1890s Quotes

In the 1890s, when Freud was in the dawn of his career, he was struck by how many of his female patients were revealing childhood incest victimization to him. Freud concluded that child sexual abuse was one of the major causes of emotional disturbances in adult women and wrote a brilliant and humane paper called “The Aetiology of Hysteria.” However, rather than receiving acclaim from his colleagues for his ground-breaking insights, Freud met with scorn. He was ridiculed for believing that men of excellent reputation (most of his patients came from upstanding homes) could be perpetrators of incest. Within a few years, Freud buckled under this heavy pressure and recanted his conclusions. In their place he proposed the “Oedipus complex,” which became the foundation of modern psychology. According to this theory any young girl actually desires sexual contact with her father, because she wants to compete with her mother to be the most special person in his life. Freud used this construct to conclude that the episodes of incestuous abuse his clients had revealed to him had never taken place; they were simply fantasies of events the women had wished for when they were children and that the women had come to believe were real. This construct started a hundred-year history in the mental health field of blaming victims for the abuse perpetrated on them and outright discrediting of women’s and children’s reports of mistreatment by men. Once abuse was denied in this way, the stage was set for some psychologists to take the view that any violent or sexually exploitative behaviors that couldn’t be denied—because they were simply too obvious—should be considered mutually caused. Psychological literature is thus full of descriptions of young children who “seduce” adults into sexual encounters and of women whose “provocative” behavior causes men to become violent or sexually assaultive toward them. I wish I could say that these theories have long since lost their influence, but I can’t. A psychologist who is currently one of the most influential professionals nationally in the field of custody disputes writes that women provoke men’s violence by “resisting their control” or by “attempting to leave.” She promotes the Oedipus complex theory, including the claim that girls wish for sexual contact with their fathers. In her writing she makes the observation that young girls are often involved in “mutually seductive” relationships with their violent fathers, and it is on the basis of such “research” that some courts have set their protocols. The Freudian legacy thus remains strong.

Arsenic turned out to work even better, and was cheaper. Until it was banned in the 1890s, it was used widely, and heavy arsenic levels are sometimes a problem for archaeologists examining some old U.S. graveyards. What they generally find is that the bodies decomposed anyway, but the arsenic stayed.

THE ORIGINAL PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE, much like the Constitution itself, did not acknowledge the existence of God. Its author, Francis Bellamy, a Baptist minister from Rome, New York, was a decidedly religious man, but when he wrote the pledge in the 1890s he described himself as something that would seem an oxymoron in Eisenhower’s America: a “Christian socialist.

In Virginia, North Carolina, and Alabama, interracial coalitions briefly won statewide and would have won more often had elections been fair. African Americans still had the rights of citizenship -- at least formally -- until the 1890s.

Phrases like “hearts and minds” first arose in public discourse in the 1890s. The French called the strategy “peaceful penetration.

Economic inequality in the country in 2007 had reached the level of the Gilded Age in the 1890s. The gap between the top 1 percent of earners in America and everyone else had grown so wide that the top 1 percent of the population owned 35 percent of the nation’s private assets and was pocketing almost a quarter of all earnings.

In the 1890s, when Freud was in the dawn of his career, he was struck by how many of his female patients were revealing childhood incest victimization to him. Freud concluded that child sexual abuse was one of the major causes of emotional disturbances in adult women and wrote a brilliant and humane paper called “The Aetiology of Hysteria.” However, rather than receiving acclaim from his colleagues for his ground-breaking insights, Freud met with scorn. He was ridiculed for believing that men of excellent reputation (most of his patients came from upstanding homes) could be perpetrators of incest. Within a few years, Freud buckled under this heavy pressure and recanted his conclusions. In their place he proposed the “Oedipus complex,” which became the foundation of modern psychology. According to this theory any young girl actually desires sexual contact with her father, because she wants to compete with her mother to be the most special person in his life. Freud used this construct to conclude that the episodes of incestuous abuse his clients had revealed to him had never taken place; they were simply fantasies of events the women had wished for when they were children and that the women had come to believe were real. This construct started a hundred-year history in the mental health field of blaming victims for the abuse perpetrated on them and outright discrediting of women’s and children’s reports of mistreatment by men.

For a long time it was assumed that anything so miraculously energetic as radioactivity must be beneficial. For years, manufacturers of toothpaste and laxatives put radioactive thorium in their products, and at least until the late 1920s the Glen Springs Hotel in the Finger Lakes region of New York (and doubtless others as well) featured with pride the therapeutic effects of its ‘Radio-active mineral springs27’. It wasn’t banned in consumer products until 193828. By this time it was much too late for Mme Curie, who died of leukaemia in 1934. Radiation, in fact, is so pernicious and long-lasting that even now her papers from the 1890s – even her cookbooks – are too dangerous to handle. Her lab books are kept in lead-lined boxes29 and those who wish to see them must don protective clothing.

Each of us has Heaven and Hell in him, Basil,' cried Dorian, with a wild gesture of despair.

As Elizabeth Blackmar and Ray Rosenzweig wrote in their magisterial history of [Central Park in NYC]: 'The issue of demoncratic access to the park has also been raised by the increasing number of homeless New Yorkers. Poor people--from the 'squatters' of the 1850s to the 'tramps' of the 1870s and 1890s to the Hooverville residents of the 1930s--have always turned to the park land for shelter...The growing visibility of homeless people in Central Park osed in the starkest terms the contradiction between Americans' commitment to democratic space and their acquiescence in vast disparities of wealth and power.

Liberty produces wealth, and wealth destroys liberty.

But the 1890s may also count as the first time in human history when market manipulation during a climate crisis crashed the world economy.

Commercial boot polishes didn’t become available until the 1890s.

That’s the rankest psychologism, and was conclusively revealed as hogwash by Gottlob Frege in the 1890s!

Occasionally people make the mistake of asking me where a word comes from. They never make this mistake twice. I am naturally a stern and silent fellow; even forbidding. But there’s something about etymology and where words come from that overcomes my inbuilt taciturnity. A chap once asked me where the word biscuit came from. He was eating one at the time and had been struck by curiosity. I explained to him that a biscuit is cooked twice, or in French bi-cuit, and he thanked me for that. So I added that the bi in biscuit is the same bi that you get in bicycle and bisexual, to which he nodded. And then, just because it occurred to me, I told him that the word bisexual wasn’t invented until the 1890s and that it was coined by a psychiatrist called Richard von Krafft-Ebing and did he know that Ebing also invented the word masochism? He told me firmly that he didn’t. Did he know about Mr. Masoch, after whom masochism was named? He was a novelist and… The fellow told me that he didn’t know about Mr. Masoch, that he didn’t want to know about Mr. Masoch, and that his one ambition in life was to eat his biscuit in peace.

The older America, until the 1890s and in some respects until 1914, was wrapped in the security of continental isolation, village society, the Protestant denominations, and a flourishing industrial capitalism. But reluctantly, year by year, over several decades, it has been drawn into the twentieth century and forced to cope with its unpleasant realities: first the incursions of cosmopolitanism and skepticism, then the disappearance of American isolation and easy military security, the collapse of traditional capitalism and its supplementation by a centralized welfare state, finally the unrelenting costs and stringencies of the Second World War, the Korean War, and the cold war. As a consequence, the heartland of America, filled with people who are often fundamentalist in religion, nativist in prejudice, isolationist in foreign policy, and conservative in economics, has constantly rumbled with an underground revolt against all these tormenting manifestations of our modern predicament.

We have permitted cynical political reactionaries and the spokesmen of large corporations to pre-empt these basic libertarian American ideals. We have permitted them not only to become the specious "voice" of these ideals such that individualism has been used to justify egotism; the "pursuit of happiness" to justify greed, and even our emphasis on local and regional autonomy has been used to justify parochialism, insularism, and exclusivity -- often against ethnic minorities and so-called "deviant" individuals. We have even permitted these reactionaries to stake out a claim to the word "libertarian," a word, in fact, that was literally devised in the 1890s in France by Elisée Reclus as a substitute for the word "anarchist," which the government had rendered an illegal expression for identifying one's views. The propertarians, in effect -- acolytes of Ayn Rand, the "earth mother" of greed, egotism, and the virtues of property -- have appropriated expressions and traditions that should have been expressed by radicals but were willfully neglected because of the lure of European and Asian traditions of "socialism," "socialisms" that are now entering into decline in the very countries in which they originated.

