Every Man Has Got the Right to Get Killed?: The Civil War Narratives of Mary Johnston and Caroline Gordon

1999 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 14-40 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah E. Gardner
Prospects ◽  
1989 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 93-123
Author(s):  
Lee Clark Mitchell

In the mid-1860s, with the nation immured in a devastating Civil War, two artists emerged as the premier representatives of America's Far West. Albert Bierstadt (1830–1902) and Mark Twain (1835–1910) captured the nation's imagination with images that challenged ideas about the West as well as about art itself. In little more than a decade, however, Bierstadt's paintings were being ignored while Twain's name began to acquire something of its present canonical status. Unremarkable as this divergence in reputations may seem today (when “fifteen minutes of fame” has been promised to every one of us), a century ago Warhol's prediction would have been inconceivable. That in itself makes the receptions first accorded Bierstadt and Twain as interesting as the dramatic divergence later taken in their careers. What was it, one might well ask, that so appealed to contemporaries, and why should Bierstadt's success so quickly have palled while Twain's only continued to grow?The question encourages us to transgress the boundaries that separate painting from writing, to shift attention from a given medium onto the larger process by which popularity is won. One of the questions that then emerges is whether artists acclaimed in different media make similar demands upon their audience. Do a certain set of common standards, that is, shape an artist's reception, much as they more self-consciously dictate assessments that scholars will make later on? Or is it simply a matter of being in the right artistic place at the right cultural time? Certainly, the receptions accorded Bierstadt and Twain suggest that the former is true -indeed, that in their case a forceful aesthetic logic was at work.


1977 ◽  
Vol 17 (192) ◽  
pp. 111-127 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles Zorgbibe

“Whenever a large organized group believes it has the right to resist the sovereign power and considers itself capable of resorting to arms, war between the two parties should take place in the same manner as between nations…” This statement by de Vattel in the 19th century seemed destined to take its place as a part of positive law, constituting part of what was known as recognition of belligerency, tantamount to the recognition by the established government of an equal status for insurgents and regular belligerents. When a civil war became extensive enough, the State attacked would understand that it was wisest to acknowledge the existence of a state of war with part of the population. This would, at the same time, allow the conflict to be seen in a truer light. The unilateral action of the legal government in recognizing belligerency would be the condition for granting belligerent rights to the parties. It would constitute a demonstration of humanity on the part of the government of the State attacked and would also provide that government with prospects for effective pursuit of the war. By admitting that it was forced to resort to war, it would at least have its hands free to make war seriously.


2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. e010
Author(s):  
Carlos Píriz

During the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939, some thirty Diplomatic Missions opened their doors and create new sites for the reception of persecution victims under the protection of the right of asylum. However, beyond the humanitarian role, a tendentious collaboration of some of their delegates with the rebels could be seen from the beginning. Argentina and Chile, which held the Diplomatic Deanship in those years, were two prime examples of this. A good number of their representatives used various strategies to help the coup plotters of 1936, such as the refuge, care and irregular extraction of people or espionage. At the same time, they played a role that alternated between searching for consensus with other Diplomatic Missions (mainly the Latin American ones), which really meant demanding that those other legations follow their lead, and denouncing the excesses of the consolidated republican rearguard, especially on the international scene. A situation which tarnishes the image of the legitimate Spanish governments. Once the contest ended, many of those collaborators were praised and rewarded by the Franco regime, and other fascists regimes. This research focuses on demonstrating, based on original documentation and providing new and compelling data, that close (and proven) relationship.


Author(s):  
Tsolin Nalbantian

Chapter 4 investigates Armenians’ stance in the 1957 elections and in the ‘general’ Lebanese and the intra-Armenian mini-civil war of 1958. Armenian parties participated in, and contributed to, political tensions in Lebanon. Simultaneously, they used their position in the Lebanese political system to jostle for power within their own community – a development that turned violent and ended only in December 1958, almost two months after the Lebanese mini-civil war had ended. This tension and violent confrontation between Armenian parties and their armed men had a crucial spatial effect: it unprecedentedly territorialized certain neighborhoods of Beirut. Whereas parts of Lebanon were organized by sects and classes, by relative contrast, it was according to political party affiliation that in 1957/1958 many Armenians of Mar Mikael, Sin el Fil, Bourj Hamoud, and Corniche el-Nahr were re-sorted and relocated, often by force. Lebanese Armenians aligned along the right-left fault lines that divided Lebanese politics and society— more than other confessions, indeed. Vice versa, the Lebanese state was Armenianized, as it were, in that it started to pay more attention to Armenian matters than before, intervening directly and by military force in Armenian neighborhoods in order to finally end the internecine Armenian confrontation.


