February 28, 2017. Women’s Rights in the West from Polygamy to The Vote Continue reading Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher, A House Full of Females: Plural Marriage and Women’s Rights in Early Mormonism, 1835-1870. Be prepared to discuss it on Thursday, March 2nd in class. Check out Reno’s Divorce History website March 2, 2017. The… MORE
19th CenturyThe U.S. West
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February 14, 2017. Plains Warfare, Indian Reservations, and Boarding Schools *Turner, Frederick Jackson, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” (1893) Dawes Act (1887) Luther Standing Bear on his experiences at Carlisle Indian School, 1933 Rules for Indian Schools, 1890 Stern, Alexandra E. “Reconstructing Approaches to America’s Indian Problem: Indian Policy in the Late… MORE
Central to Lola’s self-promotion was the dissemination of her image, primarily in the form of daguerreotypes and lithographs after daguerreotypes. Newspaper reviews and caricatures of her act circulated internationally, and her several sittings for daguerreotypes gave her a moderate sense of agency in constructing her portrait to counter her portrayal as lascivious in popular media. In these she demonstrated her oscillation between daring free-thinking associated with the frontier past of California and her understanding that she needed a façade of respectability to be tolerated by the reformers and civilizing forces increasing in 1853.
The years Lola spent in California, 1853 to 1855, coincided with a period of transformation in the Gold Rush ethos, and her megastar status reflects how she, perhaps unwittingly, poised herself to take advantage of this; I understand her performance as occupying a liminal space during the shift that occurred in 1853 away from male-centered leisure and towards more respectable theatre and family-friendly amusements. This change in popular culture was concomitant with and largely a product of urbanization and a new sense of social and economic stability that San Francisco residents experienced. A constant throughout this first decade of major Anglo settlement in California was internationalism, an aspect of society that was reflected in popular culture but also extended into labor life. Large populations of individuals of Latin American and Spanish descent characterized the multiethnic setting of California, and Lola’s constructed identity as a “Spanish dancer” played into this contested status of race, as Anglo Americans in California oscillated between appreciating and rejecting aspects of non-white cultures.