The Roads Home

2021 ◽  
pp. 55-92
Author(s):  
Phoebe S.K. Young

Chapter 2 follows the early travels of John Muir to get a glimpse of the highly mobile landscape of the decades that followed the Civil War, particularly in the South and West. Before he rose to fame as the founder of the Sierra Club, Muir walked the country’s roads alongside mobile laborers, newly freed African Americans, and Native peoples. For them, as for the itinerant naturalist, sleeping outside could constitute a marginal and perilous, if all-too-familiar existence. Muir alternately knocked on strangers’ doors, slept outside in fear of disease and alligators, and herded sheep in Sierra meadows. His interpretations and criticisms of Black and Indigenous people figured into Muir’s seminal perspectives on wilderness, which in turn influenced changing views of public nature, including recreational and nonrecreational campers alike in the late nineteenth century.

1984 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-180 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bernard Elliott

At the Reformation, three possibilities faced English Catholics. They could continue to be Catholics and so suffer the penalties of the penal laws; they could conform to the Church of England; or they could adopt a middle course and become Church Papists. The Nevills of Nevill Holt, near Market Harborough in Leicestershire, went through all three phases. In the reign of Edward VI, Thomas Nevill I became a Protestant. His grandson, Thomas Nevill II, became a Church Papist under James I; and Thomas II’s son, Henry Nevill I, continued to be one at the time of the Civil War. But Henry l’s son William was definitely a Catholic and went into exile with King James II, while William’s son, Henry Nevill II, was an open Catholic under Charles II. Henry Nevill II’s descendants continued to be Catholics throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries until they left Nevill Holt in the late nineteenth century.


Author(s):  
Deanna Ferree Womack

This book picks up where most books on the American Syria Mission have left off-in 1860, when civil war threw the Syrian Protestant community and the wider Ottoman Syrian society into chaos. This opening chapter introduces the diverse characters who sought to rebuild Syrian society and became enmeshed or entangled in one another’s history during the Arab renaissance (Nahda) that picked up steam in the late nineteenth century: American missionaries, Ottoman administrators, Syrian Protestants, and others from Syria’s Christian, Muslim, Jewish, and Druze sects. It proposes setting the dominant Western male missionary narrative alongside the overlooked stories of Ottoman residents-especially women-and it locates this exploration of Syrian Protestant history within the field of World Christianity.


Author(s):  
John Mac Kilgore

The epilogue to the book gestures toward the destiny of enthusiasm in the post-Civil War era. In the wake of the trauma of war, the end of slavery, and the birth of a technologically-oriented culture of disenchanted realism, political enthusiasm no longer seemed necessary or viable. At the same time, the final lesson of Walt Whitman circa the centennial of the American Revolution is not so much that political enthusiasm has come to an end but that it must take on new, unheard-of forms specific to its historical era—in Whitman’s view, that meant a struggle for the rights of labor against the corruptions of capitalism (what he called the “tramp and strike question”). As one indication of how literatures of enthusiasm continued to operate in the late nineteenth century, the chapter discusses Edward Bellamy’s utopian novel Looking Backward and Whitman’s contemporaneous interest in anti-capitalism. Enthusiasm is finally what Whitman calls the “latent right of insurrection,” a “quenchless, indispensable fire” in the convulsive context of political tyranny.


Author(s):  
Amanda Brickell Bellows

This chapter examines the ways in which Russian and American businesses represented the histories of slavery, serfdom, and emancipation in late nineteenth-century advertisements. Images of African Americans and peasants appeared in posters, trade cards, and ephemera. A comparative analysis of these depictions illuminates businesses’ distinct marketing strategies and efforts to target specific consumer groups through portrayals of historically subjugated populations.


Author(s):  
Sarah Blackwood

This chapter traces a new visual genealogy of inner life as it appears in canonical late-nineteenth-century painter and portraitist Thomas Eakins’s work. It situates Eakins’s lauded portraits alongside the complex political and racialized questions about mind and body that emerged in the U.S. after the Civil War. It centers a reading of a marginal Eakins painting—Whistling for Plover—that Eakins gave as a gift to neurologist S. Weir Mitchell. This painting is a part of a web of inventive thinking about mind and body in the postbellum U.S., evincing the deep anxiety felt nationally over the bodily scars left by the Civil War’s racial violence, an anxiety that is essential to the development of the New Psychology as a discipline.


1987 ◽  
Vol 61 (4) ◽  
pp. 551-581 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shin'ichi Yonekawa

In this wide-ranging article, Professor Yonekawa identifies and examines in detail the burst of cotton spinning company formation that occurred in the late nineteenth century among the major cotton-producing nations of the world. His comparative approach allows him to focus on key local factors responsible for the company flotation booms in the areas discussed. He is also able to compare the effects of more general circumstances in the industry, such as trends in the price of raw cotton and the disruption during the American Civil War, on the various locations. Finally, his multinational approach brings to light many intriguing questions and illuminates areas for productive future research.


Author(s):  
Pippa Holloway

highlights the tensions between the demands of modern law and white supremacy by studying the rights of convicted criminals in court. Many southern states, for racial and partisan ends, used criminal convictions to strip convicts of their right to testify on their own behalf in court. While states in the rest of the country had revoked such limitations on courtroom testimony by the late nineteenth century, southern states maintained them. They served as an extension of Jim Crow laws, used to deny African Americans full citizenship, much as felon disenfranchisement laws did.


Author(s):  
Diane Miller Sommerville

Suicide, by late nineteenth century, had transformed from a shameful, sinful act to one of sacrifice and courage. The most famous suicide of the Civil War, that of Edmund Ruffin, shows this evolution in attitudes about suicide. Ruffin’s suicide is venerated in Lost Cause literature as an act of patriotic martyrdom. The glorification of (white) suicide converged with the racial politics of the era as seen in the classic film, Birth of a Nation, and on the novel on which it was based, Thomas Dixon’s The Clansman. Suicide had become a marker of racial superiority that anchored the act to a neo-Confederate identity. By contrast, black suicides were either denied or explained as the acts of uncontrollable, manic, crazy former slaves no longer under the constraints of enslavement. Heroic suicide instilled meaning into the vast suffering in the failed effort at independence.


Religion ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 23-29
Author(s):  
David Chidester

This chapter examines the emergence of a category, “belief in spiritual beings,” which drove certain “intellectualist” assumptions about the essence, origin, and persistence of religion. Like many terms in the study of religion in Europe during the late nineteenth century, animism arose through a global mediation in which an imperial theorist, in this case the father of anthropology, E. B. Tylor, relied on colonial middlemen, such as missionaries, travelers, and administrators, for evidence about indigenous people all over the world. Among other colonial sources, E. B. Tylor relied on the Anglican missionary Henry Callaway for data about Zulu people in South Africa. Drawing on Callaway’s reports about Zulu dreaming and sneezing, Tylor distilled his basic definition of religion as belief in pervading and invading spirits. Against a broad imperial and colonial background, this chapter explores the historical emergence and ongoing consequences of the category animism in the study of religion.


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