The nation’s forests were being cut faster than they could grow back. In the 1890s, while Aldo was growing up, the United States had begun to set aside forest reserves to protect the trees. Then, while Aldo was in high school, one of the country’s first forestry schools opened at Yale University. Aldo knew immediately what he wanted to do. If he could become a forester, he could get paid to work in the woods all day. How could a job get any better?

War. In 1901, he graduated from the Virginia Military Institute, where he marched before Stonewall Jackson’s widow. He soon joined the Army, which then was recovering from its low ebb of the 1890s, the decade when the frontier officially closed and the last of the Indian wars ended. The Army expanded rapidly in the wake of the Spanish–American War of 1898, almost quadrupling in size to 100,000. As part of that growth, George Marshall received his commission. In this newly energized force, he stood out as a young officer. Marshall was temporarily posted to Fort Douglas, Utah—originally placed on a hillside overlooking Salt Lake City to keep an eye on Brigham Young’s nascent and hostile Mormon empire. One

There is irony here: the heyday of the railroad would be the 1880s and 1890s. So the Crash of 1850 was due to speculative fever and the wealth created by science, but the real job of railing the world would take many more decades to mature.

The female vampire exemplifies fears of the non-heterosexual reproduction of women—the literal rejection of mankind. As the criminologist Cesare Lombroso claimed in an 1896 account of prostitution, ‘Woman being naturally and organically monogamous and frigid, love is for her a voluntary slavery’. Such fears were actualized in the ‘New Woman’ of the mid-1890s: women who smoked, dressed casually, rode bicycles, educated themselves, and pursued careers, seemingly oblivious of spousal and maternal responsibilities.

The question will arise and arise in your day, though perhaps not fully in mine: Which shall rule — wealth or man? Which shall lead — money or intellect? Who shall fill public stations — educated and patriotic freemen or the feudal serfs of corporate capital?

Thus the Russian working class had contradictory characteristics for a Marxist diagnosing its revolutionary potential. Yet the empirical evidence of the period from the 1890s to 1914 suggests that in fact Russia's working class, despite its close links with the peasantry, was exceptionally militant and revolutionary. Large-scale strikes were frequent, the workers showed considerable solidarity against management and state authority, and their demands were usually political as well as economic. In the 1905 Revolution, the workers of St Petersburg and Moscow organized their own revolutionary institutions, the soviets, and continued the struggle after the Tsar's constitutional concessions in October and the collapse of the middle-class liberals' drive against the autocracy

The U.S. Supreme Court found openly anti-black ordinances unconstitutional in 1917 in Buchanan v. Warley, but sundown towns and suburbs nevertheless acted as if they had the power to be formally all-white until at least 1960; informally, some communities have never given up this idea. The federal government was hardly likely to enforce Buchanan v. Warley until after World War II; on the contrary, it was busily creating all-white suburbs itself until then. After 1917, most sundown suburbs resorted to restrictive covenants. Covenants were usually private, part of the deed one signed when buying from the developer. Like the Great Retreat, restrictive covenants first targeted Chinese Americans in the West, originating in California in the 1890s, and then spread to the East, where Jews and blacks were targeted for exclusion.

the late 1890s as the U.S. government intensified its push for the culmination of its assimilation campaign: allotment. Under the policy, the Osage reservation would be divvied up into 160-acre parcels, into real estate, with each tribal member receiving one allotment, while the rest of the territory would be opened to settlers.

Medals are great encouragement to young men and lead them to feel their work is of value, I remember how keenly I felt this when in the 1890s. I received the Darwin Medal and the Huxley Medal. When one is old, one wants no encouragement and one goes on with one's work to the extent of one's power, because it has become habitual.

You hear it in every political speech, “vote for me, we’ll get the dream back.” They all reiterate it in similar words—you even hear it from people who are destroying the dream, whether they know it or not. But the “dream” has to be sustained, otherwise how are you going to get people in the richest, most powerful country in world history, with extraordinary advantages, to face the reality that they see around them? Inequality is really unprecedented. If you look at total inequality today, it’s like the worst periods of American history. But if you refine it more closely, the inequality comes from the extreme wealth in a tiny sector of the population, a fraction of 1 percent. There were periods like the Gilded Age in the 1890s and the Roaring Twenties and so on, when a situation developed rather similar to this, but the current period is extreme. Because if you look at the wealth distribution, the inequality mostly comes from super-wealth—literally, the top one-tenth of a percent are just super-wealthy. This is the result of over thirty years of a shift in social and economic policy. If you check you find that over the course of these years the government policy has been modified completely against the will of the population to provide enormous benefits to the very rich. And for most of the population, the majority, real incomes have almost stagnated for over thirty years. The middle class in that sense, that unique American sense, is under severe attack. A significant part of the American Dream is class mobility: You’re born poor, you work hard, you get rich. The idea that it is possible for everyone to get a decent job, buy a home, get a car, have their children go to school . . . It’s all collapsed.

a subtly constructed reflex machine which can mimic the human personality perfectly... So perfect is his reproduction of a whole and normal man that no one who examines him in a clinical setting can point out in scientific or objective terms why, or hot, he is not real." - A description of the term "psychopath" by Dr. Hervey Cleckley in the 1890s.

Guests brought their own servants, too, so at weekends it was not unusual for the number of people within a country house to swell by as many as 150. Amid such a mass of bodies, confusion was inevitable. On one occasion in the 1890s Lord Charles Beresford, a well-known rake, let himself into what he believed was his mistress’s bedroom and with a lusty cry of ‘Cock-a-doodle-doo!’ leapt into the bed, only to discover that it was occupied by the Bishop of Chester and his wife. To avoid such confusions, guests at Wentworth Woodhouse, a stately pile in Yorkshire, were given silver boxes containing personalized confetti, which they could sprinkle through the corridors to help them find their way back to, or between, rooms.

While white mob violence against African Americans was an obsession in the South, it was not limited to that region. White supremacy was and is an American reality. Whites lynched blacks in nearly every state, including New York, Minnesota, and California. Wherever blacks were present in significant numbers, the threat of being lynched was always real. Blacks had to “watch their step,” no matter where they were in America. A black man could be walking down the road, minding his business, and his life could suddenly change by meeting a white man or a group of white men or boys who on a whim decided to have some fun with a Negro; and this could happen in Mississippi or New York, Arkansas, or Illinois. By the 1890s, lynching fever gripped the South, spreading like cholera, as white communities made blacks their primary target, and torture their focus. Burning the black victim slowly for hours was the chief method of torture. Lynching became a white media spectacle, in which prominent newspapers, like the Atlanta Constitution, announced to the public the place, date, and time of the expected hanging and burning of black victims. Often as many as ten to twenty thousand men, women, and children attended the event. It was a family affair, a ritual celebration of white supremacy, where women and children were often given the first opportunity to torture black victims—burning black flesh and cutting off genitals, fingers, toes, and ears as souvenirs. Postcards were made from the photographs taken of black victims with white lynchers and onlookers smiling as they struck a pose for the camera. They were sold for ten to twenty-five cents to members of the crowd, who then mailed them to relatives and friends, often with a note saying something like this: “This is the barbeque we had last night.”[17]

The three richest people in the world possess more financial assets than all the people in the forty-eight poorest countries added together. The wealthiest one percent of the human population owns more than the bottom seventy percent. And so on. Also, note that these disparities in wealth have been increasing since 1980 to the present, and are one of the defining characteristics of neoliberalism. Inequality has now reached levels not seen since the so-called Gilded Age of the 1890s. Some angles of evidence now suggest this is the most wealth-inequal moment in human history, surpassing the feudal era for instance, and the early warrior/priest/peasant states. Also, the two billion poorest people on the planet still lack access to basics like toilets, housing, food, health care, education, and so on. This means that fully one

There were vases of silk roses carefully centered on crocheted doilies, figurines of puppies carrying roses in their mouths on lace doilies, and delicate rose-covered tea sets placed on paper doilies. And that was just the start of it. It all had a really old feel to it as well, like I'd been transported back to the 1890s. Adrian stood behind us, just outside the door, and I was pretty sure I heard him mutter, "Needs more rabbits.