Author(s):  
De Wet Erika

This chapter examines whether the right to self-determination in international law prevents military intervention on the side of the recognized government during a civil war. Post-Cold War state and organizational practice does not convincingly support the claim that direct military assistance at the request of a recognized government is prohibited during a civil war, otherwise known as a ‘non-international armed conflict’ (NIAC). Attempts to explain current state practice by means of counter-terrorism and counter-intervention exceptions to a general prohibition of such assistance also is not grounded in state or organizational practice, nor are such exceptions viable in practice. Instead, state and organizational practice seems to confirm the right of recognized governments to request military assistance from third states, also during civil wars/NIACs, as long as they retain their recognized, de jure status. The potential lack of ‘representativeness’ in such a situation does not seem to limit the extent to which the de jure government can act on behalf of the state (and its people) in matters pertaining to the use of force.


Author(s):  
Barbara B. Diefendorf

The 16th century began in France as a time of relative peace, prosperity, and optimism, but horizons soon darkened under the clouds of religious schism, heresy persecutions, and civil war. French theologians condemned Martin Luther’s ideas as early as 1521, but his views continued to spread underground. The movement remained small and clandestine until the 1550s, when the penetration of John Calvin’s ideas from nearby Geneva resulted in the formation of Reformed churches, whose growing membership demanded the right to worship openly. The accidental death of King Henry II in 1559 left France with a religiously divided court and a series of young, inexperienced kings. Henry’s widow, Catherine de Medici, attempted a policy of compromise that backfired. Militancy increased on both sides of the religious divide, and civil war broke out in 1562. Neither side could secure a decisive win on the battlefield, and neither was satisfied with the compromise peace that ended the war. Indeed, war broke out seven more times before a more lasting peace was secured by the first Bourbon king, Henry IV, with the Edict of Nantes in 1598. The edict set the terms for religious coexistence, allowing French Protestants limited rights to worship and certain protections under the law. It also fostered the spread of a movement already underway for the renewal of Catholic spirituality and reform of Catholic church institutions in France. Until the 1970s, the civil and religious wars that afflicted France through the second half of the 16th century were viewed largely as the consequence of political rivalries that spun out of control following the death of King Henry II. More recently, historians have shifted their attention to the social and cultural contexts in which the wars took place, particularly to the fundamentally religious nature of the quarrels. This has led to a profusion of new scholarship on the impact of the Protestant and Catholic Reformations in France, the tensions—and ultimately the violence—generated by competing claims to religious truth, and the difficulty of resolving the quarrels or putting an end to the wars that resulted from them.


2018 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 13-37
Author(s):  
Danae Karydaki

Psychoanalysis was introduced to Greece in 1915 by the progressive educator Manolis Triantafyllidis and was further elaborated by Marie Bonaparte, Freud’s friend and member of the Greek royal family, and her psychoanalytic group in the aftermath of the Second World War. However, the accumulated traumas of the Nazi occupation (1941–1944), the Greek Civil War (1946–1949), the post-Civil-War tension between the Left and the Right, the military junta (1967–1974) and the social and political conditions of post-war Greece led this project and all attempts to establish psychoanalysis in Greece, to failure and dissolution. The restoration of democracy in 1974 and the rapid social changes it brought was a turning point in the history of Greek psychoanalysis: numerous psychoanalysts, who had trained abroad and returned after the fall of the dictatorship, were hired in the newly established Greek National Health Service (NHS), and contributed to the reform of Greek psychiatry by offering the option of psychoanalytic psychotherapy to the non-privileged. This article draws on a range of unexplored primary sources and oral history interview material, in order to provide the first systematic historical account in the English language of the complex relationship between psychoanalysis and Greek society, and the contribution of psychoanalytic psychotherapy to the creation of the Greek welfare state. In so doing, it not only attempts to fill a lacuna in the history of contemporary Greece, but also contributes to the broader historiography of psychotherapy and of Europe.


2016 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan E. Reid

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to challenge Cold War binaries, seeking a more nuanced understanding of popular experience of change in the Soviet Union’s last decades. This was a period of intensive modernization and rapid transformation in Soviet citizens’ everyday material environment, marked by the mass move to newly constructed housing and by changing relations with goods. Design/methodology/approach – To probe popular experience and changing meanings, the paper turns to qualitative, subjective sources, drawing on oral history interviews (Everyday Aesthetics in the Modern Soviet Flat, 2004-2007). Findings – The paper finds that qualitative changes took place in Soviet popular consumer culture during the 1960s-1970s, as millions of people made home in new housing amid the widespread media circulation of authoritative images representing a desirable modern lifestyle and modernist aesthetic. Soviet people began to make aesthetic or semiotic distinctions between functionally identical goods and were concerned to find the right furniture to fit a desired lifestyle, aesthetic ideal and sense of self. Research limitations/implications – The problem is how to conceptualize the trajectory of change in ways that do justice to historical subjects’ experience and narratives, while avoiding uncritically reproducing Cold War binaries or perpetuating the normative status claimed by the postwar West in defining modernity and consumer culture. Originality/value – The paper challenges dominant Cold War narratives, according to which Soviet popular relations with goods were encompassed by shortage and necessity. It advances understanding of the specific form of modern consumer culture, which, it argues, took shape in the USSR after Stalin.


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