Victorian Yankees At Queen Victoria S Court

Little seems to have changed since Queen Victoria's day in the instant magnetism of British royalty across the Atlantic Ocean; yet for the first generations liberated by revolution, the British Isles and its sovereigns seemed as remote as the moon. In theyoung nation, Americans who were little interested in the sons and daughters of their last king, George III, developed a love-hate relationship with Victoria, his granddaughter, that lasted for all her sixty-four years on the throne, ending only with herdeath in the first weeks of the twentieth century. Victoria's long reign encompassed much of the time in which the young United States was growing up. The responses of Americans toward Victoria reveal not only what they thought of her (and her husband) as people and as monarchs, but reflect their own ambitions, confidence, smugness, insecurities-and sense of loss. Parting from England brought a surge of pride, but it also carried with it an unanticipated price. American encounters with Queen Victoria asperson and as symbol evoke the costs of relinquishing a history, a tradition, a ceremonial texture. The brash, bewildered and beguiled Americans in these pages, from lion tamer Isaac Van Amburgh, Barnum's midget "Tom Thumb" and sharpshooter Annie Oakley,to literary lions like Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mark Twain and Henry James evince not only another dimension of the remote woman who might have been their queen, but what Americans were like, and what they thought they were like, in her time.

One of Britain's most famous and longest serving rulers, Queen Victoria saw widespread change across her empire. During her sixty-three-year reign, in which she became one of the most powerful and influential people in the world, Victoria met everyone from Florence Nightingale to 'Buffalo Bill', as well as royalty from around the world with whom she exchanged truly unique gifts. After meeting the exalted monarch her subjects often recorded their impressions of her, sometimes favourable and sometimes not, and she wasn't shy with her opinion either. The records range from her less than enamoured assessment of 'Greatest Showman' P.T. Barnum and her opinions about Jack the Ripper, to how much she enjoyed Jane Eyre and the affection she held for her family. An Audience with Queen Victoria examines the meetings and letters exchanged between the Queen and a veritable 'who's who' of her time. Through brand-new archival research, newspapers and interviews with descendants, sit right alongside Victoria and, for the first time, experience queenship from her perspective.

John Van Buren's 'Travel journal for a trip to Europe, 1838-1839' is a record of the a year he spent in England, Scotland, Ireland, Belgium and Holland, primarily for his father, Martin Van Buren, the 8th President of the United States. A fly-on-the-wall view of the political and social situation in Europe was invaluable to the President at a highly sensitive moment in Anglo-American relations, and provides a rich and insightful view for historians of the period. Published in its entirety for the first time, Van Buren's objective and good-humoured observations present fresh insights into complex and compelling personalities and relationships on both sides of the Atlantic, providing an invaluable and highly readable resource for scholars and students of the period, as well as for the general reader.

This book seeks to frame the “the idea of India” in the American imaginary within a transnational lens that is attentive to global flows of goods, people, and ideas within the circuits of imperial and maritime economies in nineteenth century America (roughly 1780s-1880s). This diverse and interdisciplinary volume – with essays by upcoming as well as established scholars – aims to add to an understanding of the fast changing terrain of economic, political, and cultural life in the US as it emerged from being a British colony to having imperial ambitions of its own on the global stage. The essays trace, variously, the evolution of the changing self-image of a nation embodying a surprisingly cosmopolitan sensibility, open to different cultural values and customs in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century to one that slowly adopted rigid and discriminatory racial and cultural attitudes spawned by the widespread missionary activities of the ABCFM and the fierce economic pulls and pushes of American mercantilism by the end of the nineteenth century. The different uses of India become a way of refining an American national identity.

A fascinating, inspirational look at the relationships between some of our best-loved female authors and their little-known literary collaborators and friends

Jockomo: The Native Roots of Mardi Gras Indians celebrates the transcendent experience of Mardi Gras, encompassing both ancient and current traditions of New Orleans. The Mardi Gras Indians are a renowned and beloved fixture of New Orleans public culture. Yet very little is known about the indigenous roots of their cultural practices. For the first time, this book explores the Native American ceremonial traditions that influenced the development of the Mardi Gras Indian cultural system. Jockomo reveals the complex story of exchanges that have taken place over the past three centuries, generating new ways of singing and speaking, with many languages mixing as people’s lives overlapped. Contemporary photographs by John McCusker and archival images combine to offer a complementary narrative to the text. From the depictions of eighteenth-century Native American musical processions to the first known photo of Mardi Gras Indians, Jockomo is a visual feast, displaying the evolution of cultural traditions throughout the history of New Orleans. By the beginning of the twentieth century, Mardi Gras Indians had become a recognized local tradition. Over the course of the next one hundred years, their unique practices would move from the periphery to the very center of public consciousness as a quintessentially New Orleanian form of music and performance, even while retaining some of the most ancient features of Native American culture and language. Jockomo offers a new way of seeing and hearing the blended legacies of New Orleans.