To argue that this development has anything to do with the technological progress during this period, that technological necessities which in Germany operated in the 1880s and 1890s, made themselves felt here in the 1930s, is not much less absurd than the claim, implied in a statement of Mussolini, that Italy had to abolish individual freedom before other European people because its civilization had marched so far in advance of the rest!

New statistical and racial identities forged out of raw census data showed that African Americans, as 12 percent of the population, made up 30 percent of the nation’s prison population. Although specially designed race-conscious laws, discriminatory punishments, and new forms of everyday racial surveillance had been institutionalized by the 1890s as a way to suppress black freedom, white social scientists presented the new crime data as objective, color-blind, and incontrovertible.

This is a nation of inconsistencies. The Puritans fleeing from oppression became oppressors. We fought England for our liberty and put chains on four million of blacks. We wiped out slavery and our tariff laws and national banks began a system of white wage slavery worse than the first. Wall Street owns the country. It is no longer a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for Wall Street. The great common people of this country are slaves, and monopoly is the master.

She had a significant following in Paris, where a group of hashish-eating daredevils, under the leadership of Dr. Louis-Alphonse Cahagnet, had been experimenting with monster doses (ten times the amount typically ingested at the soirees of Le Club des Haschischins) to send the soul on an ecstatic out-of-the-body journey through intrepid spheres. It was via Parisian theosophical contacts that the great Irish poet and future Nobel laureate William Butler Yeats first turned on to hashish. An avid occultist, Yeats much preferred hashish to peyote (the hallucinogenic cactus), which he also sampled. Yeats was a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and its literary affiliate, the London-based Rhymers Club, which met in the 1890s. Emulating Le Club des Haschischins, the Rhymers used hashish to seduce the muse and stimulate occult insight.6 Another member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, Aleister Crowley, was a notorious dope fiend and practitioner of the occult arts. Crowley conducted magical experiments while bingeing on morphine, cocaine, peyote, ether, and ganja.

Although a little noisy at first, in a bizarre twist of fate, electronic music became popular in France in the 1890’s before fizzling out in favor of Swing music – which somehow made an early appearance in the 1900’s. In another alternative timeline, the Beatles never existed and England invented popcorn and hamburgers in the 1840’s. Damn, that’s what almost happened last time again, thought Scrooby tensely, while maneuvering himself onto a stronger looking branch. Details, everything was about the details. Sometimes there was almost too much detail to keep up with.

For years, manufacturers of toothpaste and laxatives put radioactive thorium in their products, and at least until the late 1920s the Glen Springs Hotel in the Finger Lakes region of New York (and doubtless others as well) featured with pride the therapeutic effects of its “Radioactive mineral springs.” Radioactivity wasn’t banned in consumer products until 1938. By this time it was much too late for Madame Curie, who died of leukemia in 1934. Radiation, in fact, is so pernicious and long lasting that even now her papers from the 1890s—even her cookbooks—are too dangerous to handle.

Farmers in the South, West, and Midwest, however, were still building a major movement to escape from the control of banks and merchants lending them supplies at usurious rates; agricultural cooperatives—cooperative buying of supplies and machinery and marketing of produce—as well as cooperative stores, were the remedy to these conditions of virtual serfdom. While the movement was not dedicated to the formation of worker co-ops, in its own way it was at least as ambitious as the Knights of Labor had been. In the late 1880s and early 1890s it swept through southern and western states like a brushfire, even, in some places, bringing black and white farmers together in a unity of interest. Eventually this Farmers’ Alliance decided it had to enter politics in order to break the power of the banks; it formed a third party, the People’s Party, in 1892. The great depression of 1893 only spurred the movement on, and it won governorships in Kansas and Colorado. But in 1896 its leaders made a terrible strategic blunder in allying themselves with William Jennings Bryan of the Democratic party in his campaign for president. Bryan lost the election, and Populism lost its independent identity. The party fell apart; the Farmers’ Alliance collapsed; the movement died, and many of its cooperative associations disappeared. Thus, once again, the capitalists had managed to stomp out a threat to their rule.171 They were unable to get rid of all agricultural cooperatives, however, even with the help of the Sherman “Anti-Trust” Act of 1890.172 Nor, in fact, did big business desire to combat many of them, for instance the independent co-ops that coordinated buying and selling. Small farmers needed cooperatives in order to survive, whether their co-ops were independent or were affiliated with a movement like the Farmers’ Alliance or the Grange. The independent co-ops, moreover, were not necessarily opposed to the capitalist system, fitting into it quite well by cooperatively buying and selling, marketing, and reducing production costs. By 1921 there were 7374 agricultural co-ops, most of them in regional federations. According to the census of 1919, over 600,000 farmers were engaged in cooperative marketing or purchasing—and these figures did not include the many farmers who obtained insurance, irrigation, telephone, or other business services from cooperatives.173

If you had walked through the pleasant Tuscan countryside in the 1890's, you might have come upon a somewhat long-haired teenage high school dropout on the road to Pavia. His teachers in Germany had told him that he would never amount to anything, that his questions destroyed classroom discipline, that he would be better off out of school. So he left and wandered, delighting in the freedom of Northern Italy, where he could ruminate on matters remote from the subjects he had been force-fed in his highly disciplined Prussian schoolroom. His name was Albert Einstein, and his ruminations changed the world.

Her family’s distress increased in the late 1890s as the U.S. government intensified its push for the culmination of its assimilation campaign: allotment. Under the policy, the Osage reservation would be divvied up into 160-acre parcels, into real estate, with each tribal member receiving one allotment, while the rest of the territory would be opened to settlers. The allotment system, which had already been imposed on many tribes, was designed to end the old communal way of life and turn American Indians into private-property owners—a situation that would, not incidentally, make it easier to procure their land.

They were growing up in the golden age of comic books. Comic strips, or “funnies,” had begun appearing in the pages of newspapers in the 1890s. But comic books date only to the 1930s. They’d been more or less invented by Maxwell Charles Gaines (everyone called him Charlie), a former elementary school principal who was working as a salesman for the Eastern Color Printing Company, in Waterbury, Connecticut, when he got the idea that the pages of funnies that appeared in the Sunday papers could be printed cheaply, stapled together, and sold as magazines, or “comic books.” In 1933, Gaines started selling the first comic book on newsstands; it was called Funnies on Parade.

People called Mother a beauty, when she was young. I remember her very well in those days—until I was fourteen or fifteen she was as beautiful as ever. When I compare that memory of her with Satsuko, the contrast is really striking. Satsuko is also called a beauty. That was the main reason why Jokichi married her. But between these two beauties, between the 1890’s and now, what a change has taken place in the physical appearance of the Japanese woman! For example, Mother’s feet were beautiful too, but Satsuko’s have an altogether different kind of beauty. They hardly seem to belong to a woman of the same race. Mother had dainty feet, small enough to nestle in the palm of my hand, and as she tripped along in her straw sandals she took extremely short, mincing steps with her toes turned in. (I am reminded that in my dream Mother’s feet were bare except for her sandals, even though she was dressed to go visiting. Perhaps she was deliberately showing off her feet to me.) All Meiji women had that pigeon-like walk, not just beauties. As for Satsuko’s feet, they are elegantly long and slender; she boasts that ordinary Japanese shoes are too wide for her. On the contrary, my mother’s feet were fairly broad, rather like those of the Bodhisattva of Mercy in the Sangatstudo in Nara. Also, the women of their day were short in stature. Women under five feet were not uncommon. Having been born in the Meiji era, I am only about five feet two myself, but Satsuko is an inch and a half taller.

