History Commons^™

"Dish For An Epicure": Spanish Perceptions Of Indigenous Food In Mexico And Central America, 1517-1577, Timothy Boyer

The Thetean: A Student Journal for Scholarly Historical Writing

Upon Arrival in Veracruz, Mexico in 1520, the conquistadors were exposed to the sights, sounds, and tastes of the New World. In Cuba they had subsisted on a mostly European diet, but in Mexico they would have to learn to make do with indigenous foods. Their leader, Hernan Cortes, ordered the ships burned to prevent deserters, destroying any hope they had of receiving supplies of European foods during their conquest of what would later become known as Nueva Espana. This left them highly dependent on either their own ability to properly identify food sources or, as was usually the case, …

A Market For Plenty: Immigrants And The Making Of The Fulton Fish Market, Alison Y. Zhang

Swarthmore Undergraduate History Journal

Founded in the early nineteenth century at the southern seaport of Manhattan, New York, the Fulton Fish Market was, and remains, one of the largest seafood markets in the world. At its heart was a workforce capable of moving hundreds of millions of pounds of fish a year, that endured public suspicion and resisted activist reform, and which ultimately shaped the palate of not only New York City, but America as a country—a workforce that was, in its formative decades, predominantly immigrants. This article builds on pre-existing general scholarship regarding the Fulton Fish Market and introduces perspectives found in contemporary …

How Chinese-American Cuisine Was Advertised In The U.S. During The 1900s, Tyler J. Buchanan

The Exposition

This poster details the public opinion/view of Chinese-American cuisine changed from its founding in the early 1900s. This topic was closely related to the Chinese as they exclusively made the food up until recent years.

Roman Food In The Imperial Age Viewed Through The Lens Of Class, John B. Nienhaus

The Exposition

A look into Roman food history in the imperial age with a focus on class and the differences of the classes eating habits, access to ingredients, and diets.

The Famine Foods Co-Op / Bluff Country Co-Op Oral History Project, Michael William Doyle

Famine Foods Co-op / Bluff Country Co-op Oral History Project

The Famine Foods Co-op / Bluff Country Co-op Oral History Project collects the oral narratives of people associated with the member owned, cooperatively run natural foods grocery store in Winona, Minnesota. The Project was launched in 2022 by Michael William Doyle, a founding member of the Co-op and a retired History professor, in commemoration of the Co-op’s 50^th anniversary year. It is endorsed by the Co-op’s board of directors and sponsored by Winona State University and the Winona County Historical Society.

This enterprise began as a buying club in spring 1972, inspired by the example of North Country Co-op …

The Literature Of Food: An Introduction From 1830 To The Present, Anke Klitzing

European Journal of Food Drink and Society

No abstract provided.

Editorial, Michelle Share, Dorothy Cashman, Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire

European Journal of Food Drink and Society

No abstract provided.

La Cena: Cibo Come Comunicazione, Austin Smith

Italian Renaissance Foodways

(Disclaimer: Zine is in Italian)

In this zine, I explore how people in Renaissance Italy show themselves in their food and other items you may find at a dinner party, such as a maiolica or a fork. What does your food and your habits say about you as a person, where you came from, and your culture? I dissect specific instances in how some items reveal more about your behavior than you may think.

The Evolution Of The America Perception Of Lobster From The 17th To The 21st Century, Michael T. Fisher

The Exposition

Lobster early in American history was a low class food commonly served to servants and slaves. Technological advancements, and scarcity during World War II are what facilitated preservation of fresh lobster drove the cultural shift behind the elevated status of the American Lobster.

Memories And New Beginnings: Chinese American Restaurants And Food As A Contact Zone In Early-Twentieth Century California, Nicholas Kim

Honors Theses

In previous Asian American studies, authors largely focus on urban centers. In my thesis, I center rural Chinese American communities in early-twentieth century California in the making of the Chinese American identity. I argue that they, along with Chinese American food, acted as contact zones for Chinese and non-Chinese Americans. This paper covers a range of themes, including most prominently the connection between food and culture. I additionally address how Chinese American restaurants and food challenged perceptions of Chinese Americans as foreigners, their role in gender relations, and what we consider to be authentic. This paper largely uses archival newspaper …

Exploring Food Traditions Within The Four Quarter Days Of The Irish Calendar Year, Caitríona Nic Philibín

Dissertations

This study explores food traditions in the four quarter days of the Irish calendar year. Imbolg or St. Brigid’s Day, Bealtaine, Lughnasa and Samhain mark significant moments in the agricultural calendar. Food traditions, customs and practices relating to these days are recorded in the abundant resources of the collections in the Folklore Department, University College Dublin. However, to date, with few exceptions, little food specific research has been carried out on these collections. This thesis aims to begin to fill that gap whilst highlighting many opportunities for further research. Throughout this process we witness the illumination of a rich food …

More Than Hungry: How Political Narratives Built & Maintain Hunger In The United States, A. Camille Karabaich

