Ideological closure in newspaper political language during the U.S. 1872 election campaign

2014 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 255-291
Author(s):  
Dafnah Strauss

This paper studies political language in late nineteenth century partisan newspapers by (a) evaluating the degree of pragmatic force, or ideological closure in political editorial content published during the 1872 election year in three leading Iowa newspapers; and (b) linking variations in the degree of ideological closure of these texts to the institutional and social-political contexts of their production, i.e. the political role of editors and the web of relationships within which they performed their work. The degree of ideological closure is evaluated by analysing a range of rhetorical and discursive practices. The study identified variations in degree of closure both between newspapers affiliated with the same party and within a single newspaper over time. Such variations are interpreted as reflecting editors’ need to mitigate an intricate set of political interests and obligations. The analysis also brings to light the richness of partisan editorial language of this time. These finds demonstrate the complexity of the political language and discourse of Gilded Age newspapers.

Author(s):  
Duncan Bell

This chapter focuses on John Robert Seeley (1834–95), the most prominent imperial thinker in late nineteenth-century Britain. It dissects Seeley's understanding of theology and religion, probes his views on the sacred character of nationality, and shows how he attempted to reconcile particularism and universalism in a so-called “cosmopolitan nationalist” vision. It argues that Seeley's most famous book, The Expansion of England (1883) should be understood as an expression of his basic political-theological commitments. The chapter also makes the case that he conceived of Greater Britain as a global federal nation-state, modeled on the United States. It concludes by discussing the role of India and Ireland in his polychronic, stratified conception of world order.


Author(s):  
Karen R. Roybal

This chapter discusses the ways in which the U.S. government created an alternative archive when it recorded Mexicanas/os' voices in the "official" record during land grant adjudication proceedings in the mid- to late nineteenth century. The testimonio of landowner María Cleofas Bóne de López serves as a prime focus in the chapter to emphasize the ways in which marriage to Mexican women was one way that both Anglo and Mexican men gained access to and amassed material property. Through this and other key cases, the chapter emphasizes that males' land ownership was often predicated on relationships to and with Mexican women and the ways Mexican men were effeminized within the U.S. legal system. The depositions serve as testimonials to the integral role of gender in the history of property ownership and dispossession.


Urban History ◽  
1995 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 229-237 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roy Hartnell

This paper looks at Joseph Chamberlain's Birmingham and claims that George Dawson's famous ‘civic gospel’ which laid the ground for the municipal reforms was permeated by a consensus view of the moral and civic role of art. It suggests that it was this combination of philosophy in action through art which created the special Birmingham context for a vibrant civic culture which led to the political and artistic achievements of the 1870s and 1880s. For a few brief years, this combination enabled Birmingham to stand above other British cities and lay claim to the titles of ‘the best-governed city in the world’ and ‘perhaps the most artistic town in England’.


Author(s):  
Elif S. Armbruster

This chapter examines the role of houses and interiors in American realist fiction and argues that realist authors were preoccupied with settings and houses in a way unique to their period, the late nineteenth century, when numerous technological and aesthetic developments coincided with the reproduction of “real life” in writing. Offering the lives and literature of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Edith Wharton as useful brackets around the realist genre, the chapter illustrates the degree to which these two authors made the motif of the home central to their fiction and nonfiction. It provides detailed readings of Stowe’s Pink and White Tyranny (1871), Wharton’s The House of Mirth (1905), and Wharton’s rural novel, Summer (1917) in order to showcase how houses personify and encapsulate their characters. In realist fiction, the chapter argues, houses can be read in order to understand the characters who move within them, just as characters can be read by their homes. Finally, the chapter reveals the degree to which Gilded Age excess was replaced by early twentieth-century simplicity, which, in turn, became the linchpin for the era of modernism that evolved in literature and architecture at this time.


2018 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 716-752 ◽  
Author(s):  
RUTH ROGASKI

AbstractMount Paektu/Changbai is a massive stratovolcano situated on the current border between North Korea and China, in a region that has historically lain at the edges of competing Eurasian polities. Formed by a past of dramatic eruptions, Mount Paektu/Changbai has long been held as a powerful, sentient entity by those living near it, but the mountain's unique geographical features and distance from political centres rendered it extremely elusive as an object of elite empirical knowledge. This article examines narratives of multiple expeditions to Mount Paektu/Changbai from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries in order to understand the role of space in the creation of knowledge about the mountain, and to probe how that knowledge intersected with political goals. Consideration of human experience of the mountain's topography and environment reveals a complex relationship between proximal and distal perceptions of nature. Even as they sought to create rational, ‘universal’ forms of knowledge about the mountain, Asian elites appropriated more localized belief in the mountain's powers, creating a hybrid knowledge that combined science and miracles. As the political context shifted in the late nineteenth century, the positioning of this hybrid knowledge shifted to become an indiginized basis for national resistance. This consideration of Mount Paektu/Changbai highlights the virtues of making space and environment central to the political and cultural history of northeast Asia.


