Frederick Douglass’s Historical Turn

Author(s):  
Jeffrey Insko

Chapter 4 tracks Frederick Douglass’s developing historical-temporal consciousness and his adoption of a presentist view of history that rhymes with Ralph Waldo Emerson’s philosophical presentism. In tandem with his embrace of political abolitionism, Douglass in his speeches and writings of the 1850s, began a sweeping philosophical engagement with the relations between past, present, and future and became what I will call abolitionism’s future historian—the historian of an abolitionist past that had not yet come to pass. Examining a series of recurring images—in My Bondage and My Freedom, The Heroic Slave, and most notably, in his remarkable 1857 speech on the Dred Scott decision—of Douglass gazing into the future, I argue for the centrality of a newly acquired present-oriented perspective as the animating feature of Douglass’s mature pre-Civil War politics and his vision of the possibilities of social and historical transformation.

2020 ◽  
pp. 109-115
Author(s):  
Anna Sharova

Anna Sharova reviews two recent books separately published by two English language authors – P. Martell and J. Young. The books are very different in style and mood. While P. Martell presents an excellent example of British journalist prose in the style of his elder compatriots Somerset Maugham and Graham Greene, who did their reporting and writing from exotic countries during fateful periods of history, J. Young offers a more academic, though no less ‘on the spot’ analysis of the situation in the youngest independent country of Africa. J. Young’s considers two possible approaches to conflict resolution as possible outcomes: non-intervention cum continuation of the war, or the introduction of international governance. P. Martell comes up with a disappointing prediction about the future of South Sudan. The war will go on, the famine will return, and the threat of genocide will not disappear. People will continue to flee the country, and refugee camps will grow. New warring groups will appear, new murders will be committed. Neighbouring states will not stop competing for influence and resources. New peacekeepers will arrive. Warlords will be accused of crimes, but, as before, they will escape punishment, while some will be promoted.


Author(s):  
Jason Phillips

This conclusion explains how American temporalities changed after the war and sketches how expectations and anticipations of the future have alternated as the dominant view in American culture through the twentieth century to today. This chapter also shows how the short war myth, the story that Civil War Americans expected a short, glorious war at the outset, gained currency with the public and consensus among scholars during the postwar period. It contrasts the wartime expectations of individuals with their postwar memories of the war’s beginning to show how the short war myth worked as a tool for sectional reconciliation and a narrative device that dramatized the war by creating an innocent antebellum era or golden age before the cataclysm. It considers why historians still accept the myth and showcases three postwar voices that challenged it.


Author(s):  
Jason Phillips

This introduction explains that looming, a nineteenth-century term for a superior mirage, shows us how visions of the future war affected antebellum America. First, some spark, an event or object, captured people’s attention. Second, a unique atmosphere elevated and enlarged that spark, making it loom greater than reality. Before the Civil War was fought or remembered, it was imagined by thousands of Americans who peered at the horizon through an apocalyptic atmosphere. Third, observers focused on it and reported what appeared to be beyond the horizon. Popular forecasts rose from leaders but also women, slaves, immigrants, and common soldiers. These imaginings shaped politics, military planning, and the economy. The prologue identifies the two prevailing temporalities of antebellum America, anticipations and expectations, and calls for more historical attention to the diverse temporalities of past people.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Roman M. Frolov

In his Bellum Ciuile, Caesar reports the events of 1 January 49 with these words (1.3.1): misso ad uesperum senatu omnes qui sunt eius ordinis a Pompeio euocantur. laudat <promptos> Pompeius atque in posterum confirmat, segniores castigat atque incitat. When the Senate had been dismissed towards dusk, all who belonged to that order were summoned by Pompeius. He praised the determined and encouraged them for the future while criticizing and stirring up those who were less eager to act. This meeting has not attracted much scholarly attention and admittedly for a good reason: other circumstances of the outbreak of the Civil War are, perhaps, more significant for understanding the events as well as the intentions and decisions of the political actors. The importance of this gathering lies, however, not so much in what its role might have been in the developments of the year 49 but rather in the context of the phenomenon of the promagistrates’ interference in the domestic politics of Late Republican Rome.


Slavic Review ◽  
1992 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 485-496 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara Evans Clements

Much attention has been given lately to the utopianism that flourished in Soviet Russia during the civil war and NEP. Scholars have noted that the idea of women's emancipation figured as an important element in this utopianism, affecting diverse aspects of it—fictional portrayals of the communist society of the future, urban architectural plans, the character of public pageants, even clothing design. The names of the women who participated with men in creating these Utopian projects have been recorded. As yet, however, scholars have not asked whether the female Utopians of NEP shared the utopianism of their male comrades or whether women entertained a vision of their own, distinguishable from men's. If there are discernable differences, how do they compare to those which scholars have found between male and female Utopians elsewhere in Europe and in North America? Why did such diversity arise? What were its consequences?


