Productivity in American Whaling: The New Bedford Fleet in the Nineteenth Century

From the end of the War of 1812 until the Civil War the New Bedford whaling fleet grew spectacularly; thereafter it declined, equally spectacularly. By the end of the century New Bedford's day was over. During the 88 years of this period, the technical configuration of the fleet, the hunting grounds visited, and the types of whales pursued all changed dramatically, and more than once. The literature on whaling suggests that the collapse of the industry was due, in part, to declining productivity, occasioned by the disappearance of the whales (because of over-hunting) and the deterioration of the quality of labor. The shifts in the composition of the fleet are viewed, chiefly, as the result of efforts by whalemen to overcome their problems. In this paper, productivity data (superlative indexes), by voyage, are employed in multiple regression analysis to trace the relationships between the changes in the composition of the fleet and productivity. The propositions that declining labor quality and whale stocks had important consequences for productivity are subjected to test, while the impacts of technical changes on productivity are measured.

FIELD, Issue 3, Fall 1970

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Invisible Mink

Emily Dickinson, Frances Sargent Osgood, and Sarah Piatt render the nineteenth-century “women’s sphere” ironically Unheimliche while simultaneously conveying it as the “home sweet home” the sentimental tradition prescribes it should be. These American women poets turn the domestic milieu into, as Paula Bennett phrases it, “the gothic mise en scene par excellence…the displacements, doublings, and anxieties characterizing gothic experience are the direct consequence of domestic ideology’s impact on the lives and psyches of ordinary bourgeois women (121-122).” Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath continue to represent the Unheimliche home in their poetry through the middle of the twentieth century, specifically by portraying the woman writer’s homebound experience as a fearful one; the materials of writing surrounding Plath’s and Sexton’s speakers encourage both creation and self-destruction. The speakers of Invisible Mink confront writing similarly in that the process of making a poem is couched in extreme anxiety. Poetic creation in my collection is explored via gothic conventions including the use of doubles, or poetic doppelgangers, as multiple speakers in poems. Recent poetry and criticism by Lyn Hejinian, Brenda Hillman, Mary Ruefle, and Olena Kalytiak Davis navigate the space between “home” and “away” in terms of tensions between the “feminine” and the “masculine” and the “confessional” and the “experimental.” Innovations in form and content throughout Invisible Mink are encouraged by Hillman’s work with blank space on the page and Hejinian’s writings on the materiality of words and forms. The use of classic film as a guiding motif in Invisible Mink is particularly inspired by Ruefle’s erasures and Davis’ “samplings,” as termed by critic Ira Sadoff, of classical literary texts. Invisible Mink serves as an example of one woman artist’s “survival story” and is also, I hope, a testament to other women artists’ similar ordeals

The DIT Examiner : the Newspaper of the Dublin Institute of Technology Students\u27 Union, January, 1998

The DIT Examiner : the Newspaper of the Dublin Institute of Technology Students\u27 Union

Venture, Winter 1962

This is volume 10, issue 2 of Venture.https://scholarworks.umt.edu/venture/1023/thumbnail.jp

Portland Daily Press: December 10,1888

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Providence Independent, V. 23, Thursday, July 22, 1897 [Whole Number: 1151]

[4] p. Accept the Truth Wherever Found - Do Right for the Sake of Right. Newspaper published in Collegeville, Pa. Weekly. Contains local, national and international news, fiction and advertisements.https://digitalcommons.ursinus.edu/providence/1931/thumbnail.jp