Description
Book SynopsisIn the middle decades of the nineteenth century, a widening set of opportunities in the public sphere opened up for ambitious men and women in the loosely structured stratum of the middle class. Much of the attention to the marketplace between 1820 and 1910 has described entrepreneurship and the beginnings of a more sophisticated economy, but not much has been paid to the commodification of the self. This book sets out to explore the promotion of the self in the rapidly growing economy and political flux of the nineteenth century. Its geography extends through New England, New York, the new states of the Midwest, and the great cities of the Mid-Atlantic, with an occasional trip to New Orleans, San Francisco and Los Angeles. The approach is biographical, using representative middle class figures to illuminate cultural and social history. Aided by more cheaply produced print and the clamor of the American public for entertainment both high and low brow, the figures described in this boo
Trade ReviewAnyone who assumes that celebrity status is a 21st-century phenomenon will find Sharon Strom’s Fortune, Fame, and Desire both insightful and intriguing. The cult of personality flourished in 19th-century America, and Strom shows us what talented and charismatic Americans could do to promote themselves in an era long before television and the Internet. From the notorious Lola Montez to the spell-binding orator Frederick Douglass, Strom’s cast of characters transformed themselves into the 19th century equivalents of today’s in-demand “personalities.” Fame could be fleeting and elusive, and it could even prove destructive, but it could also be intoxicating and seductive – for those who coveted it and a public with a seemingly insatiable appetite for “sensation.” -- Julie Winch, University of Massachusetts Boston
Table of ContentsPreface and Acknowledgments Introduction 1 “I Have an Ambition that Burns Like Fire”: Ephraim George Squier, Race, and the North American Travelogue 2 “The Right of Defining One’s Position Seems to Be a Very Sacred Privilege in America:” Lola Montez, Miriam Follin, E.G. Squier, and DeWitt Clinton Hitchcock 3 “Yours in the Name of Freedom”: Frances Watkins Harper, Harriet Wilson, and the Legacy of William Watkins 4 “One’s Own Branch of the Human Race”: Frances Watkins Harper, Anna Dickinson, and Frederick Douglass 5 “Self Reliance,” “Universal Redemption,” and “The Obsessed Woman”: Warren Chase, Joseph Osgood Barrett, and Juliet Stillman Severence 6 Race, the Woman Question and “Liberty in Thought and Expression”: Harriet Wilson, Paschal Beverly Randolph, and Laura Briggs James 7 Coda ‘The Present Age” Index About the Author
