Federalists in the Attic: Original Intent, the Heritage Movement, and Democratic Theory

2004 ◽  
Vol 29 (01) ◽  
pp. 105-126 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Levin
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Public History ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Democratic Theory ◽  
The United States ◽  
Historical Consciousness ◽  
Original Intent ◽  
The Past ◽  
Cultural Phenomenon

Although the United States is often criticized for its lack of historical consciousness, historicity provides a compelling rhetorical trump in constitutional argument, particularly according to advocates of original understanding jurisprudence or “originalism.” Originalism has also proven to be quite popular as a constitutional position, especially in public discourse outside academe and the courts. I argue that originalism's appeal derives from Americans' interest in heritage. Using the literature on public history, memory, and cultural studies to distinguish the cultural phenomenon of heritage from history proper, I argue that originalism, like heritage, offers the possibility of an immediate and authentic encounter with the past tied to a critique of modernism as both antidemocratic and inauthentic. Originalism portrays the federal period as a special moment of civic unity, whose virtues have been preserved by the larger public, but have been eroded among elites by modernity.

Gender and Public Religion in America

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephanie Y. Mitchem
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Rapid Development ◽  
The United States ◽  
Public Religion ◽  
The Past

With rapid development, academically and socially, in the past sixty years, gender and public religion in the United States have become a separate field, even as it is integrated into others such as politics, biology, law, philosophy, and cultural studies. As ideas about gender have expanded, potential conflicts with established religions have sometimes occurred even as new theologies, ethical constructs, and even new strains of religion occur.

Beyond “Decorative Sociology”: Contextualizing Female Surf, Skate, and Snow Boarding

2006 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 205-228 ◽  
Author(s):  
Holly Thorpe
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Social History ◽  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
The United States ◽  
Sport Sociology ◽  
Cultural Phenomenon ◽  
The Sixties ◽  
Cultural Turn

Following criticism leveled at sociologists by Chris Rojek and Bryan Turner in “Decorative Sociology: A Critique of the Cultural Turn,” this article identifies a troubling absence of systematic contextualization in sport sociology. In addressing this issue, I begin by describing the role of history and context in sociology and conclude that the discipline should take history more seriously, not least by giving context greater due. I then engage the debate as to whether radical contextual cultural studies or social history offers the best explanation of context. Here I argue for the latter. In justifying my position, I adapt a model employed by the conservative social historian Arthur Marwick in “The sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy, and the United States, c. 1958–c. 1974,” to contextualize a contemporary cultural phenomenon, the female boarder (i.e., the female surfboard rider, skateboarder, and snowboarder). Ultimately, this paper illustrates that the systematic and transhistorical tools developed by social historians have the potential to facilitate a more all-encompassing contextualization of cultural phenomena, to examine multiple historical conjunctures, and to help sociologists take time and change more seriously.

Canadians and Their Pasts: An Exploration in Historical Consciousness

2009 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret Conrad ◽  
Jocelyn Létourneau ◽  
David Northrup
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Survey Data ◽  
The United States ◽  
Historical Consciousness ◽  
Collaborative Project ◽  
Preliminary Results ◽  
The Past ◽  
Similarities And Differences ◽  
National Boundaries ◽  
Canadian Survey

Abstract In March 2006 a group of Canadian researchers formally embarked on a collaborative project to explore how ordinary Canadians engage the past in their everyday lives. The Canadians and Their Pasts project was inspired by previous studies undertaken in Europe, the United States, and Australia that used survey data to probe people's historical consciousness. This paper will briefly summarize the findings of the earlier studies, offer preliminary results from the Canadian survey, and, where possible, reflect on similarities and differences in the consumption of the past across national boundaries.

