“A GRIM MEMORIAL OF ITS THOROUGH WORK OF DEVASTATION AND DESOLATION”: RACE AND MEMORY IN THE AFTERMATH OF THE 1893 SEA ISLAND STORM

2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 297-316
Author(s):  
Robert D. Bland

“‘A Grim Memorial of Its Thorough Work of Devastation and Desolation’: Race and Memory in the Aftermath of the 1893 Sea Island Storm” explores the political struggle that ensued in the aftermath of the August 1893 hurricane. The storm, which decimated the predominantly African American South Carolina Sea Islands, required a nine-month relief effort to assist the region's citizens in their time of need. Led by the American Red Cross, the relief effort became a new proxy for a long-standing debate over the legacy of Reconstruction and the meaning of black citizenship. This battle, waged by leaders in South Carolina's Democratic Party, Red Cross officials, writers in the national press, former abolitionists, and African Americans living in the South Carolina Sea Islands, exposed growing fissures in how Americans understood notions of charity and self-help. More than a battleground for still-nascent ideas of disaster relief, the political turmoil that followed the 1893 Sea Island Storm played a critical role in redefining the racial boundaries of the United States on the eve of the Jim Crow era.

Author(s):  
Cheryl Teelucksingh

On August 12, 2017, in Charlottesville, Virginia, alt-right/White supremacy groups and Black Lives Matter (BLM) supporters came face-to-face regarding what to do about public monuments that celebrate key figures from slavery and the Jim Crow era. White supremacists and White nationalists did not hide their racist ideologies as they demanded that their privileged place in history not be erased. The BLM movement, which challenges state-sanctioned anti-Black racism, was ready to confront themes of White discontent and reverse racism, critiques of political correctness, and the assumption that racialized people should know their place and be content to be the subordinate other.It is easy to frame the events in Charlottesville as indicative of US-specific race problems. However, a sense that White spaces should prevail and an ongoing history of anti-Black racism are not unique to the United States. The rise of Canadian activism under the BLM banner also signals a movement to change Canadian forms of institutional racism in policing, education, and the labor market. This article responds to perceptions that the BLM movement has given insufficient attention to environmental concerns (Pellow 2016; Halpern 2017). Drawing on critical race theory as a conceptual tool, this article focuses on the Canadian context as part of the author’s argument in favor of greater collaboration between BLM and the environmental justice (EJ) movement in Canada. This article also engages with the common stereotype that Blacks in Canada have it better than Blacks in the United States.


Author(s):  
Jeffrey Scholes

Race, religion, and sports may seem like odd bedfellows, but, in fact, all three have been interacting with each other since the emergence of modern sports in the United States over a century ago. It was the sport of boxing that saw a black man become a champion at the height of the Jim Crow era and a baseball player who broke the color barrier two decades before the civil rights movement began. In this chapter, the role that religion has played in these and other instances where race (the African American race in particular) and sports have collided will be examined for its impact on the relationship between race and sports. The association of race, religion, and sports is not accidental. The chapter demonstrates that all three are co-constitutive of and dependent on each other for their meaning at these chosen junctures in American sports history.


2020 ◽  
pp. 68-102
Author(s):  
Lindsay V. Reckson

This chapter examines the ecstatic performances haunting Stephen Crane’s 1895 narrative of the Civil War, The Red Badge of Courage. While much has been made of the way the novel strategically “forgets” the political history of the war, this chapter analyzes the novel’s complex overlay of religious enthusiasm and minstrel performance, exploring how Red Badge deploys these forms in order to grapple with the embodied semiotics of the Jim Crow era. Recovering traces of the midcentury minstrel figure “Dandy Jim of Caroline” in Jim Conklin’s exuberant death scene, the chapter argues that the narrative afterlife of such traces reveals the novel’s tendency to simultaneously erase and embed the excesses of war and postwar racial violence. Marking the historical resonance between minstrelsy and religious enthusiasm in their objectification of the moving body, Red Badge’s performances treat bodies as kinetic archives, whose stylized gestures offer stunning testimony to history’s traumatic returns. In this sense, the novel treats the ambivalence of performance as precisely the arena in which literature might grapple with history’s unaccountable remainders.


