scholarly journals Taking Modernity's Wager: Tocqueville, Social Capital, and the American Civil War

2011 ◽  
Vol 41 (4) ◽  
pp. 591-618
Author(s):  
Johann N. Neem
Keyword(s):  
Social Capital ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Alexis De Tocqueville ◽  
Bonding Social Capital ◽  
The Public ◽  
Bridging Social Capital ◽  
The Republic ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
American Society

Alexis de Tocqueville watched with horror as American society and politics changed in the two decades following the publication of Democracy in America. During the 1840s and 1850s, the factors that Tocqueville had earlier identified as sustaining the republic—its land and location, its laws, and its mores—had begun to undermine it. Recent work on civil society, the public sphere, and social capital is congruent with a Tocquevillian analysis of the causes of the Civil War. The associational networks that had once functioned as bridging social capital fractured under the stress of slavery, becoming sources of divisive regional, bonding social capital.

The Genteel Tradition and the Emergence of the African American Sonnet

2018 ◽  
pp. 15-38
Author(s):  
Timo Müller
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Racial Stereotypes ◽  
James Weldon Johnson ◽  
Paul Laurence Dunbar ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Public Sphere

This chapter traces the emergence of the sonnet in African American literature to the pervasive influence of genteel conventions. These conventions have widely been regarded as conservative or even stultifying, but they provided black poets with various opportunities for self-assertion in the public sphere. The sonnet was a favourite genre among the genteel establishment, and poets pushed the boundaries of black expression by appropriating the form to subvert racial stereotypes, develop a black poetic subjectivity, and participate in the debate over the memory of the Civil War. In tracing these developments, the chapter repositions the outstanding poets of the period, Paul Laurence Dunbar and James Weldon Johnson, alongside their less-known contemporaries, Samuel Beadle, William Stanley Braithwaite, Joseph Seamon Cotter Jr., T. Thomas Fortune, and Henrietta Cordelia Ray.

Printed Religion, the Public Sphere, and the Disordering of the Union

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucas P. Volkman
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Public Sphere

Chapter 4 reveals that the evangelical schisms in Missouri spurred a radical escalation of theological and political disputation between pro- and antislavery evangelicals in religious newspapers and other printed publications. This verbal sparring played a heretofore unexamined central role in spawning a vicious conflict between northern and southern evangelicals and partisans on the border with Kansas after 1854. To the extent that sectarian strife over the morality of African American bondage spurred armed strife in Missouri from the spring of 1854 through 1860, it played an important role in generating the larger sectional tensions that led to secession and the Civil War.

Conclusion

2020 ◽  
pp. 224-228
Author(s):  
Emmanuel Taïeb
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
State Violence ◽  
Self Control ◽  
The Public ◽  
Civilizing Process ◽  
Key Points ◽  
The Republic ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Public Executions ◽  
Historical Moment

This concluding chapter summarizes the key points of the book. The year 1939, when executions moved behind prison walls and thus definitively exited the public stage, marked the beginning of remote governance, a new stage in the transformation of the public sphere: power no longer had to manifest itself directly, but could instead use various media platforms to assert itself. The disappearance of public executions also signaled the advent of the civilizing process, which sought to conceal anything that might provoke anxiety or negative emotions. The criticism levied at, and the final disappearance of, public executions illustrates a historical moment when a technology of power was gradually modified, eliminated, and concealed thanks to the efforts of the elites as well as, most likely, to the efforts of executionary spectators, because the emotions that executions unleashed were in contradiction with society's desire to reject violence. The elimination of publicity did not resolve the problem of violence in the Republic nor immediately solve the issue of the death penalty, which would drag on for another four decades, but it did demonstrate that people were no longer willing to tolerate a certain kind of state violence. It also revealed a phase in the evolution of the psychological landscape in which self-control came to be determined by the authorities and their instruments.

Representations of Wales and the Welsh during the civil wars and Interregnum

2004 ◽  
Vol 77 (197) ◽  
pp. 358-376 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lloyd Bowen
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Political Discourse ◽  
The State ◽  
The Public ◽  
Charles I ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
High Politics

Abstract This article examines how Wales and the Welsh were represented in the pamphlet literature of the civil war and early Interregnum. It considers the historical construction of the Welsh image in English minds, and traces how this image came to be politicized by Welsh support for Charles I during the sixteen-forties. An examination of the public controversies surrounding the state-sponsored evangelization programme in Wales during the early sixteen-fifties shows how the contested image of Wales in the public sphere interacted with high politics at the centre. This study contributes to our understanding of the interplay between ethnicity, identity and politics during the sixteen-forties and fifties, and demonstrates how imagery and representation informed political discourse in the mid seventeenth century.

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