The Civil War Dead and American Modernity

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Finseth
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Central Complex ◽  
Moral Conflicts ◽  
Critical Thought ◽  
The Dead ◽  
War Dead ◽  
Civil War Era ◽  
American Society

Tracing the Civil War dead’s representational afterlife acroᶊ an array of historical, visual, and literary documents from 1861 to 1914, this book shows that they played a central, complex, and paradoxical role in how Americans understood the “modernity” of the United States. Amid the turbulence of the postbellum era, the dead provided an illusion of coherence, intelligibility, and continuity in the national self, and yet they also focalized American society’s central philosophical and moral conflicts. Recirculated through the networks of information and meaning by which a culture understands and creates itself, they functioned, and continue to function, as a form of symbolic currency in a memorial economy linking the Civil War era to the present. Reconstructing the strategies by which postwar American society reimagined the Civil War dead, this book argues that a strain of critical thought was alert to this necropolitical dynamic from the very years of the war itself.

The American Society of International Law 1906–1956

1956 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 293-312 ◽  
Author(s):  
George A. Finch
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
International Relations ◽  
International Law ◽  
The United States ◽  
Peace Treaty ◽  
Law And Justice ◽  
Jay Treaty ◽  
American Society

The founding fifty years ago of a society to promote the establishment of international relations on the basis of law and justice was a step marking the progress that had been made at the beginning of the century in the age-long efforts to find a means of substituting reason for force in the settlement of international controversies. At that time arbitration was generally regarded as the most suitable and acceptable substitute for war. Great Britain and the United States had both heavily contributed to that conviction first by submitting to arbitration under the Jay Treaty of 1794 the numerous misunderstandings that developed in carrying out the provisions of the Peace Treaty of 1783, and then three-quarters of a century later in submitting to arbitration by the Treaty of Washington of 1871 the dangerous Alabama Claims dispute following the American Civil War.

“ARE WE A NATION?”: THE CONJUNCTURE OF NATIONHOOD AND RACE IN THE UNITED STATES, 1850–1876

2005 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 327-360 ◽  
Author(s):  
DOROTHY ROSS
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Current Theory ◽  
National Unity ◽  
Charles Sumner ◽  
Civil War Era ◽  
Popular Nationalism ◽  
Ethnic Nation ◽  
John William Draper

While popular nationalism flourished in the United States from the time of the Revolution onward, reflective treatments of what it meant to be, specifically, a “nation” were rarely produced until the Civil War era. Historians have generally treated northern Civil War theorists of the nation as importers of European ideas of organic nationhood to serve conservative and statist purposes. The most notable mid-century theorists—Francis Lieber, Elisha Mulford, Orestes Brownson, John William Draper, Frederick Douglass, and Charles Sumner—were a more diverse set, however. They brought to the subject different theoretical and political assumptions and produced different models of the American nation, and they accommodated their borrowed conceptions to native materials. If their initial aim was to strengthen the authority and unity of the wartime nation, they soon struggled with the multiracial nation that was emerging from the war. The unity they posited in the nation contended with invidious racial, ethnic, and religious distinctions. In the end, Lieber, Brownson, Mulford, and Draper found diversity difficult or impossible to reconcile with their visions of national unity. Only Sumner and Douglass managed to construct models of the nation that were both heterogeneous and united: their postwar views serve as counterpoint to the tortured efforts of the other writers. In the language of current theory, these writers divided over whether the United States was a civic or an ethnic nation, although not all their exclusions and inequalities emanated from an ethnic model of the nation, nor all their inclusions and liberties from a civic one.

scholarly journals Response to Brinkmann et al. “Re-assembly of 19th century smallpox vaccine genomes reveals the contemporaneous use of horsepox and horsepox-related viruses in the United States”

2020 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ana T. Duggan ◽  
Edward C. Holmes ◽  
Hendrik N. Poinar
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil War ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Ancient Dna ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Civil War ◽  
Smallpox Vaccine ◽  
Civil War Era

AbstractWe thank Brinkmann and colleagues for their correspondence and their further investigation into these American Civil War Era vaccination strains. Here, we summarize the difficulties and caveats of work with ancient DNA.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Gregory P. Downs
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Civil War Era ◽  
The U.S

What is a revolution and why should we think of the U.S. Civil War Era as part of a revolutionary wave? The introduction lays out theories of revolutions and revolutionary changes and explores why the United States’ domestic transformation fits categories of a revolution because of its reliance on bloody constitutionalism, as well as its relation to a broader international revolutionary wave connecting Spain and Cuba and Mexico to the United States.