And the time was also coming when the great purges, long in blueprint, could no longer be postponed. The whole subject of the slaughter by a revolution of its children is mysterious. But it is clear that the group warfare, by the ‘logic of things,’ had opened into the next stage: the fanatical idealists of the 1880's and 1890's needed to be destroyed by the realists now in control of the Party, their younger fanatics of the apparatus, and their Calibans (a new breed). Some of the original revolutionaries had become disillusioned, and there is nothing worse than an ex-believer. Some were haunted by old romantic notions of ‘freedom,’ and therefore opposed the rough measures needed to forge a modern totalitarian state. Some probably still dreamed they could change the balance, and leadership, of the Party.

Man Made God: A Collection of Essays (Walker, Barbara G.;Murdock, D.M.;Acharya S;D.M. Murdock) - Your Highlight on page 229 | Location 5078-5084 | Added on Friday, March 20, 2015 12:14:38 PM Published in the 1890s, suffragette Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s The Christian Church and Women said: The Church has done more to degrade women than all other adverse influences put together... Out of the doctrine of original sin grew the crimes and miseries of asceticism, celibacy, and witchcraft, woman becoming the helpless victim of all the delusions generated in the brain of man... The clergy everywhere sustained witchcraft as a Bible doctrine... So long as the pulpits teach woman’s inferiority and subjection, she can never command honor and respect... There is nothing more pathetic in all history than the hopeless resignation of woman to the outrages she has been taught to believe are ordained of God.

Without in any way diminishing the horror on the Holocaust, to a certain extent we can understand Nazism as European colonialism and imperialism brought home. The decimation of the indigenous populations of the Americas and Australia, the tens of millions who died of famine in India under British rule, the ten million killed by Belgian king Leopold's Congo Free State, and the horrors of transatlantic slavery are but a sliver of the mass death and societal decimation wrought by European powers prior to the rise of Hitler. Early concentration camps (known as "reservations") were set up by the American government to imprison indigenous populations, by the Spanish monarchy to contain Cuban revolutionaries in the 1890s, and by the British during the Boer War at the turn of the century. Well before the Holocaust, the German government had committed genocide against Herero and Nama people of southwest Africa through the use of concentration camps and other methods between 1904 and 1907.

New Orleans at the nexus of gold rush, immigration, war, and trade created a fertile playground for a variety of "mysterious affections" between men. What Whitman would later call "adhesiveness" — his term for male-male love borrowed from the pseudoscience of phrenology — was on full display in the Crescent City. Prior to the existence of a modern concept of homosexuality (as sexual orientation), hand-holding, embracing, or sharing a bed were broadly considered appropriate expressions of bonding between members of the same sex. A city like New Orleans, overrun with transitory young men of marriageable age without local family ties, invited further experimentation. When Whitman was pressed, late in life, about his sexual history in New Orleans, he became flustered, quickly making up stories about affairs with women and having fathered numerous illegitimate children. The vehemence of his old-age denials suggests both an awareness of the growing homophobia of the 1890s and a conscious desire to rewrite this particular part of his biography.

New Orleans at the nexus of gold rush, immigration, war, and trade created a fertile playground for a variety of :mysterious affections" between men. What Whitman would later call "adhesiveness" — his term for male-male love borrowed from the pseudoscience of phrenology — was on full display in the Crescent City. Prior to the existence of a modern concept of homosexuality (as sexual orientation), hand-holding, embracing, or sharing a bed were broadly considered appropriate expressions of bonding between members of the same sex. A city like New Orleans, overrun with transitory young men of marriageable age without local family ties, invited further experimentation. When Whitman was pressed, late in life, about his sexual history in New Orleans, he became flustered, quickly making up stories about affairs with women and having fathered numerous illegitimate children. The vehemence of his old-age denials suggests both an awareness of the growing homophobia of the 1890s and a conscious desire to rewrite this particular part of his biography.

So Marxism, for all its plurality, has been marked by the interplay of theoretical and political preoccupations. It has also been punctuated by widely perceived moments of internal crisis – starting in the late 1890s with the publication of Eduard Bernstein’s Preconditions of Socialism, but again during the First World War, in the 1930s, and at the end of the 1970s. Indeed, one of us has written, “Marxism is constitutively, from Marx’s contribution onwards, . . . crisis theory” (Kouvelakis 2005, 25). Perhaps there are two main reasons for this succession of crises. First, Marxism is inherently tied to capitalism, at once the object of the critique of political economy and an enemy to be vanquished. But since, as Marx and Engels showed in the Communist Manifesto, it is also a dynamic system constantly transforming itself, Marxism constantly falls victim to the anxiety that it is not adequate to its Protean antagonist, that it must run to keep up with the metamorphoses of bourgeois society. This is then connected to a second source of anxiety, namely that capitalism continues to exist, and that therefore the communist project remains unrealized, two centuries now after Marx’s birth.

Bunny was the first to leave. For three weeks he had been in a panic over a paper he had to write for his fourth course, something called Masterworks of English Literature. The assignment was twenty-five pages on John Donne. We’d all wondered how he was going to do it, because he was not much of a writer; though his dyslexia was the convenient culprit the real problem was not that but his attention span, which was as short as a child’s. He seldom read the required texts or supplemental books for any course. Instead, his knowledge of any given subject tended to be a hodgepodge of confused facts, often strikingly irrelevant or out of context, that he happened to remember from classroom discussions or believed himself to have read somewhere. When it was time to write a paper he would supplement these dubious fragments by cross-examination of Henry (whom he was in the habit of consulting, like an atlas) or with information from either The World Book Encyclopedia or a reference work entitled Men of Thought and Deed, a six-volume work by E. Tipton Chatsford, Rev., dating from the 1890s, consisting of thumbnail sketches of great men through the ages, written for children, full of dramatic engravings.

Frank Baum’s book the Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which appeared in 1990, is widely recognized to be a parable for the Populist campaign of William Jennings Bryan, who twice ran for president on the Free Silver platform- vowing to replace the gold standard with a bimetallic system that would allow the free creation of silver money alongside gold. As with the Greenbackers, one of the main constituencies for the movement was debtors: particularly, Midwestern farm families such as Dorothy’s, who had been facing a massive wave of foreclosures during the severe recession of the 1890s. According to the Populist reading, the Wicked Witches of the East and West represent the East and West Coast bankers (promoters of and benefactors from the tight money supply), the Scarecrow represented the farmers (who didn’t have the brains to avoid the debt trap), the Tin Woodsman was the industrial proletariat (who didn’t have the heart to act in solidarity with the farmers), the Cowardly Lion represented the political class (who didn’t have the courage to intervene). The yellow brick road, silver slippers, emerald city, and hapless Wizard presumably speak for themselves. “Oz” is of course the standard abbreviation for “ounce.

As Mollie said to Dailey in the 1890s: "I am told that there are five other Mollie Fanchers, who together, make the whole of the one Mollie Fancher, known to the world; who they are and what they are I cannot tell or explain, I can only conjecture." Dailey described five distinct Mollies, each with a different name, each of whom he met (as did Aunt Susan and a family friend, George Sargent). According to Susan Crosby, the first additional personality appeared some three years after the after the nine-year trance, or around 1878. The dominant Mollie, the one who functioned most of the time and was known to everyone as Mollie Fancher, was designated Sunbeam (the names were devised by Sargent, as he met each of the personalities). The four other personalities came out only at night, after eleven, when Mollie would have her usual spasm and trance. The first to appear was always Idol, who shared Sunbeam's memories of childhood and adolescence but had no memory of the horsecar accident. Idol was very jealous of Sunbeam's accomplishments, and would sometimes unravel her embroidery or hide her work. Idol and Sunbeam wrote with different handwriting, and at times penned letters to each other. The next personality Sargent named Rosebud: "It was the sweetest little child's face," he described, "the voice and accent that of a little child." Rosebud said she was seven years old, and had Mollie's memories of early childhood: her first teacher's name, the streets on which she had lived, children's songs. She wrote with a child's handwriting, upper- and lowercase letters mixed. When Dailey questioned Rosebud about her mother, she answered that she was sick and had gone away, and that she did not know when she would be coming back. As to where she lived, she answered "Fulton Street," where the Fanchers had lived before moving to Gates Avenue. Pearl, the fourth personality, was evidently in her late teens. Sargent described her as very spiritual, sweet in expression, cultured and agreeable: "She remembers Professor West [principal of Brooklyn Heights Seminary], and her school days and friends up to about the sixteenth year in the life of Mollie Fancher. She pronounces her words with an accent peculiar to young ladies of about 1865." Ruby, the last Mollie, was vivacious, humorous, bright, witty. "She does everything with a dash," said Sargent. "What mystifies me about 'Ruby,' and distinguishes her from the others, is that she does not, in her conversations with me, go much into the life of Mollie Fancher. She has the air of knowing a good deal more than she tells.