William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice

This Note aims to examine the role of the legal system in creating and maintaining hunger in the United States. Through this lens, the Note discusses the shift necessary to support specific legal interventions to end hunger. This Note begins by discussing how hunger was built in the United States through policies regarding land, housing, incarceration, and food, and the narratives that allowed these policies to flourish. These policies created hunger by creating pockets of poverty and disempowerment. Although many individuals and organizations donate their time, money, and energy to support local food banks, soup kitchens, and free school meal …

Tinned Sardines And Putrefied Yellow-Fin In Equatorial Guinea: Regimes Of Food In The Novels Of Donato Ndongo-Bidyogo, Igor Cusack

European Journal of Food Drink and Society

In his semi-autobiographical novels, Las tinieblas de su memoria negra (Shadows of your black memory) and Los poderes de la tempestad (Power of the storm), the Equatoguinean writer Donato Ndongo-Bidyogo describes a boy’s, and then the man’s, life in colonial and postcolonial Equatorial Guinea, Spain’s only sub-Saharan colony. This paper argues that the numerous descriptions of the food encountered by the protagonist immerse the reader in four different worlds: that of his Fang ethnic group in the Hispanic colony; that of the colonial priests and emancipados of the protagonist’s youth; then the horrors encountered under the cruel postcolonial tyrant, Macías …

Modern Meals And Mythology: The Los Angeles Culinary Field, Lindsay Megumi Chu

Pomona Senior Theses

Throughout history, food and our relationship with it has had numerous implications. Indeed, humans have consumed food not only as sustenance, but also as ritual and as a marker of status and social hierarchy. Though food and the dissemination of culinary practices have greatly diversified in the past century, food and the culinary methods required to make it remain relevant to our understanding of contemporary society, as popular culinary practices and trends reveal our preferences, beliefs, ideals, and aspirations. While there are numerous ways to analyze the cultural impact of food in the current era, this work focuses on food …

Women’S Impact On Cooking Culture During The Great Depression: Limited To Being A Homemaker, Unlimited In Their Authority On Nutrition In Their Communities, Michelle Molina

History Undergraduate Theses

This paper examines American cooking culture of the Great Depression, as the impact it had on everyday people’s diet was much greater than one may initially think. By analyzing interviews, photographs, and newspaper advertisements, and conducting archival research, I illuminate the public history of the Great Depression’s impact on diet and the roles women played during it. The existing scholarship on the Great Depression typically focuses on the relief efforts made to help people affected by this economic downturn, but this paper will focus more specifically on the cooking culture that involved women during this desperate time. Harsh conditions experienced …

Book Review Of Hungry Nation: Food, Famine, And The Making Of Modern India, Marc A. Reyes

Madison Historical Review

Attached is a book review on Benjamin Robert Siegel's Hungry Nation: Food, Famine, and the Making of Modern India.

Aunt Adeline, Ex-Slave Interview

Slave narratives supplemental materials

Interview of ex-slave "Aunt Adeline", by Zillah Cross Peel with the Work Projects Administration, about Aunt Adeline's life as a slave.

William Brown, Ex-Slave Interview

Slave narratives supplemental materials

Interview of ex-slave William Brown, by Samuel S. Taylor with the Work Projects Administration, about Brown's life as a slave.

Try The Wine: Food As An Expression Of Cultural Identity In Roman Britain, Molly Reininger

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Research surrounding cultural identity and food customs throughout history are published often, but any research that attempts to combine the two are often based in more recent history. Few combinations of the two are available, and fewer explore the implications within ancient colonization and expansion.

The research for this thesis was conducted with three viewpoints in mind: the colonization of Britannia from Romans within the new colony, the colonization from the native Briton's perspective, and the Roman citizens within Britannia at the end of Rome's military involvement with the colony. This method was chosen because in the early years of …

Jibaritos Y Más: The Impacts Of Migration, Gentrification, And Cultural Maintenance On Chicago-Puerto Rican Cuisine, Emilio Araujo

Pomona Senior Theses

An analysis of the history of Puerto Rican cuisine from first contact between Indigenous Taínos and Spanish explorers to present day Chicago-Puerto Rican cuisine. This thesis will examine the development of Puerto Rican national cuisine as part of growing nationalism in the late nineteenth century and again in the early twentieth century. As Puerto Rican migrants settle in Chicago, they bring their cuisine with them and Puerto Rican national cuisine changes in their new context to become Chicago-Puerto Rican cuisine. This new cuisine grows along with the Chicago-Puerto Rican community and is impacted by transnational forces as well as gentrification …

Arkansas Foodways Movement Resource Guide

Resource guides

This guide contains a selection of resources available at the Arkansas State Archives pertaining to the Arkansas foodways movement. This is not a comprehensive guide, but provides a starting point for research.

19th Century Developments In Food Preservation, Jessica Mitchell

Tenor of Our Times

This paper describes the essential contributions of Nicolas Appert, Peter Durand, and Louis Pasteur to how food was preserved. From the earliest stages of canning and jarring to pasteurizing, the 19th century housed the some of the most significant growth in the development of safety and longevity of food.

