Diverse Good Causes

1995 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 333-370
Author(s):  
Whitman Stephen
Keyword(s):  
North American ◽  
European History ◽  
Minor Role ◽  
Atlantic Region ◽  
American Slavery ◽  
Legal Personality ◽  
British America ◽  
Explanatory Factors ◽  
History Of

In many slave societies manumission coexisted with perpetual bondage, often featured by self-purchase by slave artisans, a practice that some societies monitored through recognition of the slave's legal personality as a contracting party. Manumission played a comparatively minor role in shaping North American slavery, with debatable exceptions in the mid-Atlantic region; historians of slavery there have portrayed manumitters as individuals of conscience and/or economic maximizers seeking profitable exits from a locally declining labor institution. This contrast was first noted by Frank Tannenbaum, who characterized slavery in Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking America as milder than in British America, and targeted differences in religion and in the European history of slavery of each society as key explanatory factors.

North American Association for the Study of Religion (NAASR)

2015 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 29-30
Author(s):  
Matt Sheedy
Keyword(s):  
North American ◽  
American Association ◽  
The North ◽  
History Of

I interviewed Russell McCutcheon back in March 2015, about his new role as president of the North American Association for the Study of Religion (NAASR), asking him about the history of the organization, goals for his tenure, and developments for NAASR’s upcoming conference in Atlanta in November 2015.

Recasting Bourgeois Europe

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles S. Maier ◽  
Charles S. Maier
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Social Vulnerability ◽  
Group Representation ◽  
Political Stability ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
European History ◽  
World War ◽  
History Of ◽  
Country Analysis ◽  
Economic Stabilization

The author, one of the most prominent contemporary scholars of European history, published this, his first book, in 1975. Based on extensive archival research, the book examines how European societies progressed from a moment of social vulnerability to one of political and economic stabilization. Arguing that a common trajectory calls for a multi country analysis, the book provides a comparative history of three European nations—France, Germany, and Italy—and argues that they did not simply return to a prewar status quo, but achieved a new balance of state authority and interest group representation. While most previous accounts presented the decade as a prelude to the Depression and dictatorships, the author suggests that the stabilization of the 1920s, vulnerable as it was, foreshadowed the more enduring political stability achieved after World War II. The immense and ambitious scope of this book, its ability to follow diverse histories in detail, and its effort to explain stabilization—and not just revolution or breakdown—have made it a classic of European history.

White Zombie as Captivity Narrative and the Death of Certainty

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 19-25
Author(s):  
Mark C Anderson
Keyword(s):  
American Indians ◽  
American Slavery ◽  
Captivity Narrative ◽  
Early American ◽  
Arts And Culture ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Black ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
American Society ◽  
Black Other

Horror films such as White Zombie (1932) reveal viewers to themselves by narrating in the currency of audience anxiety. Such movies evoke fright because they recapitulate fear and trauma that audiences have already internalized or continue to experience, even if they are not aware of it. White Zombie’s particular tack conjures up an updated captivity narrative wherein a virginal white damsel is abducted by a savage Other. The shell of the captivity story, of course, is as old as America. In its earliest incarnation it featured American Indians in the role as savage Other, fiendishly imagined as having been desperate to get their clutches on white females and all that hey symbolized. In this way, it generated much of the emotional heat stoking Manifest Destiny, that is, American imperial conquest both of the continent and then, later, as in the case of Haiti, of the Caribbean Basin. White Zombie must of course be understood in the context of the American invasion and occupation of Haiti (1915-1934). As it revisits the terrain inhabited by the American black Other, it also speaks to the history of American slavery. The Other here is African-American, not surprisingly given the date and nature of American society of the day, typically imagined in wildly pejorative fashion in early American arts and culture. This essay explores White Zombie as a modified captivity narrative, pace Last of the Mohicans through John Ford’s The Searchers (1956), the Rambo trilogy (1982, 1985, 1988), the Taken trilogy (2008, 1012, 2014), even Mario and Luigi’s efforts to rescue Princess Peach from Bowser.

Indian Boarding School Gothic in Older than America and The Only Good Indian

2015 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 5-27
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Kella
Keyword(s):  
North American ◽  
Boarding School ◽  
Boarding Schools ◽  
Spiritual Values ◽  
Feature Films ◽  
Native North American ◽  
Indian Boarding School ◽  
Visual Sovereignty ◽  
History Of ◽  
Indian Boarding Schools

This article examines the appropriation and redirection of the Gothic in two contemporary, Native-centered feature films that concern a history that can be said to haunt many Native North American communities today: the history of Indian boarding schools. Georgina Lightning’s Older than America (2008) and Kevin Willmott’s The Only Good Indian (2009) make use of Gothic conventions and the figures of the ghost and the vampire to visually relate the history and horrors of Indian boarding schools. Each of these Native-centered films displays a cinematic desire to decenter Eurocentric histories and to counter mainstream American genres with histories and forms of importance to Native North American peoples. Willmott’s film critiques mythologies of the West and frontier heroism, and Lightning attempts to sensitize non-Native viewers to contemporary Native North American concerns while also asserting visual sovereignty and affirming spiritual values.