times had changed. The chief impetus for rethinking the value of colonies was the global Depression. It had triggered a desperate scramble among the world’s powers to prop up their flagging economies with protective tariffs. This was an individual solution with excruciating collective consequences. As those trade barriers rose, global trade collapsed, falling by two-thirds between 1929 and 1932. This was exactly the nightmare Alfred Thayer Mahan had predicted back in the 1890s. As international trade doors slammed shut, large economies were forced to subsist largely on their own domestic produce. Domestic, in this context, included colonies, though, since one of empire’s chief benefits was the unrestricted economic access it brought to faraway lands. It mattered to major imperial powers—the Dutch, the French, the British—that they could still get tropical products such as rubber from their colonies in Asia. And it mattered to the industrial countries without large empires—Germany, Italy, Japan—that they couldn’t. The United States was in a peculiar position. It had colonies, but they weren’t its lifeline. Oil, cotton, iron, coal, and many of the important minerals that other industrial economies found hard to secure—the United States had these in abundance on its enormous mainland. Rubber and tin it could still purchase from Malaya via its ally Britain. It did take a few useful goods from its tropical colonies, such as coconut oil from the Philippines and Guam and “Manila hemp” from the Philippines (used to make rope and sturdy paper, hence “manila envelopes” and “manila folders”). Yet the United States didn’t depend on its colonies in the same way that other empires did. It was, an expert in the 1930s declared, “infinitely more self-contained” than its rivals. Most of what the United States got from its colonies was sugar, grown on plantations in Hawai‘i, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the Philippines. Yet even in sugar, the United States wasn’t dependent. Sugarcane grew in the subtropical South, in Louisiana and Florida. It could also be made from beets, and in the interwar years the United States bought more sugar from mainland beet farmers than it did from any of its territories. What the Depression drove home was that, three decades after the war with Spain, the United States still hadn’t done much with its empire. The colonies had their uses: as naval bases and zones of experimentation for men such as Daniel Burnham and Cornelius Rhoads. But colonial products weren’t integral to the U.S. economy. In fact, they were potentially a threat.

The 1890s were apprentice years for Yeats. Though he played with Indian and Irish mythology, his symbolism really developed later. The decade was for him, as a poet, the years of lyric, of the Rhymers’ Club, of those contemporaries whom he dubbed the ‘tragic generation’. ‘I have known twelve men who killed themselves,’ Arthur Symons looked back from his middle-aged madness, reflecting on the decade of which he was the doyen. The writers and artists of the period lived hectically and recklessly. Ernest Dowson (1867–1900) (one of the best lyricists of them all – ‘I cried for madder music and for stronger wine’) died from consumption at thirty-two; Lionel Johnson (1867–1902), a dipsomaniac, died aged thirty-five from a stroke. John Davidson committed suicide at fifty-two; Oscar Wilde, disgraced and broken by prison and exile, died at forty-six; Aubrey Beardsley died at twenty-six. This is not to mention the minor figures of the Nineties literary scene: William Theodore Peters, actor and poet, who starved to death in Paris; Hubert Crankanthorpe, who threw himself in the Thames; Henry Harland, editor of The Yellow Book, who died of consumption aged forty-three, or Francis Thompson, who fled the Hound of Heaven ‘down the nights and down the days’ and who died of the same disease aged forty-eight. Charles Conder (1868–1909), water-colourist and rococo fan-painter, died in an asylum aged forty-one.

However, Rothschild was easily the most scientific collector of his age, though also the most regrettably lethal, for in the 1890s he became interested in Hawaii, perhaps the most temptingly vulnerable environment Earth has yet produced. Millions of years of isolation had allowed Hawaii to evolve 8,800 unique species of animals and plants. Of particular interest to Rothschild were the islands’ colorful and distinctive birds, often consisting of very small populations inhabiting extremely specific ranges. The tragedy for many Hawaiian birds was that they were not only distinctive, desirable, and rare—a dangerous combination in the best of circumstances—but also often heartbreakingly easy to take. The greater koa finch, an innocuous member of the honeycreeper family, lurked shyly in the canopies of koa trees, but if someone imitated its song it would abandon its cover at once and fly down in a show of welcome. The last of the species vanished in 1896, killed by Rothschild’s ace collector Harry Palmer, five years after the disappearance of its cousin the lesser koa finch, a bird so sublimely rare that only one has ever been seen: the one shot for Rothschild’s collection. Altogether during the decade or so of Rothschild’s most intensive collecting, at least nine species of Hawaiian birds vanished, but it may have been more. Rothschild was by no means alone in his zeal to capture birds at more or less any cost. Others in fact were more ruthless. In 1907 when a well-known collector named Alanson Bryan realized that he had shot the last three specimens of black mamos, a species of forest bird that had only been discovered the previous decade, he noted that the news filled him with “joy.

NOBEL PRIZE–WINNER, British poet laureate, essayist, novelist, journalist, and short story writer Rudyard Kipling wrote for both children and adults, with many of his stories and poems focusing on British imperialism in India. His works were popular during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, even though many deemed his political views too conservative. Born on December 30, 1865, in Bombay, India, Kipling had a happy early childhood, but in 1871 he and his sister were sent to a boarding house called Lorne Lodge in Southsea, where he spent many disappointing years. He was accepted in 1877 to United Services College in the west of England. In 1882, he returned to his family in India, working as a journalist, associate editor, and correspondent for many publications, including Civil and Military Gazette, a publication in Lahore, Pakistan. He also wrote poetry. He found great success in writing after his 1889 return to England, where he was eventually appointed poet laureate. Some of his most famous writings, including The Jungle Book, Kim, Puck of Pook’s Hill, and Rewards and Fairies, saw publication in the 1890s and 1900s. It was during this period that he married Caroline Balestier, the sister of an American friend and publishing colleague. The couple settled in Vermont, where their two daughters were born. After a quarrel with his brother-in-law and grumblings from his American neighbors about his controversial political views, Kipling and his family returned to England. There, Caroline gave birth to a son in 1896. Tragically, their eldest daughter died in 1899. Later, Kipling’s son perished in battle during World War I. In 1907 Kipling was awarded the Nobel Prize. He died on January 18, 1936, and his ashes are buried in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey.

In the 1890s, Speaker of the House Thomas Reed took care of one opponent by observing that “with a few more brains he could be a halfwit.” Of another politician, Reed remarked, “He never opens his mouth without subtracting from the sum of human intelligence.”4 Americans once heard (or rather, read) such genuinely witty remarks and tried to emulate that wit. Today we parrot the witless and half-witted language used by politicians and radio shock jocks alike, men and women alike, and comedians of all races and ethnic origins.

For valid reasons, it's been a long time since you've heard an ancient truism cherished by the fight game: "As the heavyweights go, so goes boxing." The current heavyweight division, a quaint collection of overweight senior citizens, is probably the industry's least appealing crop since bare-knuckle brawling gave way to gloved combat in the 1890s.

The study of cannabinoids goes back over a century. CBN, at first thought to be the principal psycho-active agent, was identified in the 1890s, then, in the 1930s, CBD was isolated. However, it was not until 1964, with the post-war advances in organic chemistry, that two Israeli chemists, Gaoni and Mechoulam, isolated and identified THC. Since then, studies have discovered a long list of other cannabinoids, many of which have yet to be fully investigated.

(The pen would enjoy a second life years later, in the 1890s, when converted into the first electric tattoo needle.)