The United States from the Inside Out and the Southside North

2020 ◽  
pp. 25-35
Author(s):  
Steven Hahn
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Transnational Studies ◽  
Civil War Era ◽  
Inside Out

This chapter counters the tendency of many comparative and transnational studies of the United States to focus on the Atlantic and ties between Europe and the Americas. The author reorients the reader’s gaze west and southward in the Civil War era to argue for the simultaneity of nation state and empire as governing forms and ideological goals. He highlights the sometimes seemingly contradictory impulses involved in the consolidation of sovereignty within U.S. borders and also in the contemporaneous movement outward to conquer and subjugate new lands and peoples.

Journeys of an Immigrant Violinist: Jacques Oliveira in Civil War–Era New York and New Orleans

2012 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-82
Author(s):  
BRIAN C. THOMPSON
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Civil War ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Census Data ◽  
The United States ◽  
Musical Life ◽  
Cultural Life ◽  
Civil War Era ◽  
The Impact

AbstractThis article explores the U.S. career of the Dutch immigrant violinist Jacques Oliveira. Following successful performances in Britain, Oliveira sailed for the United States in the fall of 1859. Under P.T. Barnum's management, the twenty-three-year-old became a fixture on New York's theatrical scene, as an instrumental soloist with Tom Thumb's company, with the Drayton Parlor Opera troupe, and with Hooley and Campbell's Minstrels. After a year, he traveled south, settling in occupied New Orleans, where he had family connections. Despite the economic difficulties of the time, he soon became an important figure in the city's cultural life, only to die during an outbreak of cholera and yellow fever in the summer of 1867.In the absence of letters or diaries, the article relies heavily on close examination of period newspapers, city directories and census data to reconstruct Oliveira's world. Oliveira's activities, his successes and struggles, offer insights into the place of the working musician, newly arrived in the Unites States in the late 1850s. Examining the events of his life enables us to contrast cultural life in New York and New Orleans at the time of the Civil War. The article illuminates the place of the instrumentalist in the theater, reveals how attitudes toward music were influenced by a cultural hierarchy, provides insights into the place of the violin in the musical life of the United States, and examines the impact of the Civil War on musical life in New Orleans.

scholarly journals Head injury in heroes of the Civil War and its lasting influence

2016 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. E4 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victor M. Sabourin ◽  
Ryan Holland ◽  
Christine Mau ◽  
Chirag D. Gandhi ◽  
Charles J. Prestigiacomo
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Head Injury ◽  
The United States ◽  
Abraham Lincoln ◽  
Large Head ◽  
History Of ◽  
Civil War Era ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Lasting Influence

The Civil War era was an age-defining period in the history of the United States of America, the effects of which are still seen in the nation today. In this era, the issue of head injury pervaded society. From the president of the United States, Abraham Lincoln, to the officers and soldiers of the Union and Confederate armies, and to the population at large, head injury and its ramifications gripped the nation. This article focuses on 3 individuals: Major General John Sedgwick, First Lieutenant Alonzo Cushing, and Harriet Tubman, as examples of the impact that head injury had during this era. These 3 individuals were chosen for this article because of their lasting legacies, contributions to society, and interesting connections to one another.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Erik Mathisen
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Turning Point ◽  
Rapid Development ◽  
The United States ◽  
Nation States ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Civil War Era ◽  
The Relationship

The Civil War marked a turning point not only in the history of the republic, but the history of citizenship in the United States as well. But there is more to this moment than might appear on the surface. What this book stakes out are a new set of questions about what it meant to be a citizen, how Americans thought about it, and just how much the rapid development of two warring nation-states brought the relationship between citizens and states into such sharp relief. By placing ideas about obligation at the center of a history of citizenship during the Civil War era, The Loyal Republic charts new ground.

Ad Bellum Purificandum

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giorgio Mariani
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Tradition ◽  
Overwhelming Evidence ◽  
Temporary Suspension ◽  
Civil War Era ◽  
Gun Culture

This chapter examines the notion that peace is either a temporary suspension of war or, even worse, a camouflaged form of violence. It begins with a discussion of the controversy sparked by Michael Bellesiles's 2000 book Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture, which provides overwhelming evidence that the American gun culture was created during the Civil War era. It then considers the argument that there is in the United States an important anti-war intellectual and political tradition grounded in Christian pacifism and goes on to contend that we must rediscover a different kind of peace it calls “fighting peace”—a peace that, far from shying away from conflicts, promotes confrontations. It insists that peace cannot be studied or understood without simultaneously studying and thinking war, and the same is true of violence and non-violence. Si pace frui volumus, bellum purificandum est. If you wish to enjoy the fruits of peace, you must achieve the purification of war.

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