Oh Henry!: Physical Cultural Studies’ Critical Pedagogical Imperative

2012 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 385-408 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ryan King-White
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Critical Pedagogy ◽  
Classroom Practices ◽  
The United States ◽  
Public Pedagogy ◽  
The Past ◽  
Socioeconomic Context ◽  
Physical Cultural Studies ◽  
Critical Public Pedagogy

Over the past 30 years Physical Cultural Studies (PCS) (Andrews, 2008) has grown in the United States. This form of radical inquiry has been heavily influenced by the British Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies. PCS research has focused on the various ways the corporeal has been a/effected by, and, indeed, (re)informs the contemporary socioeconomic context. However, while theoretical rigor has long been the norm in American PCS, I argue that the critical (public) pedagogy that radically contextual Cultural Studies has always called for has been a little slower in developing. As such, I will demonstrate how Henry Giroux’s influence in, on, and for critical pedagogy has more recently become and should be an essential component of PCS—particularly in our classrooms. As such, I will provide examples outlining how critical pedagogy informs my classroom practices to begin the dialogue about what constitutes good pedagogical work.

The Shadows of the Past and the Work of the Future: Frederick Douglass's Temporal Theory of Democracy

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Nathan Pippenger
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Democratic Theory ◽  
The United States ◽  
Frederick Douglass ◽  
The Past ◽  
Temporal Continuity ◽  
The Future ◽  
Theory Of Democracy ◽  
Specific Orientation

Abstract Throughout his career, Frederick Douglass linked the achievement of an egalitarian, multiracial democracy to Americans’ perception of their collective past and future. In so doing, I argue, Douglass developed a distinctive, temporal account of democratic peoplehood. For Douglass, temporal continuity lent force and content to demands for equality—demands which would succeed only if the whole demos cultivated a specific orientation to its collective past, present, and future. Douglass offers a productive contrast to contemporary democratic theory, which often misses the importance of temporality suggested by his account and thereby risks surrendering its powerful egalitarian resources. Moreover, temporality provides a new lens on what many interpreters see as an episode of inconsistency in Douglass's thought: his brief, quickly abandoned contemplation of colonization proposals in the spring of 1861. Ultimately, Douglass turned to temporality in order to decide whether democracy for African Americans required affiliation with, or disaffiliation from, the United States.

scholarly journals The 1957 Central High crisis: civil rights and education in the United States as a public history experience through the Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 180-197
Author(s):  
Augusto Machado Rocha
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Public History ◽  
School Context ◽  
The United States ◽  
School Segregation ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Central High ◽  
Visual History

Through an oral and visual history archive, we sought to develop an analysis regarding the period of school segregation in the United States, as well as the moment known as “integration”. Drawing on the experiences recorded in The David and Barbara Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History, an analysis based on the memories of the period of overcoming segregation in the school context was developed. Our focus was on the perception of the persistence of prejudice as a factor that harms the learning process, as was observed in Terrence Roberts’ speech. The orientation of the work within the sphere of public history aims to show how people simultaneously experience a conflicting situation and the problem of abandoning the past, bearing in mind the continuity of the issues faced and which need to be reestablished.

scholarly journals We will be great again: Historical victimhood in populist discourse

2021 ◽  
pp. 136754942098585
Author(s):  
Omar Al-Ghazzi
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Historical Consciousness ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Case Study Approach ◽  
Donald Trump ◽  
Study Approach ◽  
The Past ◽  
The People

This article explores historical victimhood as a feature of contemporary populist discourse. It is about how populist leaders invoke meta-history to make self-victimising claims as a means for consolidating power. I argue that historical victimhood propagates a forked historical consciousness – a view of history as a series of junctures where good fought evil – that enables the projection of alleged victimhood into the past and the future, while the present is portrayed as a regenerating fateful choice between humiliation and a promised golden age. I focus on the cases of the United States and Turkey and examine two key speeches delivered by presidents Donald Trump and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in 2017. My case-study approach aims to show how the same narrative form of historical victimhood, with its temporal logic and imaginary, latches on widely different contexts and political cultures with the effect of conflating the leader with the people, solidifying divisions in society, and threatening opponents.