A source of continual embarrassment along the American frontier—from the late 1600s until the end of the Indian Wars, in the 1890s—was a phenomenon known as “the White Indians.” The term referred to white settlers who were kidnapped by Indians—or simply ran off to them—and became so enamored of that life that they refused to leave. According to many writers of the time, including Benjamin Franklin, the reverse never happened: Indians never ran off to join white society. And if a peace treaty required that a tribe give up their adopted members, these members would often have to be put under guard and returned home by force. Inevitably, many would escape to rejoin their Indian families. “Thousands of Europeans are Indians, and we have no examples of even one of those aborigines having from choice become European,” wrote a French-born writer in America named Michel-Guillaume-Saint-Jean de Crèvecoeur in an essay published in 1782.

Our fascination with the gothic peaks in times of anxiety, panic, and upheaval. The Victorian gothic revival of the 1890s was stoked by scientific, technological, and social change. Industrialization and urbanization sparked feelings of alienation. Darwin's theories of evolution and the changing roles of women fanned racist, misogynistic, homophobic, and colonialist fears of 'primitivism,' moral decay, and sexual depravity. In the nineteenth century, terror-inducing imagery had shifted away from crumbling castles to crime-infested cities, and fear of villains and ghosts was supplanted by a fear of madness and degeneration. In the twentieth century, we celebrated/mourned the death of authorship, of the grand narrative, of the self, 'going-one-better in eschatological eloquence,' as Jacques Derrida put it, 'the end of history...the end of subject, the end of man, the end of the West, the end of Oedipus, the end of the earth, Apocalypse Now.' A few years into the new millennium, we were zombie hordes, stalking social media for brains. The gothic is the fucked-either-way-and-freaking-the-fuck-out school of artistic interpretation, the hysterical framework of doom. And this tension between horror as morality tale and horror as decadent spectacle is, I believe, what fueled the pandemic of tabloid stories about wayward starlets that raged throughout 2006 and 2007. Celebrity train wreck stories begin, conservatively, as cautionary tales. A young woman, unprotected or legally emancipated, has moved alone from the relatively sheltered and secluded condition of parent-managed child stardom (because who, nowadays, is more cut off from the world than a child star?) into a corrupt and dangerous world, where her beauty, fame, youth, fortune, and sexual allure are regarded with a charged, ambivalent awe. She is instantly besieged with dangers, and preyed upon by unscrupulous adults. Until they can be contained again, by marriage or paternal protection, she exists in a constant state of uncertainty and peril. The peril is created, of course, by the 'author' - the media outlets that shape the train wreck's life, again and again, into thrilling, chilling tales of suspense.

Hindu-Muslim clashes occurred in the 1880s and 1890s in the towns of Multan, Isa Khel (Mianwali district), Dera Ghazi Khan, Delhi, Rohtak and Ludhiana.

…the end of the Cold War has brought not prosperity for all but a pitiless economic struggle for pole-position on the food chain of information capitalism. The neoliberalism and neocolonialism of the 1990s are the direct heir of the Manchester liberalism and colonialism of the 1890s, the only difference being that whereas Victorian rentiers extracted their Imperial textile-rents from the labor of the Great Unwashed, their postmodern analogues on Wall Street speculate on the viewing-rents of the Great Unwatched.

In France, Georges Vacher de Lapouge, the chief figure of French anthroposociology, led a comprehensive research programme in the 1890s, gaining sympathisers all over the Western world and some degree of academic legitimacy in his home country.96 His German colleague Otto Ammon, in contrast, met with strong opposition from the German anthropological establishment when he began putting forward his ideas in the late 1880s and 1890s. After the turn of the century, however, the roles were reversed, with Ammon winning increasing scientific acclaim in Germany and Lapouge being ostracised from the French scientific community.

After witnessing a particularly brutal Harvard–Yale match in the 1890s, boxing champ John L. Sullivan boarded a train for New York City. In the washroom, he encountered noted football official Paul Dashiell, who asked the prizefighter what he had thought of the match. Sullivan lowered his voice to a whisper before observing, “There’s murder in that game.

Mormonism had given up polygamy in the late 1890s in order to secure statehood for Utah,

Phonics was used to teach reading in America without question until the 1890s when John Dewey began a movement to change education from intellectual training to conditioning students to be obedient, conformist, non-thinkers. One of his disciples William Gray, dean of the University of Chicago’s School of Education, convinced the National Education Association that phonics instruction should be replaced with the look-say technique. (Look-say involves memorizing a whole word without recognizing the individual sounds of letters in the word. Committing the word to memory through repetition is a form of behavior conditioning.) In 1930 Scott Foresman published Gray’s new reader, Dick and Jane. These readers, or primers, soon gained dominance in American elementary schools.

Douglass was the most photographed American of the nineteenth century, explained in this book and especially by the intrepid research of three other scholars I rely upon.2 Although it can never really be measured, he may also have been, along with Mark Twain, the most widely traveled American public figure of his century. By the 1890s, in sheer miles and countless numbers of speeches, he had few rivals as a lecturer in the golden age of oratory. It is likely that more Americans heard Douglass speak than any other public figure of his times. Indeed, to see or hear Douglass became a kind of wonder of the American world. He struggled as well, with the pleasures and perils of fame as much as anyone else in his century, with the possible exceptions of General Ulysses S. Grant or P. T. Barnum. Douglass’s dilemma with fame was a matter of decades, not merely of moments, and fraught with racism.

Keaton’s modernism—brash in ambition but melancholy in tone—is that of his fellow 1890s babies F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hart Crane, who both made spectacular literary debuts in 1920. Like those writers (whom he almost certainly never read), Keaton was formally innovative, inclined to puncture social pretension, and given to making art that was, in a uniquely 1920s way, sardonic and romantic at once.

We offer over 100 new and used boats for sale, and we have a long association with some of the world’s most renowned motor boat and sailing boat manufacturers. With roots tracing back to the 1890’s Shepherds provides an unparalleled choice, unrivalled expertise and unbeatable service.

At the time of Vivekananda's synthesis of yoga in the 1890s, postural practice was primarily associated with the yogin (or, more popularly, "yogi"). This term designated in particular the haṭha yogins of the Nāth lineage, but was employed more loosely to refer to a variety of ascetics, magicians, and street performers. Often confused with the Mohammedan "fakir," the yogi came to symbolize all that was wrong in certain tributaries of the Hindu religion. The postural contortions of haṭha yoga were associated with backwardness and superstition, and many people considered them to have no place in the scientific and modern yoga

Studies of modern yoga have tended to elide the passage from Vivekananda's āsana-free manifestos of yoga in the mid-1890s to the well known posture-oriented forms that began to emerge in the 1920s. The two main studies in this area to date, by De Michelis (2004) and Alter (2004a), have focused on both these moments in the history of transnational yoga, but they have not offered a good explanation of why āsana was initially excluded and the ways in which it was eventually reclaimed.

1890s when a farmer walked into his backyard and over his field saw a cigar-shaped craft floating about forty feet off the ground. Below was one of his cows dangling by a thick cord.

The folk-like crafted goods of Sergei Maliutin, the principal artist at Talashkino, were pure invention. Maliutin was the creator of the first matrioshka, or Russian nesting doll, in 1891. At that time he was working at the Moscow zemstvo’s craft workshops at Sergiev Posad which specialized in making Russian toys. Contrary to the popular belief today, the matrioshka has no roots in Russian folk culture at all. It was dreamed up in response to a commission from the Mamontovs to make a Russian version of the Japanese nesting doll. Maliutin created a red-cheeked peasant girl in the shape of a barrel with a chicken underneath her arm. Each smaller doll portrayed a different aspect of peasant life; and at the core was a baby tightly swaddled in the Russian style. The design became immensely popular and by the end of the 1890s several million dolls were being manufactured every year. The myth was then established that the matrioshka was an ancient Russian toy.

