The Nineteenth-Century South in Film

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Christopher Hulbert
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
American Exceptionalism ◽  
The South ◽  
Gone With The Wind ◽  
Territorial Expansion ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 19Th Century

Representations of the 19th-century South on film have been produced in America from the Silent Era to the present. These movies include some of the most critically acclaimed and influential in American cinematic history—Gone with the Wind (1939), Glory (1989), 12 Years a Slave (2013)—and have produced some of the most iconic onscreen characters—Scarlett O’Hara, Josey Wales, Uncle Remus, Django Freeman—and onscreen moments—Rhett Butler not giving a damn, Mede boiling to death in a giant cauldron—in all of American popular culture. Depictions of the 19th-century South on film have also accounted for some of American film’s most notorious offerings—see the section entitled Anti-Slavery: Blaxploitation—and some of its biggest financial disappointments, such as Raintree County (1957) or Gods and Generals (2003). The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Gone with the Wind (1939) set standards for how southerners and other Americans would imagine the 19th-century South and subsequent films have been responding ever since. Prior to the apex of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 60s, Lost Cause themes dominated at the box office. After integration, the Civil Rights Act (1964), the Voting Rights Act (1965), and the assassinations of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert Kennedy, movies about the 19th-century South gradually shifted toward African American and female protagonists. Films also became increasingly graphic, violent, and sexualized in the late 1960s and 1970s as the pendulum swung fully away from the moonlight and magnolia, pro-slavery narratives of Gone with the Wind. In the 1990s, Hollywood began to carve out a middle position; however, neither extreme—exemplified by The Birth of a Nation and Mandingo, respectively—ever completely disappeared. Filmic coverage of the antebellum (1820–1860) and war years (1861–1865) dominates portrayals of the 19th-century South. These movies home in on major themes involving the legacy of slavery in America, the legacy of the Civil War, American territorial expansion, and American exceptionalism. Moreover, the South is habitually depicted as unique compared to the rest of the nation—for its hospitality, pace of living, race relations, mysteriousness, exoticism—and southerners are represented as innately more violent than their northern counterparts. Generally, the messaging of these films has been untethered from contemporary academic interpretations of the region, slavery, or the Civil War—yet their scripts and visuals have played, and continue to play, an outsized role in how Americans imagine the South and use the South to forge regional and national identities.

Look Away! Dixie’s Landed!

2018 ◽  
pp. 123-154
Author(s):  
Nina Silber
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
New Deal ◽  
Lost Cause ◽  
White Americans ◽  
Gone With The Wind ◽  
White Southerners ◽  
Civil War Era ◽  
The New Deal

The pro-Confederate Lost Cause memory of the Civil War continued to have considerable staying power during the 1930s, seen most notably in the popularity of the book and film versions of Gone With the Wind. At the same time, the Lost Cause was adapted to fit the sensibilities of this era. Many white Americans, for example, were drawn to the suffering of Civil War era white southerners in light of the economic trials of the 30s. Conservatives also doubled-down on the Lost Cause narrative as they pushed back against aspects of the New Deal agenda, as well as a reawakened civil rights movement and anti-lynching campaign. Finally, conservatives adapted the Lost Cause story to target Northern radicals and communists as the same kind of agitators who punished white southerners during Reconstruction. Black activists and communists tried to expose the racist and unpatriotic underpinnings of the Lost Cause but often fell short.

Mrs. John Marshall Harlan's Memories: Hierarchies of Gender and Race in the Household and the Polity

1993 ◽  
Vol 18 (03) ◽  
pp. 453-478
Author(s):  
Linda C. A. Przybyszewski
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
White Male ◽  
Family Identity ◽  
Public Spheres ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Family ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
John Marshall

While legal papers and case decisions have been the traditional focus of judicial biography, the family papers of Justice John Marshall Harlan the Elder demonstrate the importance for understanding a judge's conception of the polity of shifting our sights to the household. Historians of the 19th century have overestimated the distance between the private and the public spheres. The memoirs of Harlan's wife Malvina offer us unparalleled, and hitherto neglected, testimony. Her depiction of the antebellum Harlan household shows its two hierarchies based on assumptions of fundamental differences—those of gender and of race—and both positing a benevolent white male paternalist at their apex. Malvina Harlan's memoirs indicate the lifelong persistence of this paternalism in her own relationship with Justice Harlan and in his relationship with a black servant. These patterns of hierachy, separation, and mutual devotion were essential to Harlan's understanding of his family identity and personal duty. His famous dissents in favor of black civil rights protections and his lapses from his color-blind rule have their roots in this paternalism even as Harlan came to embrace the racial egalitarianism of the Civil War amendments.

US South remains distinctive as divisions sharpen

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
The South ◽  
Us South ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Southern States ◽  
Contemporary Politics ◽  
The Us ◽  
The 19Th Century

Significance The US South, defined as the eleven states of the 19th-century Confederacy, was a Democratic stronghold for 100 years after the Civil War. Now, with some of the country’s heaviest concentrations of Black Democratic supporters and White evangelical Republican voters, it encompasses the intensified schisms in contemporary politics. Impacts There will be seven Senate races in the South in November, two of which will not have an incumbent. Nine Southern states will have Republican governors in 2022, with Republican-controlled legislatures in ten. Beto O’Rourke, the Democrat who gave Republican Ted Cruz a close Senate race in 2018, is running for governor of Texas.