scholarly journals What heritage does and does not do to identity: some answers from an ethnographic perspective

2005 ◽  
Vol 11 (23) ◽  
pp. 51-70 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Gable
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Public History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Popular Imagination ◽  
The Public ◽  
Heritage Sites ◽  
The Past ◽  
Antebellum Era ◽  
Robert Bellah ◽  
Identity Production

This paper explores how caretakers of slave-era heritage sites objectify and enact what Robert Bellah and his co-authors call "communities of memory" in a racially polarized United States and how the public interpret their efforts at creating what amounts to official history. It highlights the often-vexed encounter between those who are in charge of conveying public representations of slavery and race in the antebellum era in the United States and vernacular responses to such representations. It looks at Monticello, the home of Thomas Jefferson, which recently has made great efforts to make slaves prominent figures in the landscapes it reconstructs in on-site maps, tours, and literature. Of particular interest are the various ways that vernacular skepticism and cynicism about public portrayals continues to generate controversy at Monticello, and particularly at how the topic of erasure and invisibility remain enduring themes in the popular imagination of what public history is all about when such history focuses on slavery and race. By interrogating public skepticism about official portrayals of the past, the paper moves towards a performative approach to studying what heritage does to identity production rather than a representational approach. Among the identities that are produced at Monticello (and by extension other antebellum sites) are racial and oppositional identities.

International Research and Variation in Views of Ethnicity

2012 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 66-72
Author(s):  
Ella Inglebret ◽  
Amy Skinder-Meredith ◽  
Shana Bailey ◽  
Carla Jones ◽  
Ashley France
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Classification System ◽  
International Research ◽  
The United States ◽  
Research Articles ◽  
Journal Articles ◽  
Research Participants ◽  
The Past ◽  
International Scale ◽  
Publication Patterns

The authors in this article first identify the extent to which research articles published in three American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) journals included participants, age birth to 18 years, from international backgrounds (i.e., residence outside of the United States), and go on to describe associated publication patterns over the past 12 years. These patterns then provide a context for examining variation in the conceptualization of ethnicity on an international scale. Further, the authors examine terminology and categories used by 11 countries where research participants resided. Each country uses a unique classification system. Thus, it can be expected that descriptions of the ethnic characteristics of international participants involved in research published in ASHA journal articles will widely vary.

Proportion of Individuals With Past-Year Suicidal Ideation Who Attempted Suicide Over the Past 10 Years in the United States, and the Influence of Age and Sex

Crisis ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 1-5
Author(s):  
Shannon Lange ◽  
Courtney Bagge ◽  
Charlotte Probst ◽  
Jürgen Rehm
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Suicidal Ideation ◽  
Random Effects ◽  
Attempted Suicide ◽  
Suicide Attempts ◽  
The United States ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
The Past ◽  
Meta Analyses ◽  
Age Category

Abstract. Background: In recent years, the rate of death by suicide has been increasing disproportionately among females and young adults in the United States. Presumably this trend has been mirrored by the proportion of individuals with suicidal ideation who attempted suicide. Aim: We aimed to investigate whether the proportion of individuals in the United States with suicidal ideation who attempted suicide differed by age and/or sex, and whether this proportion has increased over time. Method: Individual-level data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), 2008–2017, were used to estimate the year-, age category-, and sex-specific proportion of individuals with past-year suicidal ideation who attempted suicide. We then determined whether this proportion differed by age category, sex, and across years using random-effects meta-regression. Overall, age category- and sex-specific proportions across survey years were estimated using random-effects meta-analyses. Results: Although the proportion was found to be significantly higher among females and those aged 18–25 years, it had not significantly increased over the past 10 years. Limitations: Data were self-reported and restricted to past-year suicidal ideation and suicide attempts. Conclusion: The increase in the death by suicide rate in the United States over the past 10 years was not mirrored by the proportion of individuals with past-year suicidal ideation who attempted suicide during this period.

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