The Continuous Past: Historical Referents in Nineteenth-Century American Journalism

2007 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 119-174 ◽  
Author(s):  
Betty Houchin Winfield ◽  
Janice Hume
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Memory Studies ◽  
National History ◽  
The Past ◽  
Historical Continuity ◽  
New Immigrants ◽  
American Journalism ◽  
Historical References

This study examines how nineteenth-century American journalism used history. Based primarily on almost 2,000 magazine article titles, the authors found a marked increase in historical referents by 1900. Primarily used for context and placement, historical references often noted the country's origins, leaders and wars, particularly the Civil War. By connecting the present to the past, journalists highlighted an American story worth remembering during a time of nation-building, increased magazine circulation, and rise of feature stories. References to past people, events and institutions reiterated a particular national history, not only to those long settled, but also to new immigrants. Journalistic textual silences were the histories of most women, African Americans, Native Americans and immigrants. This study found historical continuity in contrast to Lipsitz and a repeated national institutional core as opposed to Wiebe. It reinforced other memory studies about contemporary usefulness of the past, and agrees with Higham's contention that the century's journalistic reports created the initial awareness of the nation's history.

Between history and nation: Paul Robert Magocsi and the rewriting of Ukrainian history

2011 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 117-124 ◽  
Author(s):  
Serhii Plokhy
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Essential Factor ◽  
National History

“Getting history wrong is an essential factor in the formation of a nation,” wrote Ernest Renan, basing this observation on his analysis of the nation-building experience in nineteenth-century Europe (qtd. in Eric Hobsbawm,On History.New York: New York Press, 1997: 270; for a different translation of the same sentiment, see Ernest Renan, “What is a Nation,” inNationalism in Europe from 1815 to the Present: A Reader.Ed. Stuart Woolf. London: Routledge, 1996: 50). Many historians today tend to agree with Renan's statement and are doing their best to “get history right” as they search for alternatives to national history. More often than not they face an uphill battle in that regard, both within and outside their profession.

scholarly journals Republican Relicts: Gender, Memory, and Mourning in Irish Nationalist Culture, ca. 1798–1848

2020 ◽  
Vol 59 (3) ◽  
pp. 608-637
Author(s):  
Catriona Kennedy
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Memory Studies ◽  
Irish Studies ◽  
Nationalist Discourse ◽  
The Past ◽  
National Memory ◽  
Female Figures ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractIn the past two decades, remembrance has emerged as one of the dominant preoccupations in Irish historical scholarship. There has, however, been little sustained analysis of the relationship between gender and memory in Irish studies, and gender remains under-theorized in memory studies more broadly. Yet one of the striking aspects of nineteenth-century commemorations of the 1798 and 1803 rebellions is the relatively prominent role accorded to women and, in particular, Sarah Curran, Pamela Fitzgerald, and Matilda Tone, the widows of three of the most celebrated United Irish “martyrs.” By analyzing the mnemonic functions these female figures performed in nineteenth-century Irish nationalist discourse, this article offers a case study of the circumstances in which women may be incorporated into, rather than excluded, from national memory cultures. This incorporation, it is argued, had much to do with the fraught political context in which the 1798 rebellion and its leaders were memorialized. As the remembrance of the rebellion in the first half of the nineteenth century assumed a covert character, conventionally gendered distinctions between private grief and public remembrance, intimate histories and heroic reputations, and family genealogy and public biography became blurred so as to foreground women and the female mourner.

‘Een homo is minder verdacht dan een held’ : Literaire verbeeldingen van Michiel de Ruyter en het nationale-identiteitsdebat na 2001

2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 167-194
Author(s):  
Marc van Zoggel
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
The United States ◽  
First Century ◽  
Terrorist Attacks ◽  
National History ◽  
Ongoing Debate ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
The Past ◽  
Wide Range

Abstract Historically, the glorification of the past and the eulogizing of national heroes in art and literature have been constructive elements in the process of nation building. In the postmodern era, however, a cultivation of national history and its great men and women is often regarded outdated or even suspect and regressive. The ‘nine eleven’ terrorist attacks in the United States and the rise and assassination of Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn intensified an ongoing debate in the Netherlands about the meaning and value of a shared ‘Dutch national identity’ in a multicultural, diversified society. In this article, I argue that several novels and poems about Dutch naval hero Michiel de Ruyter (1607-1676), published in or in the wake of the ‘De Ruyter year 2007’, both reproduce and challenge a wide range of voices, viewpoints and sentiments within the hot topic of national identity in the twenty-first century.

