in the West have always made art was rarely cited as a possibility. Yet they have - and, of course, continue to do so - often against tremendous odds, from laws and religion to the pressures of family and public disapproval. In The Mirror and the Palette, Jennifer Higgie introduces us to a cross-section of women artists who embody the fact that there is more than one way to understand our planet, more than one way to live in it and more than one way to make art about it. Spanning 500 years, biography and cultural history intertwine in a narrative packed with tales of rebellion, adventure, revolution, travel and tragedy enacted by women who turned their back on convention and lived lives of great resilience, creativity and bravery.


Confidence Men and Painted Women

Confidence Men and Painted Women

Author: Karen Halttunen

Publisher:

Published: 1982

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 9780300166644

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Karen Halttunen draws a vivid picture of the social and cultural development of the upwardly mobile middle class, basing her study on a survey of the conduct manuals and fashion magazines of mid-nineteenth-century America.“An ingenious book: original, inventive, resourceful, and exciting. ... This book adds immeasurably to the current work on sentimental culture and American cultural history and brings to its task an inquisitive, fresh, and intelligent perspective. ... Essential reading for historians, literary critics, feminists, and cultural commentators who wish to study mid-nineteenth-century American culture and its relation to contemporary values.”-Dianne F. Sadoff, American Quarterly“A compelling and beautifully developed study. ... Halttunen provides us with a subtle book that gently unfolds from her mastery of the subject and intelligent prose.”-Paula S. Fass, Journal of Social History“Halttunen has done her homework-the research has been tremendous, the notes and bibliography are impressive, and the text is peppered with hundreds of "es-and gives some real insight into an area of American culture and history where we might have never bothered to look.”-John Hopkins, Times Literary Supplement“The kind of imaginative history that opens up new questions, that challenges conventional historical understanding, and demonstrates how provocative and exciting cultural history can be.”-William R. Leach, The New England Quarterly“A stunning contribution to American cultural history.”-Alan Trachtenberg.


Women of Empire

Women of Empire

Author: Verity McInnis

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Published: 2017-11-09

Total Pages: 301

ISBN-13: 0806159375

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In his Rules for Wife Behavior, Colonel Joseph Whistler summed up his expectations for his new bride: “You will remember you are not in command of anything except the cook.” Although their roles were circumscribed, the wives of army officers stationed in British India and the U.S. West commanded considerable influence, as Verity McInnis reveals in this comparative study of two female populations in two global locations. Women of Empire adds a previously unexplored dimension to our understanding of the connections between gender and imperialism in the nineteenth century. McInnis examines the intersections of class, race, and gender to reveal social spaces where female identity and power were both contested and constructed. Officers’ wives often possessed the authority to direct and maintain the social, cultural, and political ambitions of empire. By transferring and adapting white middle-class cultural values and customs to military installations, they created a new social reality—one that restructured traditional boundaries. In both the British and American territorial holdings, McInnis shows, military wives held pivotal roles, creating and controlling the processes that upheld national aims. In so doing, these women feminized formal and informal military practices in ways that strengthened their own status and identities. Despite the differences between rigid British social practices and their less formal American counterparts, military women in India and the U.S. West followed similar trajectories as they designed and maintained their imperial identity. Redefining the officer’s wife as a power holder and an active contributor to national prestige, Women of Empire opens a new, nuanced perspective on the colonial experience—and on the complex nexus of gender, race, and imperial practice.


Reading the Market

Reading the Market

Author: Peter Knight

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2016-09

Total Pages: 330

ISBN-13: 1421420600

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Introduction -- Market reports -- Reading the ticker tape -- Picturing the market -- Confidence games and inside information -- Conspiracy and the invisible hand of the market -- Epilogue


Courteous Capitalism

Courteous Capitalism

Author: Daniel Robert

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2023-11-28

Total Pages: 333

ISBN-13: 1421447355

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A provocative history of how corporate titans in the 1920s used a massive public relations campaign to transform public opinion on big business. In the early twentieth century, as Americans erupted in righteous indignation over the flagrant abuses of big business, utility executives faced an existential crisis. With calls for strict regulation or outright government ownership of utilities, how could streetcar, electricity, and telephone executives thwart municipal ownership, rein in regulation, and secure huge profits? In Courteous Capitalism, Daniel Robert reveals how utility executives answered this question by launching the largest nongovernmental public relations campaign the nation had ever seen. In part, this campaign encouraged managers to compel their clerks to exude "courtesy," "sunshine," and "patience" toward customers. Rather than bribe the few, executives would convert the many using a combination of emotional labor and improved customer service. At the same time, executives organized the widespread manipulation of the press, schools, radio, and movies. At once a labor history of clerks and a social history of consumers, Courteous Capitalism offers an intriguing new argument for why a major reform goal of Progressives faded and why Americans changed their minds regarding corporate monopolies.


