The Lebanese Civil War 1975–90

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 105-124
Author(s):  
Jamal Wakim
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Working Class ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Elites ◽  
Economic Role ◽  
Lebanese Civil War ◽  
Organized Violence ◽  
State And Society ◽  
Leftist Parties

This article argues that the Lebanese Civil War (1975–90) was in essence a terror of state directed by mercantile economic and political elites (the comprador class) controlling the Lebanese state and society against the middle and poorer classes (the working class). The aim of this terror or organized violence was to subdue the subordinate classes, which in the late 1960s and early 1970s rebelled against the confessional system that operated for the benefit of the comprador class. The rebellion was expressed by members of the working-class joining cross-confessional nationalist and leftist parties. Hence, violence was aimed at reestablishing the confessional order as a means to restore a hegemonic system that served the interests of the comprador class at a time when this class was rehabilitating its economic role by resurrecting the financial system, which had received a severe blow in the late 1960s. It effected this rehabilitation through the Taif Agreement signed between Lebanese parliamentarians in 1989, under the auspices of Syria, Saudi Arabia, and the United States, to favor the new mercantile elite led by Rafiq Hariri.

The ‘Fortunate Banner’: Languages of Democracy in the United States, c.1848

2013 ◽  
pp. 28-39
Author(s):  
Adam I. P. Smith
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Political Identity ◽  
The United States ◽  
Democratic State ◽  
State And Society ◽  
White Working Class

By the mid-nineteenth century, inhabitants of the United States generally agreed that they lived in a democratic state and society. But uses of the term were complicated by the fact that it also had partisan associations: one group of politicians claimed to be par excellence leaders of ‘the Democracy’. This party had no single or unchanging political identity: it was strongly backed in slave states, but also had white working-class supporters who pushed egalitarian notions hard. Their Whig opponents were not prepared to surrender the language of democracy to them, yet they were more ambivalent about endorsing it, and sometimes distinguished restrained and principled forms of democracy, which they favoured, from vulgar populist forms. The effect of the European revolutions of 1848 in the United States was to encourage the drawing of such distinctions.

The Role of Anti-Slavery Sentiment in English Reactions to the American Civil War

1976 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 405-420 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas A. Lorimer
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Political Attitudes ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Democracy ◽  
Testing Ground ◽  
Parliamentary Reform

From 1861 to 1865, English politicians and journalists watched with passionate interest as the United States seemed to tear itself apart over the question of slavery. During these years, English public men, politicians and writers of all qualities and degrees, gave extensive airing to their views both of slavery and of American democracy. This extensive commentary on the American conflict, and the subsequent revival of interest in parliamentary reform, have made the divisions in English opinion on the war a useful testing ground of mid-Victorian social and political attitudes. Early studies, written from the perspective of the northern victory, the abolition of slavery, and the martyrdom of Lincoln, found it difficult to comprehend the extent of pro-confederate sympathy in England. On the slavery question, the mid-Victorians seemed to have lost the abolitionist enthusiasm of their evangelical forebears in the Clapham Sect. In order to fathom this failure of English judgement, historians attempted to show that the more articulate minority, the upper echelons of mid-Victorian society, sided with an aristocratic, slave-owning south, while the less articulate majority, middle-class radicals and the working class, sided with a democratic, abolitionist north.

Middle-Class Victorian Street Arabs: Modern Re-creations of the Baker Street Irregulars

2012 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dominic Cheetham
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Children's Literature ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Street Children ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
The United States ◽  
Sherlock Holmes ◽  
Upward Shift

In three of Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories there are brief appearances of the Baker Street Irregulars, a group of ‘street Arabs’ who help Holmes with his investigations. These children have been re-imagined in modern children's literature in at least twenty-seven texts in a variety of media and with writers from both Britain and the United States. All these modern stories show a marked upward shift in the class of the Irregulars away from the lower working class of Conan-Doyle's originals. The shift occurs through attributing middle-class origins to the leaders of the Irregulars, through raising the class of the Irregulars in general, and through giving the children life environments more comfortable, safe, and financially secure than would have been possible for late-Victorian street children. Because of the variety in texts and writers, it is argued that this shift is not a result of the conscious political or ideological positions of individual writers, but rather reflects common unconscious narrative choices. The class-shift is examined in relation to the various pressures of conventions in children's literature, concepts of audience, and common concepts of class in society.

Canada and the United States: The Civil War Years

1961 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 704
Author(s):  
D. M. L. Farr ◽  
Robin W. Winks
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil War ◽  
The United States
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