Reading the Historical Novel: Reworking the Past and the Relation of Blackfeet History in James Welch's Fools Crow

2009 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-100
Author(s):  
SARAH MARTIN
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Native American ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
The Political ◽  
Historical Novels ◽  
The Novel ◽  
James Welch ◽  
The Past ◽  
Political Impact

The article considers the political impact of the historical novel by examining an example of the genre by Native American novelist James Welch. It discusses how the novel Fools Crow represents nineteenth-century Blackfeet experience, emphasizing how (retelling) the past can act in the present. To do this it engages with psychoanalytic readings of historical novels and the work of Foucault and Benjamin on memory and history. The article concludes by using Bhabha's notion of the “projective past” to understand the political strength of the novel's retelling of the story of a massacre of Native Americans.

Holding The City Hostage: Popular Sectors and Elites in San Miguel, El Salvador, 1875

2011 ◽  
Vol 68 (01) ◽  
pp. 63-95
Author(s):  
Aldo A. Lauria Santiago
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Rural Communities ◽  
Local Communities ◽  
National History ◽  
Ample Evidence ◽  
Peasant Communities ◽  
State Institutions ◽  
The Past ◽  
The City

During the past 20 years, historians have made great strides in studying the engagement of rural communities with the formation of nations and states in nineteenth-century Latin America. The formation of citizenship, popular liberalism, local pueblo sovereignty, and alternative nationalisms and the influence of local struggles on state institutions have all been plotted, from very local communities to regions. However, the recent emphasis on the integration of peasant communities into regional and national history has largely failed to highlight the importance of provincial cities, even as it gives ample evidence of how important they became as bridges between the local, the regional, and the national.

scholarly journals The Problem of Realist Events in American Journalism

2014 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 84-95 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin G. Barnhurst
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
Digital Communications ◽  
Past Century ◽  
Public Radio ◽  
News Content ◽  
The Past ◽  
News Websites ◽  
American Journalism

Since the nineteenth century, more kinds of news outlets and ways of presenting news grew along with telegraphic, telephonic, and digital communications, leading journalists, policymakers, and critics to assume that more events became available than ever before. Attentive audiences say in surveys that they feel overloaded with information, and journalists tend to agree. Although news seems to have become more focused on events, several studies analyzing U.S. news content for the past century and a half show that journalists have been including fewer events within their coverage. In newspapers the events in stories declined over the twentieth century, and national newscasts decreased the share of event coverage since 1968 on television and since 1980 on public radio. Mainstream news websites continued the trend through the 2000s. Instead of providing access to more of the “what”, journalists moved from event-centered to meaning-centered news, still claiming to give a factual account in their stories, built on a foundation of American realism. As journalists concentrated on fewer and bigger events to compete, audiences turned away from mainstream news to look for what seems like an abundance of events in digital media.

scholarly journals The Ways of the Nation: Messianic and Universalist Nationalism 161 in Renieris, Zambelios and Paparrigopoulos

2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 161
Author(s):  
Pericles Vallianos
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Modern World ◽  
National Consciousness ◽  
The Past ◽  
Historical Continuity ◽  
Western View ◽  
Historical Periods ◽  
Dominant Theory ◽  
Of Greece

The vital cultural project during the nineteenth century was the formation of an authoritative version of the national consciousness that serve to homogenise the disparate populations of newly independent Greece. Three towering intellectuals led the way in this process: Markos Renieris, Spyridon Zambelios and Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos. All three adhered to the since dominant theory of the historical continuity of the Greek nation from prehistoric times to the present but held sharply different views concerning the role of Greece in the modern world. Renieris stressed the European vocation of today’s Hellenic culture, given that the foundations of European civilisation were initially Hellenic as well. Zambelios put forward an anti-Western view of the nation’s destiny, tinged with theological fanaticism and a mystical historicism. Paparrigopoulos was the consummate historian who emphasised the links between the Greek present and the past, chiefly through the medium of language, but without hiding the sharp discontinuitiesbetween historical periods.

