Michael F. McCartney;105757 wrote:

I

Often we talk about "authentic" Chinese or Italian or other cuisine…

Totally off topic, but people who do this are thinking ahistorically.  The food you get in Naples today is not what you would have gotten in Naples in 1890 when immigration was it its peak.  The Italians who came to America brought their way of cooking, adapted it to the products that were available in Boston, New York, and Chicago, and it evolved from there.  The cooking in Naples evolved along a different path, but what you get in Naples and Chicago today are equally authentic or inauthentic.

Or maybe that is relevant to heraldry.

Joe - point taken.  So change "Authentic" Italian or Chinese etc.to "what I was served on vacation to…" as contrasted to "what I’m served in Chinatown or Little Italy or ..." etc. And as you say, contrast both to "what immigrant great-grandfather ate back home X decades ago…"

Which I think is still quite - or even more so - relevant to heraldry!

Luis Cid;105750 wrote:

Unfortunately in the USA, England, France, Itay, Spain, and elsewhere the bucket-shop arms predominate.  In England heraldry is regulated by a private institution, the College of Arms, and not by laws that may be inforced by Common Law courts, a clear majority of those who bear arms have usurped them.  The usurpation of other’s arms gained ground with the end of the herald’s visitations in the 17th century and continued to grow during the 18th and 19th centuries when the civil law court which adjudicated such matters ceased to sit. Because of subsequent legal changes in the U.K. this court cannot now sit without new enabling legislation.  To my knowlege only in Scotland and South Africa are arms truely protected under law - both jurisdictions that have heraldic authorities with legal enforcement mechanisms through the law courts, and both by coincidence (or not) are hybrid legal systems common law/roman civil law to one extent or another.

The importance of the AHS, the ACH, and other heraldic societies in the USA is to attempt to educate the public as to appropriate heraldic practices and expose the fraud which are the bucket-shops.  Without a heraldic authority with teeth such as Scotland or South Africa we must rely on people’s honesty and good taste - as in the rest of the world, including England.

I often wonder at the belief that "bucket-shop arms predominate" and "In England…. a clear majority who bear arms usurped them.."

Granted Arms are legally protected in Canada - not by the Grant, but via Trademark Law which, for heraldry, is granted and published in the appropriate locations…

The importance of the AHS and ACH and whatnot is certainly to educate the public on the rich history, artistry and opportunity in heraldry - to provide thoughtful guidance when asked….

It’s not our job to "expose bucket-shops"—If it is, well—where is the section of our web pages which provide links with "DON’T GO HERE" avatars?  Where it the comprehensive list of the companies who are scamming the populace?  Why haven’t we published all over the web that these are scams?  Of course we can recommend when asked, point out in social media, etc… but if expose is a primary function of this group, we do a very poor job of it.

David Pope;105743 wrote:

So how do we view foreign grants or registrations by American citizens?  I appreciate that the legal status of such arms in the US is the same as assumed arms, that is to say no legal status, as US law doesn’t recognize any sort of personal heraldry on the basis of being heraldry (I’m purposefully setting to the side trademark protection, etc.).

But is an English grant borne by an American, American heraldry? Or is it merely English heraldry being displayed in America?

An American who obtains a grant from another country may choose to use those arms in the US as the assumed arms here (and everywhere arms may be assumed as long as their arms follow the general rules of that jurisdiction), IMHO.  The grant means merely their arms are recognized in both locations.  While they may not be in Scotland.  To my immediate knowledge - assumption is not illegal anywhere else, although, for instance, if you don’t register in South Africa, the arms would not be protected there.

Well Kathy I suppose the "expose" piece would be incorporated into the "educate" part.  Our society only educates those with enough interest in the subject matter to have found our website and taken the trouble to read the significant amount of information available - and (hopefully) if they go beyond mere curiosity - to become a registered user or member.  We here do not pretend to attempt to inform and educate the majority of the public who have little or no curiosity, much less interest in this topic.  The National Geografic Society has not even been able to do that with their subject of interest, as evidenced by what a large percentage of the U.S. population doesn’t even know the names of the States of the Union or where they are situated with regard to the map of the U.S.A.!

Michael F. McCartney;105757 wrote:

It occurred to me - not for the first time - at lunch today at our currently favorite Vietnamese restaurant, that asking what (if anything) makes for uniquely American arms is a bit like asking what makes for uniquely American food.

There are in some cases regional differences or preferences - Philly cheese steak and Boston baked bean, Southern fried steak chicken and corn fritters, Alaskan smoked salmon and so forth, based in part on locally available produce and in part on historical ethnic differences.  Much is what we used to call "foreign food" but nowadays American food includes spaghetti and chow mein and any number of other dishes originating elsewhere but now served in both local and chain theme restaurants nationwide.

 

Often we talk about "authentic" Chinese or Italian or other cuisine, though if we’re honest there is a caveat that we don’t really want it too authentic; and trendy eateries sometimes focus on "fusion" of, say, Chinese and Mexican dishes that wouldn’t be recognizable in Shanghai or Guadalajara outside of places aimed at American tourists. (I remember reading recently that the Irish in Ireland typically have pork rather than corned beef for St Patrick’s Day…)

 

Much if not most of the above could substitute heraldry for cuisine and arms for dishes.  The distinctly American aspect of heraldry, as with cuisine, is in large part the wide variety of styles and tastes, largely drawn from foreign sources but omitting or modifying certain aspects to meet local or national criteria.  With food, it’s food safety; with heraldry, it’s omitting those foreign elements incompatible with a society which by design eschews the concept of noblesse.

