Houses Divided

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucas P. Volkman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
The United States ◽  
Local Phenomenon ◽  
White Middle Class ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Border State

This work argues that congregational and local denominational schisms among Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians in the border state of Missouri before, during, and after the Civil War were central to the crisis of the Union, Civil War, and Reconstruction. Employing an array of approaches that examine these ecclesiastical fractures beyond the customary antebellum temporal scope of analysis, and as a local phenomenon, this study maintains that the schisms were interlinked religious, sociocultural, legal, and political developments rife with implications for the transformation of evangelicalism and the United States in that period and to the end of Reconstruction. The evangelical disruptions in Missouri were grounded in divergent moral and political understandings of slavery, abolitionism, secession, and disloyalty. Publicly articulated by factional litigation over church property and a combative evangelical print culture, the schisms were complicated by race, class, and gender dynamics that arrayed the contending interests of white middle-class women and men, rural churchgoers, and African American congregants. These ruptures forged antagonistic northern and southern evangelical worldviews that increased antebellum sectarian strife and violence, energized the notorious guerrilla conflict that gripped Missouri through the Civil War, and fueled postwar vigilantism between opponents and proponents of emancipation. As such, the schisms produced the intertwined religious, legal, and constitutional controversies that shaped pro- and antislavery evangelical contention before 1861, wartime Radical rule, and the rise and fall of Reconstruction.

“Look!! Look!!! at This!!!!”: The Radical Typography of David Walker's Appeal

PMLA ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 126 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-72 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcy J. Dinius
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
The United States ◽  
Literary Canon ◽  
The World ◽  
Printed Word

From the first publication of David Walker's Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World in 1829 through its incorporation into the contemporary literary canon, readers have recognized it as a fiery indictment of slavery and of the contradictions in Christianity and in the United States' founding. Yet the striking typography of Walker's Appeal has become invisible in our critical focus on the text's relation to African American oratory and even in considerations of the pamphlet's significance in early black print culture. An analysis of this graphic text reveals how it materially registers Walker's impassioned voice and argument and how it visually directs readers to voice his call to the illiterate. Walker attempts to resolve the opposition of the spoken and the printed word by exploiting his text's typography.

The Rise and Fall of Ace Records: A Case Study in the Independent Record Business

1990 ◽  
Vol 64 (3) ◽  
pp. 411-450 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donald J. Mabry
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
The United States ◽  
Record Industry ◽  
Rhythm And Blues ◽  
White Middle Class ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Rock N Roll

The record industry in the United States was controlled until the 1950s by a half dozen major companies, which produced music directed primarily toward the white middle class. The following article uses the history of Ace Records, a small, regional, independent company, to examine the nature of the record industry in the 1950s and 1960s. The article explains the shifts in demography and technology that made possible the growth of the independents, as well as the obstacles and events that made their demise more likely. It also traces the changes that such companies, by recording and promoting rhythm and blues and early rock ‘n’ roll, introduced to the cultural mainstream.

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.

Gendering asexuality and asexualizing gender: A qualitative study exploring the intersections between gender and asexuality

Sexualities ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (7-8) ◽  
pp. 1197-1216 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristina Gupta
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Qualitative Study ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
The United States ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Sexual Norms ◽  
Sexual Autonomy ◽  
White Middle Class ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Depth Interviews

In this article, I explore the intersections between gender and asexuality, drawing on data collected from in-depth interviews with 30 asexually-identified individuals living in the United States. I examine the differential effects that gendered sexual norms have on asexually-identified men and women and begin to explore the relationship between asexuality, gender non-conformity, and trans* identities. Based on these findings, I argue that while white, middle-class asexually-identified men may live in greater conflict with dominant gendered sexual norms than white, middle-class asexually-identified women, the sexual autonomy of these asexually-identified men – specifically their right to refuse sexuality – may be greater than the sexual autonomy of these asexually-identified women.

Women, Gender, and Religion in the United States

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ann Braude
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
Civil War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Domestic Policy ◽  
Jewish Women ◽  
Public Speech ◽  
Religious Women ◽  
Multiple Markers ◽  
Early National

While historians of America attend to religion most closely in the colonial and early national periods, this chapter, in contrast, views the century following the Civil War as the period when religious women had their greatest public impact, founding huge associations that connected religious women to public goals related to reform, temperance, and missions as well as foreign and domestic policy. It explores the responses of American women to the theological basis of gender in scriptural and doctrinal injunctions governing women’s public speech, leadership, and roles in marriage and motherhood. Treating Protestant, Catholic, Mormon, Muslim, and Jewish women, the chapter draws on interpretive models from African American women’s history, a field that has theorized the inseparability of multiple markers of identity, including religion. It argues that the construction of every religious prejudice, like the construction of race, advances and is advanced by the construction of gender.