Achieving the Black Social Gospel

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gary Dorrien
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Social Gospel ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
Abolitionist Movement ◽  
The 19Th Century

The black social gospel advocated protest activism within religious communities to resist America’s system of racial caste. Dorrien’s previous book, The New Abolition: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Black Social Gospel, described the 19th century founding of this tradition as a successor to the abolitionist movement. The New Abolition ended just as King’s models of social justice ministry entered the story. Breaking White Supremacy describes the black social gospel luminaries who influenced King and the figures of King’s generation who led the civil rights movement.

Atlantic New Orleans: 18th and 19th Centuries

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean-Pierre Le Glaunec ◽  
Nathalie Dessens
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil War ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Mississippi River ◽  
The United States ◽  
Port Cities ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
The 19Th Century

Founded in 1718 by Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, the city of La Nouvelle-Orléans was named in honor of the French Regent Philippe, Duc d’Orléans. In 1722, it became the capital of the then-French colony of Louisiana. After four decades of French rule, it was ceded to Spain, at the end of the Seven Years’ War, in 1762. Almost four decades later, in 1800, it was briefly (and secretly) retroceded to France before the latter, faced with defeat in neighboring Saint-Domingue, sold it to the United States in 1803, turning La Nouvelle-Orléans into New Orleans. Throughout the eighty-five years of its colonial history, it remained a small frontier town, with a population of about 8,000 in 1805. Its integration to the United States marked the beginning of its expansion, favored by its ideal position at the mouth of the Mississippi River, at the confluence of the main riverway of the young American republic and the Gulf of Mexico, a position which permitted exchanges of products and people between the United States, the Caribbean, and the Atlantic. Receiving large contingents of migrants (free and forced) from the eastern part of the United States, the Caribbean (especially the “refugees” from the Haitian Revolution), Europe (France, in particular, throughout the first half of the 19th century), and Africa (until the closing of the Atlantic slave trade), it grew to 102,193 inhabitants by 1840, then becoming the third-largest city in the United States. Its specific colonial past and singular evolution in the early American period account for its complex status in the 19th-century United States. Because it relied on the institution of slavery, it was a city of the South in the forty-year sectional confrontation that eventually tore the country apart in 1860. The presence of a significant population of free people of color, often educated, politically conscious, and socially and economically active, however, made it depart from the usual Southern pattern. Moreover, its existence as one of the main port cities of the United States, its cosmopolitanism, and its multilingualism made it follow a development pattern closer to that of the Atlantic port cities of the northeastern United States. After the Civil War, it became the spearhead of the civil rights movement, under the lead of the politically conscious, culturally, socially, and sometimes economically influential population of color that had been free before the Civil War. When the 19th century closed, New Orleans became an American city of the segregated South and its Atlantic destiny ended.

Fade In, Crossroads

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Jackson
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Film Industry ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The South ◽  
Gone With The Wind ◽  
White Southerners ◽  
Black And White

Fade In, Crossroads is a history of the relations between southerners and motion pictures from the silent era to midcentury. In providing a narrative of the South’s contributions to the film medium from the late nineteenth century through the golden age of Hollywood, it considers the many southerners who worked as inventors, executives, filmmakers, screenwriters, performers, and critics during this period. It explores early production centers within the South as well as the effects of the migration of millions of black and white southerners beyond the region to such destinations as Los Angeles, where they made inroads in the growing film industry. It is also the story of how the rise and fall of the American film industry coincided with the rise and fall of the South’s most important modern product and export—Jim Crow segregation. This work looks at important southern historical legacies on film: the Civil War film tradition (which includes the two most successful films of all time, The Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind); the notorious tradition of lynching films during an era of prolific lynching in the South; and the remarkable race film industry, whose independent African American filmmakers forged an important cinematic tradition in response to the racial limitations of both the South and Hollywood. It also examines the activities of southern censorship officials, who utilized the medium in the service of Jim Crow, and traces the influence of film on future Civil Rights Movement figures.

Sources of the recognition of belligerent status

1977 ◽  
Vol 17 (192) ◽  
pp. 111-127 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles Zorgbibe
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
The State ◽  
Sovereign Power ◽  
Equal Status ◽  
Positive Law ◽  
Unilateral Action ◽  
The Government ◽  
The Right ◽  
The 19Th Century

“Whenever a large organized group believes it has the right to resist the sovereign power and considers itself capable of resorting to arms, war between the two parties should take place in the same manner as between nations…” This statement by de Vattel in the 19th century seemed destined to take its place as a part of positive law, constituting part of what was known as recognition of belligerency, tantamount to the recognition by the established government of an equal status for insurgents and regular belligerents. When a civil war became extensive enough, the State attacked would understand that it was wisest to acknowledge the existence of a state of war with part of the population. This would, at the same time, allow the conflict to be seen in a truer light. The unilateral action of the legal government in recognizing belligerency would be the condition for granting belligerent rights to the parties. It would constitute a demonstration of humanity on the part of the government of the State attacked and would also provide that government with prospects for effective pursuit of the war. By admitting that it was forced to resort to war, it would at least have its hands free to make war seriously.

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