1987 ◽  
Vol 81 (2) ◽  
pp. 567-570 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul R. Abramson

Measuring the southern contribution to the Democratic coalition is an important task. To measure this contribution one must choose appropriate data and the appropriate unit of analysis for studying party coalitions in the United States. Two recent studies of party coalitions use the National Election Studies to estimate the southern contribution to the Democratic party, and these studies illustrate the problems one may encounter. This note demonstrates two points. First, survey research results may lead to erroneous estimates and it is preferable, where possible, to rely upon official election statistics. Second, the contribution of demographic groups to party coalitions should be assessed within the context of the political rules that make such coalitions meaningful.


2017 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 334-363
Author(s):  
Mark Brockway

AbstractThe American religious landscape is transforming due to a sharp rise in the percentage of the population that is nonreligious. Political and demographic causes have been proffered but little attention has been paid to the current and potential political impact of these “nones,” especially given the established link between religion, participation, and party politics. I argue that the political impact of nonreligious Americans lies in an unexplored subset of the nonreligious population called committed seculars. Committed seculars de-identify with religion, they adopt secular beliefs, and join organizations structured on secular beliefs. Using a unique survey of a secular organization, the American Humanist Association, I demonstrate that committed seculars are extremely partisan and participatory, and are driven to participate by their ideological extremity in relation to the Democratic Party. These results point to a long-term mobilizing dimension for Democrats and indicate the potential polarizing influence of seculars in party politics.


1948 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 500-510 ◽  
Author(s):  
O. Douglas Weeks

The closing chapter in the history of the white primary in the South has seemed since 1944 to be in process of being written. In that year, the United States Supreme Court, by invalidating in Smith v. Allwright the white primary rule of the Texas state Democratic convention, dealt a stunning, if not immediately mortal, blow to this most significant political custom or practice of the Southern states. The refusal of this court on April 19, 1948, to review a federal circuit court decision invalidating the white primary arrangements of South Carolina, created in 1944 to circumvent the effect of the Allwright decision, seems to have administered the judicial coup de grâce. It would, however, be unsafe to predict when “finis” may be set down for all states, political areas, counties, and voting precincts where by one means or another the Negro has long been barred from participation in the all-important primaries of the Democratic party. The remaining suffrage requirements, registration restrictions, and election provisions, and the political and administrative methods of applying them which still are employed in some Southern states and in parts of others in order to render it difficult for Negroes to vote will not be immediately eliminated. Moreover, the effects of political action have not been fully tested by the Democratic leaders of the South. At the present moment, plans for united efforts on their part are under consideration; and these could have far-reaching results before the end of the current presidential election year. Whatever the abstract justice of the situation, traditional attitudes and customs cannot be uprooted easily and have a way of resisting judicial or legislative fiat, particularly when it is honestly felt by many that such fiat has been imposed from the outside and by people unaware of the difficulties and adjustments involved.


1963 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 196-214 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harry N. Scheiber

In September 1833, Andrew Jackson issued an executive order ending deposit of Federal funds in the Bank of the United States, which had been the government depository since 1817. The culmination of Jackson's long struggle with the Bank and its friends in Congress, this measure closed a chapter in the political history of the era. To the conservative Jacksonians, “victory over the Bank of the United States was a consummation” that freed the state banks and business enterprise from the control of a powerful and despised institution. To the radical, hard-money faction of the Democratic party, however, “removal of the deposits” (as the order was popularly termed) was merely a first step toward more fundamental reform—elimination of the monetary disturbances that they attributed to reliance on bank paper for the currency of the country. Because of this divergence of views, partisan and factional disputes over Jacksonian financial policy did not cease with victory over the Bank. Central to the continuing debate was the relationship of die Treasury Department to the group of state-chartered banks, usually called the “pet banks,” in which Federal funds were deposited after September 1833. My purpose here is to review Treasury operations in die period 1833–1841, to suggest the political role of die pet banks and the economic impact of financial policy in die administrations of Jackson and Van Buren.


