Revisiting nineteenth-century U.S. interventionism in Central America: capitalism,intrigue, and the obliteration of Greytown

In October 2016 the Congressional Research Service published its latest version of “Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad.” One of the “instances” occurred in 1854, and the entry reads in its entirety: “Naval forces bombarded and burned San Juan del Norte (Greytown) to avenge an insult to the American Minister to Nicaragua.”¹1. Torreon, Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad, 1798–2016, 4.View all notes The following article posits that Greytown was not destroyed to avenge an insult to an American diplomat. Rather, two groups of prominent American businessmen used this and related events and their antecedents as pretexts to enlist the federal government in destroying Greytown. One group, representing a U.S.-owned isthmian steamboat company, sought to seize the port of Greytown as a private fiefdom; the other wanted it as the prospective capital of a new colony based on a huge, dubious land grant they owned.     

News wire services in the nineteenth-century United States

News wire services were established in the United States in the mid-nineteenth century to gather and distribute news for local newspapers, using the new technology of the telegraph. With that early beginning in the era of electronic communication, the expansion of news wire services spans the change from a society of local communities to a more nationally integrated society. This paper assesses the importanceof changes in the medium's spatial organization which promoted national culture. The first wire services were local, ad hoc groups, organized to achieve greater efficiency in news-gathering. Formal services were first organized on a local basis, but in 1848 they began to sell news to the major urbanized portions of the United States. As the nation grew, the desire for greater efficiency conflicted with the desire for greater autonomy. Regional wire services persisted from the 1860s to the 1880s but after the 1880s, a tenuous national organization was achieved, cementing itself into a national system after the turn of the century. Efficiency in news collection was the primary reason for the increasing scale of news collecting groups. Each step toward larger spatial coverage, fed the growth of a complex interdependent urban system.     

Determinants of divorce in nineteenth-century Flanders

In 1830, the year Belgium became independent, there were four divorces in Belgium. From about 1870 to 1910, there were about one hundred divorces per year, and since 1910, there have been about 1,000. The aim of this research is to investigate the factors that played a role in the increase in the number of divorces in Belgium in the course of the nineteenth century. The research relates to information from four Flemish municipalities for the period 1800-1913. Results indicate that an explanation of the rising divorce rate can be sought in the psychological and social consequences of the more pronounced shift in marriage, gender and family expectations. Increasing numbers of women threw themselves more and more into their gender-specific expressive gender role, whereas the objective opportunities and attainability of this role did not increase commensurately. The result was role strain: high marriage and family expectations soon come up against intrinsic limitations. As a result of this, both individual and general frustration increased, and this was an ideal social substratum for facilitating divorce.     

Local-scale turnpike roads in nineteenth-century Kentucky

This essay will examine, through a Kentucky case study, the process whereby states, county-level localities, and individuals undertook for themselves the responsibility for internal improvements, especially the construction of comprehensive road networks in the nineteenth century. Before the Kentucky legislature authorized state-funded road construction in the twentieth century, the state's best roads were a few toll turnpikes. Following other eastern states, Kentucky approved turnpike construction charters and subscribed to turnpike stock to underwrite construction. State statutes, based upon directives from trained engineers hired by the Board of Internal Improvement, required that turnpike construction follow complex procedures. A change in the state constitution in 1850 forced the state to withdraw from turnpike road investment and road construction oversight and finance devolved to counties and private investors. Local county road networks were largely the product of neighborhood turnpike companies chartered by the state. Primary documents record the local road-building process for a five-mile turnpike in a Bourbon County. With little direction or assistance from state engineers, the neighborhood residents, led by farmer John W. Jones, surveyed a route, arranged for right-of-way access through adjacent farms, hired Irish turnpike construction crews, built a tollhouse, and collected tolls. Formal state law and engineering directives became attenuated as amateur turnpike builders constructed a simplified version of the state's ideal road.     

Caricatures of clergymen in nineteenth-century Sweden

This article investigates caricatures of clergymen in the nineteenth-century Church of Sweden. It offers the first attempt in Sweden to study these images as an enduring historical source. As case study, six caricatures of bishops from 1790–1870 will be analysed in terms of both their motifs and their significance. The bishops have been selected as the object of study because of their visibility as ex officio members of Parliament and leaders of the clergy. It is argued that graphic satire was used as a medium to criticise the bishops' influential position in the government and their defence of the Parliament of the Estates. Furthermore, it is demonstrated that as the techniques used to produce caricatures improved during the period, the images were more widely spread and had a greater impact on Swedish society. Finally, it is shown that caricature in Sweden reached a peak in the middle of the nineteenth century thanks to the extended debate on parliamentary reform and restrictions on press freedom.     

The geopolitics of the Irish-Catholic parish in nineteenth-century Montreal

Irish Catholics in nineteenth-century Montreal, as a minority within a larger French-Catholic population, encountered a cultural environment very different from that experienced by their compatriots in most cities of eastern North America. In contrast with the more typical situation in which the majority position of Irish Catholics enabled them to exercise leadership in local Catholic affairs, in Montreal they had to overcome numerous obstacles in order to obtain churches and parishes they could call their own. Diocesan and parish records demonstrate that these struggles, in particular the controversy created by the subdivision of the extensive parish of Notre Dame in the late 1860s were defining events in the formulation of Irish-Catholic ethnic consciousness in Montreal. Constructivist interpretations of ethnicity have drawn attention to the way in which conflictual (and less frequently accommodative) relations among groups contribute to the formation and preservation of ethnicities. Drawing on this approach, it is argued that religious institutions acted as catalysts for debates that encouraged Montreal's Irish Catholics to define themselves in relation to the French-Catholic majority. These debates had an important territorial dimension and ultimately led to the entrenchment of ethnic boundaries in the urban landscape through the creation of separate parishes for the two groups.     

Rewriting the history of Chinese families in nineteenth-century Australia

The nineteenth-century Chinese population in Australia was made up mostly of men, drawing many commentators to the conclusion these men faced an absence of family life, resulting in prostitution, gambling, opium use and other so-called vices. Recent research has, however, expanded and complicated our knowledge of Chinese families in New South Wales and Victoria, particularly concerning the extent to which Chinese men and white Australian women formed intimate relationships. This article traces the origins of the misconceptions about Chinese families in nineteenth-century Australia, and considers how new directions in scholarship over the past decade are providing methods for enlarging our knowledge. It argues that instead of being oddities or exceptions, Chinese-European families were integral to the story of Australia's early Chinese communities.