Southern Scoundrels

Southern Scoundrels

Author: Jeff Forret

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2021-04-21

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 080717534X

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The history of capitalist development in the United States is long, uneven, and overwhelmingly focused on the North. Macroeconomic studies of the South have primarily emphasized the role of the cotton economy in global trading networks. Until now, few in-depth scholarly works have attempted to explain how capitalism in the South took root and functioned in all of its diverse—and duplicitous—forms. Southern Scoundrels explores the lesser-known aspects of the emergence of capitalism in the region: the shady and unscrupulous peddlers, preachers, slave traders, war profiteers, thieves, and marginal men who seized available opportunities to get ahead and, in doing so, left their mark on the southern economy. Eschewing conventional economic theory, this volume features narrative storytelling as engaging and seductive as the cast of shifty characters under examination. Contributors cover the chronological sweep of the nineteenth-century South, from the antebellum era through the tumultuous and chaotic Civil War years, and into Reconstruction and beyond. The geographic scope is equally broad, with essays encompassing the Chesapeake, South Carolina, the Lower Mississippi Valley, Texas, Missouri, and Appalachia. These essays offer a series of social histories on the nineteenth-century southern economy and the changes wrought by capitalist transformation. Tracing that story through the kinds of oily individuals who made it happen, Southern Scoundrels provides fascinating insights into the region’s hucksters and its history. Contents Introduction, Jeff Forret and Bruce E. Baker “Preachers and Peddlers: Credit and Belief in the Flush Times,” John Lindbeck “A Gentleman and a Scoundrel? Alexander McDonald, Financial Reputation, and Slavery’s Capitalism,” Alexandra J. Finley “‘How Deeply They Weed into the Pockets’: Slave Traders, Bank Speculators, and the Anatomy of a Chesapeake Wildcat, 1840–1843,” Jeff Forret “Bernard Kendig: Orchestrating Fraud in the Market and the Courtroom,” Maria R. Montalvo “William A. Britton v. Benjamin F. Butler: Occupied New Orleans, Confiscation, and the Disruption of the Cotton Trade in Wartime Natchez,” Jeff Strickland “Devils at the Doorstep: Confederate Judges, Masters of Sequestration,” Rodney J. Steward “‘Irresistibly Impelled toward Illegal Appropriation’: The Civil War Schemes of William G. Cheeney,” Jimmy L. Bryan, Jr. “Das Kapital on Tchoupitoulas Street: The Marketing of Stolen Goods and the Reserve Army of Labor in Reconstruction-Era New Orleans,” Bruce E. Baker “The Violent Lives of William Faucett,” Elaine S. Frantz “Eureka! Law and Order for Sale in Gilded Age Appalachia,” T. R. C. Hutton


Theatres of Value

Theatres of Value

Author: Danielle Rosvally

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 2024-07-01

Total Pages: 332

ISBN-13: 1438498357

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Theatres of Value explores the idea that buying and selling are performative acts and offers a paradigm for deeper study of these acts—"the dramaturgy of value." Modeling this multifaceted approach, the book explores six case studies to show how and why Shakespeare had value for nineteenth-century New Yorkers. In considering William Brown's African Theater, P. T. Barnum's American Museum and Lecture Hall, Fanny Kemble's American reading career, the Booth family brand, the memorial statue of Shakespeare in Central Park, and an 1888 benefit performance of Hamlet to theatrical impresario Lester Wallack, Theatres of Value traces a history of audience engagement with Shakespearean cultural capital and the myriad ways this engagement was leveraged by theatrical businesspeople.


American Discord

American Discord

Author: Lesley J. Gordon

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2020-05-20

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 0807173746

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A panoramic collection of essays written by both established and emerging scholars, American Discord examines critical aspects of the Civil War era, including rhetoric and nationalism, politics and violence, gender, race, and religion. Beginning with an overview of the political culture of the 1860s, the collection reveals that most Americans entered the decade opposed to political compromise. Essays from Megan L. Bever, Glenn David Brasher, Lawrence A. Kreiser Jr., and Christian McWhirter discuss the rancorous political climate of the day and the sense of racial superiority woven into the political fabric of the era. Shifting focus to the actual war, Rachel K. Deale, Lindsay Rae Privette, Adam H. Petty, and A. Wilson Greene contribute essays on internal conflict, lack of compromise, and commitment to white supremacy. Here, contributors adopt a broad understanding of “battle,” considering environmental effects and the impact of the war after the battles were over. Essays by Laura Mammina and Charity Rakestraw and Kristopher A. Teters reveal that while the war blurred the boundaries, it ultimately prompted Americans to grasp for the familiar established hierarchies of gender and race. Examinations of chaos and internal division suggest that the political culture of Reconstruction was every bit as contentious as the war itself. Former Confederates decried the barbarity of their Yankee conquerors, while Republicans portrayed Democrats as backward rubes in need of civilizing. Essays by Kevin L. Hughes, Daniel J. Burge, T. Robert Hart, John F. Marszalek, and T. Michael Parrish highlight Americans’ continued reliance on hyperbolic rhetoric. American Discord embraces a multifaceted view of the Civil War and its aftermath, attempting to capture the complicated human experiences of the men and women caught in the conflict. These essays acknowledge that ordinary people and their experiences matter, and the dynamics among family members, friends, and enemies have far-reaching consequences.