2021 ◽  
Vol 03 (04) ◽  
pp. 395-404
Author(s):  
Sahar MAHOOD

The aim of the study was to learn about the situation of education in Lebanon during the French campaign in Syria in the period prior to 1921, to learn about developments at the educational level in Lebanon in order to reach its current status. To achieve the objectives of the study, the descriptive curriculum based on reference and extrapolation of previous studies has been followed. The study found that the education in Lebanon based on that of the French, who modified the education system in the line with their system and French became an official language. France took care of education in Syria and Lebanon because it recognized the important role of education in building an educated generation influenced by French culture to serve its political interests and orientations. The Maronite Church had also been instrumental in the emergence of education in Lebanon. Documents from the mandatory period indicated that many schools that had been closed of the war had not been re-established until after the end of hostilities. It has been subjected to some culture pressures and is therefore an interesting case study of the political role of education and the politicization of education.


2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 113-135
Author(s):  
Lucila Mallart

This article explores the role of visuality in the identity politics of fin-de-siècle Catalonia. It engages with the recent reevaluation of the visual, both as a source for the history of modern nation-building, and as a constitutive element in the emergence of civic identities in the liberal urban environment. In doing so, it offers a reading of the mutually constitutive relationship of the built environment and the print media in late-nineteenth century Catalonia, and explores the role of this relation as the mechanism by which the so-called ‘imagined communities’ come to exist. Engaging with debates on urban planning and educational policies, it challenges established views on the interplay between tradition and modernity in modern nation-building, and reveals long-term connections between late-nineteenth-century imaginaries and early-twentieth-century beliefs and practices.


Author(s):  
Marilyn Booth

This chapter demonstrates that inscriptions of female images in Cairo’s late nineteenth-century nationalist press were part of a discursive economy shaping debates on how gender roles and gendered expectations should shift as Egyptians struggled for independence. The chapter investigates content and placement of ‘news from the street’ in al-Mu’ayyad in the 1890s, examining how these terse local reports – equivalent to faits divers in the French press – contributed to the construction of an ideal national political trajectory with representations of women serving as the primary example in shaping a politics of newspaper intervention on the national scene. In this, an emerging advocacy role of newspaper correspondents makes the newspaper a mediator in the construction of activist reader-citizens.


2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-135
Author(s):  
Giles Whiteley

Walter Pater's late-nineteenth-century literary genre of the imaginary portrait has received relatively little critical attention. Conceived of as something of a continuum between his role as an art critic and his fictional pursuits, this essay probes the liminal space of the imaginary portraits, focusing on the role of the parergon, or frame, in his portraits. Guided by Pater's reading of Kant, who distinguishes between the work (ergon) and that which lies outside of the work (the parergon), between inside and outside, and contextualised alongside the analysis of Derrida, who shows how such distinctions have always already deconstructed themselves, I demonstrate a similar operation at work in the portraits. By closely analysing the parerga of two of Pater's portraits, ‘Duke Carl of Rosenmold’ (1887) and ‘Apollo in Picardy’ (1893), focusing on his partial quotation of Goethe in the former, and his playful autocitation and impersonation of Heine in the latter, I argue that Pater's parerga seek to destabilise the relationship between text and context so that the parerga do not lie outside the text but are implicated throughout in their reading, changing the portraits constitutively. As such, the formal structure of the parergon in Pater's portraits is also a theoretical fulcrum in his aesthetic criticism and marks that space where the limits of, and distinctions between, art and life become blurred.


Theoria ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 67 (165) ◽  
pp. 92-117
Author(s):  
Bronwyn Leebaw

What kinds of lessons can be learned from stories of those who resisted past abuses and injustices? How should such stories be recovered, and what do they have to teach us about present day struggles for justice and accountability? This paper investigates how Levi, Broz, and Arendt formulate the political role of storytelling as response to distinctive challenges associated with efforts to resist systematic forms of abuse and injustice. It focuses on how these thinkers reflected on such themes as witnesses, who were personally affected, to varying degrees, by atrocities under investigation. Despite their differences, these thinkers share a common concern with the way that organised atrocities are associated with systemic logics and grey zones that make people feel that it would be meaningless or futile to resist. To confront such challenges, Levi, Arendt and Broz all suggest, it is important to recover stories of resistance that are not usually heard or told in ways that defy the expectations of public audiences. Their distinctive storytelling strategies are not rooted in clashing theories of resistance, but rather reflect different perspectives on what is needed to make resistance meaningful in contexts where the failure of resistance is intolerable.


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