To address such concerns, major breweries had started hiring “travellers,” men who would literally travel to places where the product was being sold to check on the quality. In the United Kingdom and Ireland, Guinness had employed several such men, including J. C. Haines, himself a former brewer, who traveled the London region for Guinness in the 1890s. Haines also became a Guinness “World Traveller,” making trips to Europe and the Middle East, as well as to Australia. Perhaps the most famous Guinness World Traveller was Arthur T. Shand, a former World Traveller for British ale brewer Allsopp, who was hired by Guinness in 1898. For the next 15 years, until the eve of World War I, the tireless Shand traveled throughout the United States and Canada, and also made visits to Latin America, South Africa, and Australia, which was the largest market for Foreign Extra Stout until eclipsed by the United States in 1910.

A black person born in Alabama in 1865 thus had much less chance of getting a good education and a well-paid job than did his white neighbours. His children, born in the 1880s and 1890s, started life with the same disadvantage – they, too, were born to an uneducated, poor family.

Nations sign treaties of cooperation, but even they arrive out of conflict. In case of conflict between two nations, they may seek friendship treaties or alliances with other powerful nations. Thus, when England, France and Russia learnt in the 1890s that Austria-Hungary, Germany and Italy had aligned themselves against the other two (France and Russia), the former three nations entered into a counter alliance. During the Cold War period, several alliances were concluded by countries of the two blocs. While the Eastern Bloc countries were led by the former USSR, the Western Bloc came to be led by the United States. When in 1971 a war between India and Pakistan became imminent, and it became clear that the USA and China were likely to side with Pakistan, a treaty of friendship was concluded between India and the Soviet Union. This treaty acted as a deterrent, and Pakistan's friends did not side with it in the war. The idea of this discussion is that cooperation at political level between countries arises out of conflict. So, conflict is more important for international relations than cooperation among nations.

One day in 1885, the twenty-three-year old Henry Ford got his first look at the gas-powered engine, and it was instant love. Ford had apprenticed as a machinist and had worked on every conceivable device, but nothing could compare to his fascination with this new type of engine, one that created its own power. He envisioned a whole new kind of horseless carriage that would revolutionize transportation. He made it his Life’s Task to be the pioneer in developing such an automobile. Working the night shift at the Edison Illuminating Company as an engineer, during the day he would tinker with the new internal-combustion engine he was developing. He built a workshop in a shed behind his home and started constructing the engine from pieces of scrap metal he salvaged from anywhere he could find them. By 1896, working with friends who helped him build a carriage, he completed his first prototype, which he called the Quadricycle, and debuted it on the streets of Detroit. At the time there were many others working on automobiles with gas-powered engines. It was a ruthlessly competitive environment in which new companies died by the day. Ford’s Quadricycle looked nice and ran well, but it was too small and incomplete for large-scale production. And so he began work on a second automobile, thinking ahead to the production end of the process. A year later he completed it, and it was a marvel of design. Everything was geared toward simplicity and compactness. It was easy to drive and maintain. All that he needed was financial backing and sufficient capital to mass-produce it. To manufacture automobiles in the late 1890s was a daunting venture. It required a tremendous amount of capital and a complex business structure, considering all of the parts that went into production. Ford quickly found the perfect backer: William H. Murphy, one of the most prominent businessmen in Detroit. The new company was dubbed the Detroit Automobile Company, and all who were involved had high hopes. But problems soon arose. The car Ford had designed as a prototype needed to be reworked—the parts came from different places; some of them were deficient and far too heavy for his liking. He kept trying to refine the design to come closer to his ideal. But it was taking far too long, and Murphy and the stockholders were getting restless. In 1901, a year and a half after it had started operation, the board of directors dissolved the company. They had lost faith in Henry Ford.

Federal intervention to change the institutions in the South started with the decision of the Supreme Court in 1944 that primary elections where only white people could stand were unconstitutional. As we have seen, blacks had been politically disenfranchised in the 1890s with the use of poll taxes and literacy tests (pages 351–357). These tests were routinely manipulated to discriminate against black people, while still allowing poor and illiterate whites to vote. In a famous example from the early 1960s, in Louisiana a white applicant was judged literate after giving the answer “FRDUM FOOF SPETGH” to a question about the state constitution. The Supreme Court decision in 1944 was the opening salvo in the longer battle to open up the political system to blacks, and the Court understood the importance of loosening white control of political parties.

Gandhi had come to South Africa to help settle a commercial dispute. He had, without expecting or anticipating it, become an activist for a political cause instead. Many Indians in the colony now knew of him; as did many Europeans. How did he respond to this public acclaim and public disparagement? His autobiography is silent on this score. But that he diligently followed the press for every trace of his name seems clear. In a steel almirah in an archive in Ahmedabad lie many volumes of newspaper clippings from the Natal of the 1890s, doubtless collected by Gandhi himself.

In the 1890’s horses, carrying people to work, dropped 4.5 million tons of manure on the streets of Manhattan, every year. That was the big environmental problem of the day. “NYC will be buried in horse manure by 1950!” screamed the headlines. It doesn’t matter what your opinion about this was. None of the people living in NY solved the problem despite the 1000s of opinions. People with passion for mechanics in Detroit made something called a car. Problem solved.

Since the early 1890s, when Wilfrid Laurier implemented the most ambitious immigration expansion the country has ever seen, we have always understood that immigration is essentially an economic policy. The argument that this is a conservative innovation is frequently made by those don’t know the country’s history very well. The economic value of immigration has always been recognized. We wouldn’t have much growth without it.

Black resistance caused lynchings to spike in the early 1890s. However, the White lynchers justified the spike in lynchings as corresponding to a spike in Black crime. This justification was accepted by a young W. E. B. Du Bois, by the middle-aged, ambitious principle of Alabama’s Tuskegee Institute, Booker T. Washington, and by a dying Frederick Douglass. It took a young antiracist Black woman to set these racist men straight. Mississippi-born Memphis journalist Ida B. Wells recoiled from the lynching of friends and the sheer number of lynchings during the peak of the era in 1892, when the number of Blacks lynched in the nation reached a whopping 255 souls. She released a blazing pamphlet in 1892 called Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases. From a sample of 728 lynching reports in recent years, Wells found that only about a third of lynching victims had “ever been charged with rape, to say nothing of those who were innocent of the charge.” White men were lying about Black-on-White rape, and hiding their own assaults of Black women, Wells raged.11

When he died penniless in 1880, more than 30,000 people lined Market Street for his funeral procession. In the 1890s, the gauntlet passed to Mayor Adolph Sutro, who used his fortune from the Comstock Lode silver mine to build monuments to himself, including the Sutro Baths, an indoor swimming complex next to the Cliff House that was more elaborate than the fantasy pools in Hawaii. The Baths closed when I was a kid, but you can still see the ruins. Over the decades, other luminaries included beat poets Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, a stripper named Carol Doda who headlined the city’s first topless club a few blocks from where we were sitting, and a high-end madam named Sally Stanford who became a restauranteur and later the Mayor of Sausalito. The list would not be complete without mentioning flamboyant lawyers like Melvin Belli, Jake Ehrlich, Vincent Hallinan, Tony Serra, and Nate Cohn. Nick “the Dick” was one of San Francisco’s few

Through the decade of the 1880s and into the early 1890s, Tolstoy and Fedorov met many times, and Tolstoy frequently refers to him in his letters and notebooks. For Tolstoy these were years of spiritual unrest. Never a complacent person unaware of his own self-development, Tolstoy in the late 1870S and early 1880s was passing through a stage of especially intense spiritual torment and particularly ruthless self-examination. His earlier religious faith, never terribly strong, had collapsed utterly, and he was seeking a new faith to live by. That he could not live a life strictly consistent with his deeply felt (and widely publicized) principles had always troubled him, and now tormented him. He had turned against the ideal of family life that he had so memorably depicted in War and Peace, but he still lived as-and at times very much enjoyed being-a family man. Theoretically he had turned against his own social class and against all art that did not illustrate some simple moral truth-and yet his biographers give us a charming picture of Tolstoy at age fifty and his old aesthetic and ideological enemy Turgenev, age sixty, sitting at opposite ends of a child's teeter-totter, seesawing up and down as children from the neighborhood laugh and applaud. Even during his famous "peasant" phase, in which he allowed himself to be portrayed by the artist Repin à la moujik behind a plow, we learn from his wife's diary that under his peasant smock he always wore silk underwear.

