scholarly journals THE ETHOS OF DEMOCRACY

2017 ◽  
Vol 16 (02) ◽  
pp. 607-612
Author(s):  
ANNELIEN DE DIJN
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
American History ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
The Self ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
Michel De Montaigne ◽  
Depth Of Knowledge ◽  
Religious Wars

James Kloppenberg's Toward Democracy is a monumental achievement. To start with, Kloppenberg's breadth and depth of knowledge are awe-inspiring. He begins his story in the late sixteenth century, at the height of the religious wars in France, with the philosopher Michel de Montaigne, who rejected democracy because he did not believe ordinary people were capable of the self-restraint it required. Kloppenberg ends his narrative three hundred years later, with the poet Walt Whitman, lamenting the rise of unbridled individualism in the post-Civil War United States. Even though much attention is devoted to intellectual developments in northern America—Kloppenberg is, after all, specialized in American history—his book places these in a much broader context, highlighting how both in the colonial period and beyond Americans participated in transatlantic “communities of discourse” (2). In that sense, Toward Democracy contributes towards the recent transatlantic turn in American historiography.

To 1750

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
William H. McNeill
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
American History ◽  
East Coast ◽  
The United States ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
Columbian Exposition ◽  
The Republic

IN THE LATTER part of the nineteenth century, east coast city dwellers in the United States had difficulty repressing a sense of their own persistent cultural inferiority vis-à-vis London and Paris. At the same time a great many old-stock Americans were dismayed by the stream of immigrants coming to these shores whose diversity called the future cohesion of the Republic into question almost as seriously as the issue of slavery had done in the decades before the Civil War. In such a climate of opinion, the unabashed provinciality of Frederick Jackson Turner's (1861-1932) paper "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," delivered at a meeting of the newly founded American Historical Association in connection with the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago (1892), began within less than a decade to resound like a trumpet call, though whether it signalled advance or retreat remained profoundly ambiguous....

A Civics Primer for American History

2020 ◽  
Vol 125 (5) ◽  
pp. 1773-1777
Author(s):  
Paul Ortiz
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
American History ◽  
Driving Force ◽  
White Men ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Self ◽  
National Narrative ◽  
History Of ◽  
Magic Circle ◽  
Short Essays

Abstract This AHR Roundtable features four short essays on Jill Lepore’s widely read synthesis of American history, These Truths: A History of the United States (2018). Lepore’s framework insists that the “self-evident” truths of the nation’s founding were anything but. The driving force of her narrative is the struggle of those excluded from this magic circle—really, the majority of the country’s population—to extend those truths beyond their narrow core of elite white men. The four reviewers—Ned Blackhawk, Matt Garcia, Mary Beth Norton, and Paul Ortiz—appreciate the “shared sense of national destiny” that clearly informs Lepore book. At the same time, they chide her for what they regard as significant omissions. These critical essays invite further consideration of how best to write a fully inclusive (and therefore dramatically reconfigured) national narrative

FemaleComplaintes: Laments of Venus, Queens, and City Women in Late Sixteenth-Century France*

2001 ◽  
Vol 54 (3) ◽  
pp. 801-845 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kate van Orden
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Religious Wars ◽  
Female Voices ◽  
Love Lyric ◽  
Cheap Print ◽  
Musical Forms

This essay studies a large repertory of French laments (complaintes,) written in the voices of women. As a feminine counterpart to masculine love lyric, thecomplaintearose from an alternative poetics, treating subjects excluded fromfin amors, such as death, crime, and war. Essentially, lyric assigned erotic longing to men and mourning to women. The unusual subject matter accommodated by thecomplaintes, coupled with a set of material and musical forms locating them amid the cultures of cheap print, psalmody, and street song, ultimately embroiled them in the battles of the religious wars. Thus female voices came to trumpet confessional politics in songs that levied lyric, gender, and faith to serve in civil war.

“Many persons say I am a ‘Mono Maniac’”: Three Letters from Dakota Conflict Captive Sarah F. Wakefield to Missionary Stephen R. Riggs

Prospects ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Kathryn Zabelle Derounian-Stodola
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Cultural Identity ◽  
American History ◽  
The Other ◽  
United States Government ◽  
Unknown Number ◽  
States Government ◽  
White Settlers ◽  
The U.S

“The other Civil War” is how many Minnesotans think of the U.S.-Dakota Conflict of 1862, fought for six weeks in the recently established state as the Civil War raged elsewhere (Nichols). These hostilities between groups of Dakota Indians and the U.S. government were triggered by a containable incident near Acton, Minnesota, in which four hungry young Dakotas apparently challenged five white settlers over food and then killed them. But some Indians decided against containment, and the Conflict instead escalated into a contest for traditional Dakota cultural identity and cohesion. Of course, the Dakotas' sense of siege had been exacerbated for years by “the historically familiar rapacious traders, ethnocentric missionaries, white men's decimating diseases, inept Indian Bureau officials, equivocating United States government representatives, and deplorably conflicting military policies,” as well the growing number of “land-hungry settlers” (Russo, 99). When the war ended in late September 1862, about five hundred whites and a considerable, but unknown, number of Dakotas and crossbloods were dead (Anderson and Woolworth, 1). The U.S. government unilaterally abrogated treaties with the Dakotas – regardless of individuals' actual involvement in the Conflict – removed or imprisoned them, conducted hasty and illegal trials, and sent thirtyeight to the gallows in Mankato, Minnesota, on December 26, 1862. It is believed to be the largest mass execution in American history. Although little known outside the state, this short but intense war has been called “a microcosm of the tragedy of Indian–white relations in America,” and its repercussions still resonate over a century later (Nichols, 4).