Mortality And Meals: The Black Death’S Impact On Diet In England, Jessica Cordova

History Undergraduate Theses

This paper investigates the role of the Black Death in developing England’s eating habits and culinary traditions. The mid-fourteenth century saw a marked change in English cuisine, change that traversed the classes. This change correlates with the timing of the Black Death, an episode of extreme mortality cause by bubonic plague. Notorious as the greatest single source of death across medieval Europe, the Black Death looms in modern minds as an unparalleled tragedy. Between 1348 to 1350, the Black Death swept across Europe and killed between one third and one half of the population. England endured an average of forty …

Weaponizing Ordinary Objects: Women, Masculine Performance, And The Anxieties Of Men In Medieval Iceland, Steven T. Dunn

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis unravels the deeper meanings attributed to ordinary objects, such as clothing and food, in thirteenth-century Icelandic literature and legal records. I argue that women weaponized these ordinary objects to circumvent their social and legal disadvantages by performing acts that medieval Icelandic society deemed masculine. By comparing various literary sources, however, I show that medieval Icelandic society gradually redefined and questioned the acceptability of that behavior, especially during the thirteenth-century. This is particularly evident in the late thirteenth-century Njal’s Saga, wherein a woman named Hallgerd has been villainized for stealing cheese from a troublesome neighbor. If Hallgerd were a …

Aid To Hungry Persons Of Ferghana (1923-1924 Years), N. Rejabboev

Scientific journal of the Fergana State University

In this article the cut off of food on TASSR Fergana region in 1923-1924, the attempt of the Soviet Union to reduce the famine in the region with the use of archive sources are analyzed.

The Consideration Of The Caddo Area In “Food Production In Native North America: An Archaeological Perspective”, Timothy K. Perttula

Index of Texas Archaeology: Open Access Gray Literature from the Lone Star State

Kristen J. Gremillion has written “a highly selective survey of Native North American food production systems from an archaeological perspective,” with a particular focus on plant food production in the Eastern Woodlands and the Southwest. The time frame of the book spans the period from ca. 3000 B.C. to post-European contact, extending up to ca. A.D. 1800. The archaeological evidence for plant food production in the Caddo Archaeological Area of Southwest Arkansas, Northwest Louisiana, eastern Oklahoma, and East Texas is mentioned by Gremillion, but only rather briefly in her chapter entitled “the Rise of the Three Sisters: Maize in the …

Rosario Marierdo, Rosario Marierdo

Coming to the Plains Oral Histories/ Llenando las Llanuras Historias Orales

Rosario Maierdo proviene de El Salvador, fue criada principalmente por su abuela porque su mamá inmigró a los Estados Unidos de América. Marierdo se convirtió en madre soltera y decidió seguir a su madre. Entonces, Marierdo y su hija iniciaron su viaje a EE.UU., en este viaje tuvieron que subirse a un tren, cruzar el río y el desierto. Finalmente, Marierdo y su hija llegaron a Huston, Texas, donde unos familiares las fueron a recoger. Marierdo se estableció su hogar en Schuyler, Nebraska, donde trabajó cuidando a los hijos de los otros trabajadores y luego, tomó un trabajo en un …

Food In The West: Using Timelinejs In The Classroom, Julia Gossard

Spark - Empower Teaching Scholarship Collection

“Never underestimate the ‘hangry.’” This might as well be one of the learning objectives in my Foundations of Western Civilization course at Utah State University. Whether the bread riots of the 1790s in France, the “Hungry 1840s,” or the starvation of Russian citizens after the conclusion of World War II, food (and access to it) has continued to be a mobilizing factor in history. By examining what people ate and how they ate at different points in time, we can know a lot about a particular era’s economic conditions, social mores, political conflicts, religious issues, and nutrition. For the past …

Orality In Joyce: Food, Famine, Feasts And Public Houses, Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire

Books/Book Chapters

Some common themes within the history of food and literature include starvation, famine, gluttony, feasting, commensality, hospitality, religion, gender, and class, and indeed food also functions as a complex signifier of national, racial, and cultural identity. Despite the growing international scholarship of food in literature (Bevan 1988; Schofield 1989; Ellmann 1993; Applebaum 2006; Piatti-Farnell 2011; Gilbert and Porter 2015; Boyce and Fitzpatrick 2017; Piatti-Farnell and Lee Brien 2018), until recently, Ireland appeared “as only the smallest of dots on the map of high gastronomy” (Goldstein 2014, xi). Most international collections discuss the canonical Irish writings of James Joyce and of …

You Are What You Eat: Gastronomy & Geography Of Southern Spain, Katherine F. Perry

The Catalyst

Using empirical and numeric data, this study explores the use of food as a proxy to understand the cultural-historical geography of southern Spain. After spending three months in Granada, Spain, I compiled the most commonly used thirty-five ingredients from a selection of Spanish cookbooks and contextualized them within the broader history of Spain. The elements of traditional Andalucían cooking fit into three primary chapters of Iberian history: Roman occupation, the Moorish invasion beginning in the 8^th century, and the Columbian exchange, or the exchange of goods that took place between the Americas and Old World following European discovery of …