Reviews: Geography and Regional Administration, French Revolution 1968, The Beginning of the End: France, May 1968, The Student Revolt: The Activists Speak, Obsolete Communism: The Left-Wing Alternative, Resistance: The Political Autobiography of Georges Bidault, The New French Revolution: A Social and Economic Survey of France, 1945–1967, The Government of France, French Politics and Political Institutions, The Army of the Republic: The Role of the Military in the Political and Constitutional Evolution of France, 1871–1914, Parades and Politics at Vichy: The French Officer Corps Under Marshal Petain, La Socialization Politique Des Enfants, French Administrative Law, The French Parliament 1958–1967, Canadian Legislative Behaviour: A Study of the 25th Parliament, La Fonction Parlementaire En Belgique: Mecanismes D'Acces Et Images, Congress: Its Contemporary Role, Congress and Lobbies: Image and Reality, Congressional Ethics: The Conflict of Interest Issue, The Congressional Process: Strategies, Rules, and Procedure, Marxian Socialism in the United States, The American Party Systems, Critics of Society, American Politics: A Radical View, The Democratic Experiment: American Political Theory, The Federalists vs., The Democratic Party in American Politics, Parties and the Governmental System, Jacksonian Democracy and the Working Class, One Man, One Vote, The Art of the Possible: Government and Foreign Policy in Canada, in Defence of Canada: From the Great War to the Great Depression, Canada's Changing Defense Policy, 1957–1963: The Problems of a Middle Power in Alliance, A Samaritan State? External Aid in Canada's Foreign Policy, Canada and the Quest for Peace, The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Vols. XI-XXVI (1911–1925), Gandhi, A Study in Revolution, Non-Violence and Aggression, A Study of Gandhi's Moral Equivalent of War, Indian Administration, The Citizen and the Administrator in a Developing Democracy, States' Finances in India, The Foundations of Indian Federalism, Elite Conflict in a Plural Society, West Bengal and the Federalizing Process in India, Party Building in a New Nation, The Political Consequences of Electoral Laws, Economic Planning and Policies in Britain, France and Germany, Communism and the Politics of Development, Internationalism or Russification?, People's Democracy: A Contribution to the Study of the Communist Theory of State and Revolution, The Permanent Crisis: Communism in World Politics, Cohesion and Conflict in International Communism: A Study of Marxist-Leninist Concepts and Their Application, the Communist States and the West, the Communist World: Marxist and Non-Marxist Views, Yearbook on International Communist Affairs, 1966., Soviet Foreign Policy

1969 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 236-265
Author(s):  
B. Keith-Lucas ◽  
N. P. Keatinge ◽  
Robert S. Short ◽  
L. P. O'Sullivan ◽  
Margherita Rendel ◽  
...  

2006 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 132-159 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth Scheve ◽  
David Stasavage

There are few scholars who would disagree with the proposition that individual economic position and economic risk play a critical role in shaping preferences for income redistribution and social insurance. There is less consensus, however, about the extent to which non-economic factors also influence individual preferences regarding social insurance provision. A number of scholars have examined how issues of race and identity have influenced the development of social insurance programs in the United States, as well as individual attitudes with respect to these programs. In a theoretical context, other authors have considered how attitudes toward income redistribution might also depend upon psychological dispositions such as the “belief in a just world.” In this article, we focus on religiosity as an important factor that can shape both individual preferences and policy outcomes regarding social insurance in the United States. To do so, we develop an argument about religion and social insurance as substitutes that draws both on existing work on the political economy of social insurance and on findings in social psychology regarding what we call the “coping effect” of religion. We test our hypothesis using historical evidence from two early social insurance policies: workers’ compensation legislation enacted by state governments between 1910 and 1930 and New Deal unemployment relief.


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