Platonic Communion and ‘An Unfinished Romance’ in Gaston de Latour

2020 ◽  
pp. 162-194
Author(s):  
Adam Lee
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Michel De Montaigne ◽  
Song Of Solomon ◽  
Spiritual Transcendence ◽  
Religious Wars ◽  
Single Character ◽  
Platonic Love ◽  
Giordano Bruno ◽  
The Way

This chapter explores the Platonism in Pater’s Gaston de Latour, which began publication in monthly instalments in 1888. Like Marius, Gaston is set in a time of religious turmoil—the religious wars of sixteenth-century France—and follows a single character in search of spiritual transcendence. Along the way Gaston has critical encounters with historical authors, such as Michel de Montaigne and Giordano Bruno, who enrich his understanding of Platonism. The love that seeks wholeness in Plato’s Symposium is proposed as a model for Pater’s critical engendering with historical authors. Beyond Platonic love narratives, Pater incorporates the Odyssean homecoming, employed by Neoplatonists, and the Christian narrative of desire in Song of Solomon. Gaston’s later chapters seem to engage with Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Portrait of Mr. W. H.’ concerning what Pater means by the phrase ‘lover and philosopher at once’, inspired by Plato’s Phaedrus.

Chick-a-ma-feeno

Jockomo ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 75-108
Author(s):  
Shane Lief ◽  
John McCusker
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Black Community ◽  
The United States ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Social Equality ◽  
Mardi Gras ◽  
Personal Histories

This chapter lays out several different narratives about the origins of Mardi Gras Indians. Some are based on oral histories shared among Mardi Gras Indians themselves, while others are based on various archives and newspaper accounts. The emergence of the Mardi Gras Indian tradition is set against the backdrop of the evolution of Mardi Gras as celebrated during the colonial period and beyond, after Louisiana had become part of the United States. The struggle for African American political power and social equality is another parallel thread for this narrative, especially as Mardi Gras Indian practices overlapped with other masking traditions and institutions in the Black community. The earliest known account of Mardi Gras Indians, identified as such, is analysed and the personal histories of the first known Mardi Gras Indians reveal connections to Black participation in the Civil War and continuing struggles during Reconstruction and through the early twentieth century.

Truths . . . Audacious and Flawed

2020 ◽  
Vol 125 (5) ◽  
pp. 1764-1767
Author(s):  
Mary Beth Norton
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
American History ◽  
Driving Force ◽  
White Men ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Self ◽  
National Narrative ◽  
History Of ◽  
Magic Circle ◽  
Short Essays

Abstract This AHR Roundtable features four short essays on Jill Lepore’s widely read synthesis of American history, These Truths: A History of the United States (2018). Lepore’s framework insists that the “self-evident” truths of the nation’s founding were anything but. The driving force of her narrative is the struggle of those excluded from this magic circle—really, the majority of the country’s population—to extend those truths beyond their narrow core of elite white men. The four reviewers—Ned Blackhawk, Matt Garcia, Mary Beth Norton, and Paul Ortiz—appreciate the “shared sense of national destiny” that clearly informs Lepore book. At the same time, they chide her for what they regard as significant omissions. These critical essays invite further consideration of how best to write a fully inclusive (and therefore dramatically reconfigured) national narrative

‘Cet universel naufrage du monde’

2019 ◽  
pp. 101-140
Author(s):  
Jennifer H. Oliver
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
Michel De Montaigne ◽  
Safe Distance ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Pierre De Ronsard ◽  
The Difference ◽  
The Spectator

This chapter marks the transition from portent to actuality, addressing the prospect of political shipwreck in the troubled latter part of the sixteenth century by considering not only incarnations and reconfigurations of the suave mari magno commonplace but also shipwrecks that are narrated from the inside. It explores the distinction between the struggling ship in Lucretius and the eagerly spectated shipwreck of a political enemy in Cicero’s letters, taking account of the model of the ship of state as elaborated in Plato, Cicero, and medieval sources. It argues that the role of the spectator is most often not at a safe distance, and that the ethical relationship between the spectator and those on board is significantly developed from that in Lucretius. Through the work of three writers (Michel de L’Hospital, Pierre de Ronsard and Michel de Montaigne), it shows that the powerful metaphor of the ship of state struggling on troubled waters is itself articulated in a variety of ways during the political storm of the late sixteenth century—ways that, ethically speaking, variously implicate or exonerate the politician, poet or author. This chapter poses a series of questions concerning the difference between public and private spheres, the unique moral implications of civil war, and the author or poet’s own position, be it personal, political, or philosophical—or all three—with relation to what Montaigne calls ‘cet universel naufrage du monde’.

Lepore’s America, “Our America”?

2020 ◽  
Vol 125 (5) ◽  
pp. 1768-1772
Author(s):  
Matt Garcia
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
American History ◽  
Driving Force ◽  
White Men ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Self ◽  
National Narrative ◽  
History Of ◽  
Magic Circle ◽  
Short Essays

Abstract This AHR Roundtable features four short essays on Jill Lepore’s widely read synthesis of American history, These Truths: A History of the United States (2018). Lepore’s framework insists that the “self-evident” truths of the nation’s founding were anything but. The driving force of her narrative is the struggle of those excluded from this magic circle—really, the majority of the country’s population—to extend those truths beyond their narrow core of elite white men. The four reviewers—Ned Blackhawk, Matt Garcia, Mary Beth Norton, and Paul Ortiz—appreciate the “shared sense of national destiny” that clearly informs Lepore book. At the same time, they chide her for what they regard as significant omissions. These critical essays invite further consideration of how best to write a fully inclusive (and therefore dramatically reconfigured) national narrative

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