scholarly journals Lived Historiography: National History as a Script to the Past

2021 ◽  
pp. 29-57
Author(s):  
Pertti Haapala
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Identities ◽  
History Writing ◽  
National History ◽  
Political Role ◽  
The Past

AbstractThe chapter studies the role of historiography in experiencing the past. Haapala analyzes how written history and its conceptualizations offered people a framework for understanding, defining, and living the past emotionally, and understanding how their present experiences became connected to history. It is claimed here that academic historiography often played a major role in creating historical and national identities by providing a script, as well as intellectual and emotional tools, to live the past. National history was invented by nineteenth-century intellectuals and it became a powerful, imagined narrative for the nation for two centuries. That success can be explained only by realizing the societal and political role of history writing as an autobiography of a society.

scholarly journals “Moral Rubbish in Close Proximity”: Penal Colonization and Strategies of Distance in Australia and New Caledonia, c.1853–1897

2019 ◽  
Vol 64 (3) ◽  
pp. 445-471
Author(s):  
Briony Neilson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
East Coast ◽  
New Caledonia ◽  
Moral Panic ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Temporal Distance ◽  
Penal Colony ◽  
The Past ◽  
Close Proximity ◽  
Convict Transportation

AbstractIn the second half of the nineteenth century, the two convict-built European settler colonial projects in Oceania, French New Caledonia and British Australia, were geographically close yet ideologically distant. Observers in the Australian colonies regularly characterized French colonization as backward, inhumane, and uncivilized, often pointing to the penal colony in New Caledonia as evidence. Conversely, French commentators, while acknowledging that Britain's transportation of convicts to Australia had inspired their own penal colonial designs in the South Pacific, insisted that theirs was a significantly different venture, built on modern, carefully preconceived methods. Thus, both sides engaged in an active practice of denying comparability; a practice that historians, in neglecting the interconnections that existed between Australia and New Caledonia, have effectively perpetuated. This article draws attention to some of the strategies of spatial and temporal distance deployed by the Australian colonies in relation to the bagne in New Caledonia and examines the nation-building ends that these strategies served. It outlines the basic context and contours of the policy of convict transportation for the British and the French and analyses discursive attempts to emphasize the distinctions between Australia and New Caledonia. Particular focus is placed on the moral panic in Australian newspapers about the alleged dangerous proximity of New Caledonia to the east coast of Australia. I argue that this moral panic arose at a time when Britain's colonies in Australia, in the process of being granted autonomy and not yet unified as a federated nation, sought recognition as reputable settlements of morally virtuous populations. The panic simultaneously emphasized the New Caledonian penal colony's geographical closeness to and ideological distance from Australia, thereby enabling Australia's own penal history to be safely quarantined in the past.

scholarly journals Representations of Native Americans in Adamic’s Writing on (New) Immigrants

Two Homelands ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ksenija Šabec
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Identity ◽  
New Immigrants ◽  
European Immigrants ◽  
Interethnic Relationships

This article presents an overview of the attention Louis Adamic dedicated to Native Americans in various written works and public engagements and compares it with his writing on new immigrants in the light of his understanding of the importance of the preservation of immigrants’ identity and issues of integration and nation-building as they relate to American identity. The article also explores the views on interculturaland interethnic relationships in the United States that Adamic drew on in his treatment of Native Americans. Three works in particular will be analyzed: My America (1938), From Many Lands (1940), and A Nation of Nations (1945). The main finding is that Adamic does not deal as extensively with issues related to indigenous Americans as he does with those related to European immigrants. Nevertheless, Adamic does notcompletely neglect “the Indian story”. In some of his works, most extensively in A Nation of Nations, he specifically compares this story to the (problematic) position of African Americans in an American space that was colonized either “by sword or by book”.

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