The Role of Anti-Slavery Sentiment in English Reactions to the American Civil War

1976 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 405-420 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas A. Lorimer
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Political Attitudes ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Democracy ◽  
Testing Ground ◽  
Parliamentary Reform

From 1861 to 1865, English politicians and journalists watched with passionate interest as the United States seemed to tear itself apart over the question of slavery. During these years, English public men, politicians and writers of all qualities and degrees, gave extensive airing to their views both of slavery and of American democracy. This extensive commentary on the American conflict, and the subsequent revival of interest in parliamentary reform, have made the divisions in English opinion on the war a useful testing ground of mid-Victorian social and political attitudes. Early studies, written from the perspective of the northern victory, the abolition of slavery, and the martyrdom of Lincoln, found it difficult to comprehend the extent of pro-confederate sympathy in England. On the slavery question, the mid-Victorians seemed to have lost the abolitionist enthusiasm of their evangelical forebears in the Clapham Sect. In order to fathom this failure of English judgement, historians attempted to show that the more articulate minority, the upper echelons of mid-Victorian society, sided with an aristocratic, slave-owning south, while the less articulate majority, middle-class radicals and the working class, sided with a democratic, abolitionist north.

Eating Together

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alice P. Julier
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Social Inequalities ◽  
The United States ◽  
Past Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Moral Discourses

An insightful map of the landscape of social meals, this book argues that the ways in which Americans eat together play a central role in social life in the United States. Delving into a wide range of research, the author analyzes etiquette and entertaining books from the past century and conducts interviews and observations of dozens of African American and non-ethnic white hosts and guests at dinner parties, potlucks, and buffets. It finds that when people invite friends, neighbors, or family members to share meals within their households, social inequalities involving race, economics, and gender reveal themselves in interesting ways: relationships are defined, boundaries of intimacy or distance are set, and people find themselves either excluded or included. The book focuses on one particular type of sociable activity, the shared meal—and more narrowly, the shared meal that occurs in households and includes non-kin. It explores some of the moral discourses and texts that shape our understanding of food and social life in the United States.

scholarly journals Acute Rheumatic Fever: Findings of a Hospital-Based Study and an Overview of Reported Outbreaks

1990 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 77-81 ◽  
Author(s):  
Upton D Allen ◽  
Michael Braudo ◽  
Stanley E Read
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Rural Communities ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Rheumatic Fever ◽  
Acute Rheumatic Fever ◽  
The United States ◽  
White Middle Class ◽  
Time Period ◽  
Group A ◽  
Sick Children

To review the characteristics of reported outbreaks of acute rheumatic fever in the United States, and to determine if there is an increase in the incidence of acute rheumatic fever in the population served by the Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto, Ontario, the authors conducted a literature search and a retrospective review of inpatients and outpatients, satisfying the revised Jones criteria for the diagnosis of acute rheumatic fever, from 1972 to 1988. Patients satisfying the revised Jones criteria for the time period 1972–88 were included in the study. There have been eight articles reporting an increase in acute rheumatic fever in the United States. In three, the majority of children were white and from middle class suburban/rural communities in different geographic locations. Mucoid strains of group A streptococci were implicated but not confirmed as being associated with the outbreaks in three. The results of the chart review at the Hospital for Sick Children revealed that 83 cases satisfied the revised Jones criteria. The number of cases per 100,000 children (aged 18 years or less) per year, decreased progressively over the study period. Polyarthritis was the most frequently seen major criterion occurring in 73% of patients (61 of 83). The most frequently affected ethnic groups were Italians 23%, Afro-Canadians 19% and Orientals 8%. The reported outbreaks in the United States are multifocal and predominantly confined to white middle class children residing in suburban/rural communities. There was no evidence of an increase in the number of cases of acute rheumatic fever seen in the population served by the Hospital for Sick Children; there was a progressive decline in number of cases over the study period. The results facilitate the characterization of acute rheumatic fever within North America into three different patterns of occurrence.

Early African American Print Culture

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Gardner
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
The United States ◽  
Diverse Range ◽  
The North ◽  
Black Life ◽  
Maria Stewart

Not until the end of the 20th century did scholars begin to look at early African American print culture in the depth it deserves. A story painfully intertwined with the transatlantic slave system and racism, early black print engagement combined, from its beginnings, responses to white aggression and a powerful set of individual and communal desires to read about, record, and, via print, share truths of black life in the United States. Some of the first creators of black print in the United States, from the authors of the earliest slave narratives to poet Phillis Wheatley, had to think through questions of individual and communal identity vis-à-vis emerging American socio-political structures and find ways to ensure control over their own voices in a white-dominated culture that tried to exclude, use, or abuse those voices. But early black print culture is not simply the story of a single genre like the slave narrative or of exceptional individuals like Wheatley. Rather, it is also the story of organizational print tied to churches, conventions, and activist groups. It is as well the story of a diverse range of modes, from the rich pamphleteering tradition (perhaps most excitingly expressed by David Walker) to early black periodicals like those edited by Samuel Cornish and Philip Bell. Especially after 1830, it also became the story of a range of black women (from Maria Stewart and Jarena Lee to Frances Ellen Watkins Harper), of African Americans across the North (and occasionally in the midst of the slave South), and of an increasing number of formats, genres, and approaches. And it became a story of how black activists might interact (in print and beyond) with white antislavery activists, recognizing both shared and different goals and philosophies as they attempted to fight not only for emancipation but for broader civil rights.

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