Well Mike, there may not be very much in the way of a distinctive national U.S. cuisine, but there is most certainly distinctive regional cuisines in the U.S. - just ask most folks in Louisiana and New Mexico.  In the San Francisco bay area where you and I reside I would agree there is not a distinctive cuisine.  But I do not know of a unique and distinctive regional style for heraldic art anyplace in the U.S.—nor nationaly, with the major exception of the great body of work produced and regulated by the only heraldic authority in the U.S., The Institute of Heraldry United States Army.

It would seem to me that what makes American heraldry unique is similar to what makes every other American thing unique. It’s a land where we eat kimchi tacos and Thai pizza, speak Spanglish, celebrate Oktoberfest, Cinco de Mayo and St. Patrick’s Day, and watch Westerns based on Japanese and Italian films.

I would say that what makes heraldry in the U.S. unique is the mix of other countries’ traditions with dashes of homegrown (national or regional) ideas.

I think Joe’s (valid, interesting) point is that heraldry, too, wherever you are in the world, is now in a kind postmodern phase where some element of irony is never completely absent. For instance, whatever a grant of arms meant once upon a time is not precisely what it means now, and awareness of that is inescapable.

arriano;105773 wrote:

It would seem to me that what makes American heraldry unique is similar to what makes every other American thing unique. It’s a land where we eat kimchi tacos and Thai pizza, speak Spanglish, celebrate Oktoberfest, Cinco de Mayo and St. Patrick’s Day, and watch Westerns based on Japanese and Italian films.

I would say that what makes heraldry in the U.S. unique is the mix of other countries’ traditions with dashes of homegrown (national or regional) ideas.

I don’t see how that makes heraldry in the U.S. unique being that other countries in the Americas also have a mix of foriegn heraldic traditions with dashes of homegrown ideas.  One of several such examples is Argentina, where I spent more than two years back in the early to mid 1990’s in doing investment banking work in Buenos Aires.  The Argentines’ basic heraldic tradition is Spanish, much as ours is English.  But just as we diverge from English norms where needed or deemed appropriate so do the Argentines from the Spanish.  As in the U.S., Argentina’s heraldry is also influenced by the heraldry brought over by the many European immigrant groups in addition to the Spanish such as the Italian, Brittish, German, French, Croatian, etc… all of which together now constitute the majority of the population.

What we have that the Argentines do not is an authority like the Institute of Heraldry of the U.S. Army which make our Military and Federal Government heraldry quite distinctive and recognizably "U.S.A."

The last few posts generally agree that American cuisine and armory is diverse, though not as to whether that makes us unique in either category.  I think I’d say that our diversity does distinguish us from historicàl practice in individual Old World cultures, but not so much from at least some New World countries with similarly diverse populations, such as Argentina.  But I don’t know enough about heraldic practice in Latin America to say much more than that.

And on at least one level, that’s fine with me; we didn’t begin as colonies of Latin American empires.  Our defining national characteristics, historically, both drew from and rebelled against Britain; and that tension was what produced and defined much of our national laws, social structures, and historical heraldic practice.  Not that there were or are not other cultural contributions, but the historical core, for better or worse, was what we kept and continued to keep, and equally what we rejected and continue to reject, from England.

Quote:

Ulster was (and the CHI is) a law unto himself. My comments in the essay had to do with the English kings of arms. As far as I know the first Ulster letters patent to a US resident were issued to a man in New York in 1873, although this was an outlier until the early 20th century. The citation is Ulster Office Grants and Confirmations of Arms, Book G, fol. 259, which unfortunately is not among the OCHI digital collections at the moment, even though it was 6 months ago (how exasperating!).

Here is an Ulster grant to a resident of New York City from 1873 that recently sold on Ebay: http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/1873-GRANT-OF-ARMS-JEREMIAH-DEVLIN-O-039-DEVLIN-IRELAND-NEW-YORK-QUEEN-VICTORIA-/281513976417?&_trksid=p2056016.m2518.l4276

http://i.ebayimg.com/00/s/MTYwMFgxMjAw/z/qbEAAOSwxCxT0Uhp/$_57.JPG

This is the one I was thinking of.  I remember the lucky-charmish Celtic cross, a little less hackneyed than a shamrock, but still the heraldic equivalent of a "kiss me I’m Irish" button.

The star/mullet of some type or another tends to appear a great deal in American official heraldry. It might be present in a lot of personal heraldry too. I think a star or stars are ubiquitous symbols of the US. Maybe they’re to the US what the lion is to British heraldry.

Two US-related Irish grants that pre-date the 1873 Devlin grant are :

~ an 1842 confirmation to Thomas Oliver, son of Robert Oliver "late of the North of Ireland and afterwards of the United States of America" (Volume E fol 239)

~ an 1855 grant of arms to "the descendants of Joseph Hopley, formerly Governor of St Vincent in America and to his son George Augustus Hopley of Charlestown, South Carolina, with account of descent from Peter Dod" (Vol F fol 107, according to the catalogue, but that volume is not online as yet).

It’s unclear if Thomas Oliver was in the USA, but George Hopley evidently was.

But for an Irish-American (or substitute your favorite, or least-favorite, hyphenated identity) "kiss me, I’m ..." is pretty much the idea!

Hmmm…lion and stars?  "Kiss me, I’m a McMillan"

But then, I suppose a stag and border say "kiss me, I’m ..."