Hymnody and Liturgy

2019 ◽  
pp. 491-506
Author(s):  
Jonathan Hehn
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
North American ◽  
John Calvin ◽  
Church Of Scotland ◽  
Metrical Psalmody ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Church

This chapter outlines the history of Presbyterian worship practice from the sixteenth century to the present, with a focus on North American Presbyterians. Tracing both their hymnody and their liturgy ultimately to John Calvin, Presbyterian communions have a distinct heritage of worship inherited from the Church of Scotland via seventeenth-century Puritans. Long marked by metrical psalmody and guided by the Westminster Directory, Presbyterian worship underwent substantial changes in the nineteenth century. Evangelical and liturgical movements led Presbyterians away from a Puritan visual aesthetic, into the use of nonscriptural hymnody, and toward a recovery of liturgical books. Mainline North American and Scottish Presbyterians solidified these trends in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; however, conservative North American denominations and some other denominations globally continue to rely heavily on the use of a worship directory and metrical psalmody.

Religious Norms, Human Capital, and Money Lending in Jewish European History

2011 ◽  
pp. 56-80 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maristella Botticini ◽  
Zvi Eckstein
Keyword(s):  
Human Capital ◽  
Jewish History ◽  
Southern Italy ◽  
European History ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Common View ◽  
Jewish Diaspora ◽  
Medieval Europe ◽  
History Of ◽  
Muslim Spain

Circa 1000, the main occupations of the large Jewish community in Muslim Spain and of the small Jewish communities in southern Italy, France, and Germany were local trade and long-distance commerce, as well as handicrafts. A common view states that the usury ban on Christians segregated European Jews into money lending. A similar view contends that the Jews were forced to become money lenders because they were not permitted to own land, and therefore, they were banned from farming. This article offers an alternative argument which is consistent with the main features that mark the history of the Jews: the Jews in medieval Europe voluntarily selected themselves into money lending because they had the key assets for being successful players in credit markets. After providing an overview of Jewish history during 70–1492, it discusses religious norms and human capital in Jewish European history, Jews in the Talmud era, the massive transition of the Jews from farming to crafts and trade, the golden age of the Jewish diaspora (ca. 800–ca. 1250), and the legacy of Judaism.

An Economic Analysis of Indian Behavior in the North American Fur Trade

1972 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-53 ◽  
Author(s):  
John C. McManus
Keyword(s):  
Economic Analysis ◽  
North American ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Fur Trade ◽  
Historical Research ◽  
The North ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Way

This study of Indian behavior in the fur trade is offered more as a report of a study in progress than a completed piece of historical research. In fact, the research has barely begun. But in spite of its unfinished state, the tentative results of the work I have done to this point may be of some interest as an illustration of the way in which the recent revival of analytical interest in institutions may be used to develop an approach to the economic history of the fur trade.

scholarly journals Decolonization and the aesthetics of disorder: Naipaul, Evaristo, Boland

2021 ◽  
pp. 002198942199605
Author(s):  
Matthew Whittle
Keyword(s):  
European History ◽  
Resistance Movements ◽  
Eavan Boland ◽  
History Of ◽  
Paul Gilroy ◽  
Orderly Transition ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Bear Witness ◽  
Formal Features

Decolonization is presented in dominant accounts as an orderly transition and not the culmination of anticolonial resistance movements. This in turn contributes to what Paul Gilroy terms an endemic “post-imperial melancholia” across contemporary European nations and the removal of empire and its demise from understandings of European history. Drawing on Bill Schwarz’s reconceptualization of a Fanonian commitment to disorder, this article focuses on Britain’s history of colonialism and post-imperial immigration and argues for the mapping of a disorderly aesthetics in works by V. S. Naipaul, Bernardine Evaristo, and Eavan Boland. The three formal features of non-linearity, polyvocality, and environmental imagery enable these writers to bear witness to the complex histories of empire, transatlantic slavery, decolonization, and immigration from the colonial “margins”. These “aesthetics of disorder” counter a dominant narrative of decolonial order and challenge conceptions of British exceptionalism that were reinforced at the moment of imperial decline.

scholarly journals The Danger of Analogical Myths: Explaining the Power and Consequences of the Sykes-Picot Delusion

AJIL Unbound ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 110 ◽  
pp. 132-136 ◽  
Author(s):  
Toby Dodge
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Middle East ◽  
The United States ◽  
Historical Background ◽  
Minor Role ◽  
Historical Significance ◽  
Historical Analogy ◽  
History Of ◽  
Political Units ◽  
Postcolonial States

Even before its hundredth year anniversary on 16 May 2016, the Sykes-Picot agreement had become a widely cited historical analogy both in the region itself and in Europe and the United States. In the Middle East, it is frequently deployed as an infamous example of European imperial betrayal and Western attempts more generally to keep the region divided, in conflict, and easy to dominate. In Europe and the United States, however, its role as a historical analogy is more complex—a shorthand for understanding the Middle East as irrevocably divided into mutually hostile sects and clans, destined to be mired in conflict until another external intervention imposes a new, more authentic, set of political units on the region to replace the postcolonial states left in the wake of WWI. What is notable about both these uses of the Sykes-Picot agreement is that they fundamentally misread, and thus overstate, its historical significance. The agreement reached by the British diplomat Mark Sykes and his French counterpart, François Georges-Picot, in May 1916, quickly became irrelevant as the realities on the ground in the Middle East, U.S. intervention into the war, a resurgent Turkey and the comparative weakness of the French and British states transformed international relations at the end of the First World War. Against this historical background, explaining the contemporary power of the narrative surrounding the use of the Sykes-Picot agreement becomes more intellectually interesting than its minor role in the history of European imperial interventions in the Middle East.

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