ZARCH ◽  
2016 ◽  
pp. 94
Author(s):  
Miguel Sancho ◽  
Beatriz Martín

Como consecuencia de la devastación a la que se verá sometida Teruel durante la guerra civil española gran parte del núcleo urbano se verá afectado. Esta dramática situación planteará la necesidad reconstruir la ciudad pero también la posibilidad de renovar la trama urbana. En el presente artículo se estudiaran las distintas propuestas llevadas a cabo durante este proceso, la tensión entre las ideas reformistas que entenderán la situación como una oportunidad renovadora sin prejuicios e ideas mucho más conservacionistas preocupadas por la identidad histórica de la ciudad, enfrentarán a los distintos agentes involucrados y finalmente dará lugar a la definitiva actuación propuesta. Es imprescindible conocer y reflexionar sobre una sucesión de ideas que plasmadas sobre el papel pueden decidir el futuro de un pueblo, pero también la conservación de su pasado, de su memoria.As a result of the devastation which will come under Teruel during the Spanish civil war much of the urban area will be affected. This dramatic situation arises the need to rebuild the city but also the possibility of renewing the urban fabric. In this article, the various proposals made during this process will be evaluated. The tension between reformist ideas to understand the situation as a renewed and unprejudiced opportunity and much more conservationist ideas concerned with the historical identity of the city will create a confrontation between different involved agents and ultimately lead to the final proposed action. It is essential to know and think of a series of ideas that once reflected on paper can decide the future of the people, but also the preservation of their past, their memory.


Author(s):  
Jun Koga Sudduth

Political leaders face threats to their power from within and outside the regime. Leaders can be removed via a coup d’état undertaken by militaries that are part of the state apparatus. At the same time, leaders can lose power when they confront excluded opposition groups in civil wars. The difficulty for leaders, though, is that efforts to address one threat might leave them vulnerable to the other threat due to the role of the military as an institution of violence capable of exercising coercive power. On one hand, leaders need to protect their regimes from rebels by maintaining strong militaries. Yet, militaries that are strong enough to prevail against rebel forces are also strong enough to execute a coup successfully. On the other hand, leaders who cope with coup threats by weakening their militaries’ capabilities to organize a coup also diminish the very capabilities that they need to defeat their rebel challengers. This unfortunate trade-off between protection by the military and protection from the military has been the long-standing theme in studies of civil-military relations and coup-proofing. Though most research on this subject has focused primarily on rulers’ maneuvers to balance the threats posed by the military and the threats coming from foreign adversaries, more recent scholarship has begun to explore how leaders’ efforts to cope with coup threats will influence the regime’s abilities to address the domestic threats coming from rebel groups, and vice versa. This new wave of research focuses on two related vectors. First, scholars address whether leaders who pursue coup-proofing strategies that weaken their militaries’ capabilities also increase the regime’s vulnerability to rebel threats and the future probability of civil war. Second, scholars examine how the magnitude of threats posed by rebel groups will determine leaders’ strategies toward the militaries, and how these strategies affect both the militaries’ influence over government policy and the future probability of coup onsets. These lines of research contribute to the conflict literature by examining the causal mechanisms through which civil conflict influences coup propensity and vice versa. The literatures on civil war and coups have developed independently without much consideration of each other, and systematic analyses of the linkage between them have only just began.


1935 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-67
Author(s):  
V. M. Osipovsky

The existing methods for treating thermal injuries (burns and frostbite) have a number of requirements from a practical surgeon: the method must be simple, cheap, effective and, most importantly, it must reduce the number of treatment days as much as possible and thus allow for faster return to the collective farm, state farm or production unit. In addition, it also has a defensive effect. Whereas during the last imperialist and civil war the number of thermal damage (especially burns) was quite significant, in the future war the number of thermal damage will probably increase even more.


1987 ◽  
Vol 9 (6) ◽  
pp. 171-172
Author(s):  
Robert H. Guinter

Just before Christmas, my 12-year-old son was reading The Time Machine by H. G. Wells. According to the story, the driver of this machine could travel to any date in the past or future, and he could return to the present time whenever he wished. We enjoyed talking about the story and about how much fun it would be to own a time machine. Where would we go and what would we see? He decided, among other things, that we should see his grandparents as children, to see whether their way of life really was as different from his as they say it was. Then we should visit some famous persons from the past and witness some great event, such as a Civil War battle. Then we should look to the future. What will we be like in 10 or 20 years? What will our city or country be like in 100 or 1,000 years? What will our planet be like in 1 million years? We thoroughly enjoyed ourselves as we talked about owning and using such a machine.


Author(s):  
William H. McNeill

IN THE LATTER part of the nineteenth century, east coast city dwellers in the United States had difficulty repressing a sense of their own persistent cultural inferiority vis-à-vis London and Paris. At the same time a great many old-stock Americans were dismayed by the stream of immigrants coming to these shores whose diversity called the future cohesion of the Republic into question almost as seriously as the issue of slavery had done in the decades before the Civil War. In such a climate of opinion, the unabashed provinciality of Frederick Jackson Turner's (1861-1932) paper "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," delivered at a meeting of the newly founded American Historical Association in connection with the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago (1892), began within less than a decade to resound like a trumpet call, though whether it signalled advance or retreat remained profoundly ambiguous....


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