school. In the late 1890s John Dewey warned of this emerging disconnect in School and Society and sought in his own educational approach to recover the relationship between formal learning and community life that had been disrupted in most schools: From the standpoint of the child, the great waste in the school comes from his inability to utilize the experiences he gets outside the school in any complete and free way within the school itself; while, on the other hand, he is unable to apply in daily life what he is learning at school. That is the isolation of the school—its isolation from life. When the child gets into the schoolroom he has to put out of his mind a large part of the ideas, interests, and activities that predominate in his home and

The limitations of these methods make it easier to understand why so many women might leap at the prospect of removing hair through prolonged exposure to radiation. First introduced by professional physicians in the late 1890s, x-ray hair removal offered several distinct advantages over other techniques. To begin, x-rays were undeniably effective at removing hair, as even the staunchest critics grudgingly admitted.37

The science fiction magazine has played a unique role in the development of this fiction, functioning partly as a medium for publication and partly as a forum for ongoing debate about the nature of this fiction. SF pieces were being published in a range of popular magazines by the 1890s, but the first SF-dedicated periodical was Amazing Stories, founded in 1926 by Hugo Gernsback. The opening issue identified a tradition by publishing tales by Poe, Verne, and Wells, who Gernsback situated within what he was now calling ‘scientifiction’, tales in which ‘a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision’.

the laboratories established by German pharmaceutical and dye manufacturers in the 1880s and 1890s as the first truly institutionalized research laboratories, and to General Electric’s 1900 laboratory as the pioneer in America.17

Historian Joan Jacobs Brumberg researched the diaries of young women around the turn of the century and found that the girls’ primary concerns for self-improvement in the 1890s focused on character.51 They wrote about striving to be kinder and more concerned for others, working harder in school, and rejecting frivolity. One hundred years later, Brumberg found, the same age group focused its self-improvement on physical appearance, and that the means by which to achieve it almost always involved buying things.

You go back to the 1890s—we go back 110 years because it is so easy to stress the system to the breaking point where we don’t have basic sanitation, uncontaminated food or water, or the ability to control communicable diseases.

Later, large numbers worked on the railroads, performing the dangerous tasks that white workers refused to do, working (and dying) in snowslides and landslides. That is how the phrase “a Chinaman’s chance” originated. Although Chinese could not become citizens because a federal law, passed in 1890, reserved naturalized citizenship for “white persons,” there was stoop work for them to do. As times got harder, however, white workers began taking out their frustrations on Chinese workers. In 1860 an estimated forty thousand Chinese miners were driven off their claims by whites. In the wake of the 1873 economic depression, white workers in the West exploded in anti-Chinese uprisings, beating and attacking Chinese laborers and merchants and destroying their homes and businesses. From then on, no Chinese felt safe either in person or property. Confronted with this hostility from whites, Chinese workers in the West left the labor force and headed East, developing means of self-employment along the way. Because laundries and restaurants could be worked by the whole family and required relatively little knowledge of English and an outlay of only a few hundred dollars for equipment, Chinese became laundrymen and restaurateurs. By the mid-1890s “chop suey” had become popular in the United States, and cartoons of Chinese laundrymen saying, “No tickee, no laundry,” were a familiar feature in American newspapers.

Tesla applied for a patent on an electrical coil that is the most likely candidate for a non mechanical successor of his energy extractor. This is his “Coil for Electro magnets,” patent #512,340. It is a curious design, unlike an ordinary coil made by turning wire on a tube form, this one uses two wires laid next to each other on a form but with the end of the first one connected to the beginning of the second one. In the patent Tesla explains that this double coil will store many times the energy of a conventional coil.   The patent, however, gives no hint of what might have been its more unusual capability. In an article for Century Magazine, Tesla compares extracting energy from the environment to the work of other scientists who were, at that time, learning to condense atmospheric gases into liquids. In particular, he cited the work of a Dr. Karl Linde who had discovered what Tesla described as a self-cooling method for liquefying air. As Tesla said, “This was the only experimental proof which I was still wanting that energy was obtainable from the medium in the manner contemplated by me.” What ties the Linde work with Tesla's electromagnet coil is that both of them used a double path for the material they were working with. Linde had a compressor to pump the air to a high pressure, let the pressure fall as it traveled through a tube, and then used that cooled air to reduce the temperature of the incoming air by having it travel back up the first tube through a second tube enclosing the first. The already cooled air added to the cooling process of the machine and quickly condensed the gases to a liquid. Tesla's intent was to condense the energy trapped between the earth and its upper atmosphere and to turn it into an electric current. He pictured the sun as an immense ball of electricity, positively charged with a potential of some 200 billion volts. The Earth, on the other hand, is charged with negative electricity. The tremendous electrical force between these two bodies constituted, at least in part, what he called cosmic-energy. It varied from night to day and from season to season but it is always present. Tesla's patents for electrical generators and motors were granted in the late 1880's. During the 1890's the large electric power industry, in the form of Westinghouse and General Electric, came into being. With tens of millions of dollars invested in plants and equipment, the industry was not about to abandon a very profitable ten-year-old technology for yet another new one. Tesla saw that profits could be made from the self-acting generator, but somewhere along the line, it was pointed out to him, the negative impact the device would have on the newly emerging technological revolution of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. At the end of his article in Century he wrote: “I worked for a long time fully convinced that the practical realization of the method of obtaining energy from the sun would be of incalculable industrial value, but the continued study of the subject revealed the fact that while it will be commercially profitable if my expectations are well founded, it will not be so to an extraordinary degree.

In the 1890s Wilhelm Wundt, the founder of experimental psychology, formulated the doctrine of “affective primacy.”7 Affect refers to small flashes of positive or negative feeling that prepare us to approach or avoid something. Every emotion (such as happiness or disgust) includes an affective reaction, but most of our affective reactions are too fleeting to be called emotions (for example, the subtle feelings you get just from reading the words happiness and disgust).

In Montana in the 1890s, as in the United States in the 2010s, the laws were loose enough to allow men of means to spend unlimited sums of money, either personally or through their companies, to put candidates into office. Bribery was forbidden, but virtually any “campaign expense” was allowed.

Miss Kate!” Kiernan exclaimed, pointing. “What happened to your toes?” “What?” I glanced down, half expecting to see a leech or a cut or some other trauma, but there was nothing odd. “What are you talking about?” “Your toenails. They’re all red—it looks like blood!” “Oh,” I laughed. “That’s just nail polish. It’s chipped off in a few places.” “It looks like paint.” Kiernan sniffed disapprovingly. I sighed. This was one of the anachronisms that Katherine would probably have caught as I prepared to leave. Did young women paint their nails in the 1890s? Had nail polish even been invented yet? I had no clue. “Well, it is paint, sort of,” I said. “Me mom says…” He shook his head and fell silent. “What does your mom say, Kiernan?” He didn’t answer. “No, really, I won’t be angry. What does she say?” “She says only whores wear paint,” he said, staring down at the grass. “They usually wear it on their faces, though. I never even heard of painted toes.

how the man of today looks with derision upon the prohibitions of the 1890’s and supposes that the violation of them has been without penalty! He would suffer poignant disillusion had he a clear enough pattern in his soul to be able to measure differences; but one consequence of this debauchery, as we shall see, is that man loses discrimination.

In the 1890s, facing a shortage of tallow to make soap, the soap and candle company Procter & Gamble turned to a byproduct of the textile industry—cottonseeds. Prior to the mid-1800s, cottonseeds had little commercial value because of their high concentration of an antinutrient called gossypol that causes dangerous spikes in blood potassium levels, organ damage, infertility, and paralysis. However, when the seeds are pressed for oil, and that oil is refined, bleached, and deodorized, the gossypol is largely eliminated

In the 1890s, Kuwait offered a dramatically more cosmopolitan and commercially vibrant environment than Riyadh. As a result, by his middle teens the future King of Saudi Arabia had acquired firsthand experience of dynastic politics, humiliating exile, and desert warfare. He spoke some English and had watched Sheikh Mubarak conduct commercial and diplomatic relations with Europeans. He was a very unusual young man for his time and place, and he stood six foot, four.