The New Infidelity: Northern Protestant Clergymen and the Critique of Progress, 1840-1855

1991 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 204-226
Author(s):  
Mark Y. Hanley
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Herman Melville ◽  
Nathaniel Hawthorne ◽  
Political Development ◽  
High Tide ◽  
The United States ◽  
Critical Edge

Northern Protestant leaders are commonly portrayed as uncritical scions of a cultural Obsession with “progress” that reached high tide in the two decades before the Civil War. Convinced that the United States held a divinely appointed commission to usher in Christ's millennial Kingdom on Earth, ministers supposedly sanctioned the nation's material and political development as integral to spiritual advancement. While they served their American flock a füll portion of Christian moralism to sustain this collective destiny, only a few renegade naysayers—such as Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne—remained sensible to human limitations and challenged a pervasive clerical frenzy of “progressivism, bravado and boasting.” Mainstream Protestantism's accommodative spirit, in other words, dulled its “critical edge” and rendered its message subservient to what one scholar calls a “nationwide ritual of progress.”

History, Romance, and the Novel

2019 ◽  
pp. 154-170
Author(s):  
Gretchen J. Woertendyke
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Herman Melville ◽  
Nathaniel Hawthorne ◽  
Edgar Allan Poe ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Washington Irving ◽  
The Difference ◽  
The Government ◽  
Conjectural History

This chapter traces Charles Brockden Brown’s theories of romance, history, and the novel, from his earliest fictional-historical essays, “The Rhapsodist” (1789), “Walstein’s School of History” (1799), and “The Difference between History and Romance” (1800); to Wieland; or, The Transformation (1798) and Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker (1799); to An Address to the Government of the United States (1803) and “Annals of Europe and America” (1807–1810). For Brown, romance is a form of conjectural history, true because of its imaginative range beyond the limitations of the novel’s verisimilitude. The future-oriented romance is especially suited to the local and regional conditions of the United States and uniquely connected to the geography of the nation. Brown’s influence can be found in later writers of romance, such as Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Herman Melville.

Fargo’s Whitened Spaces

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Lurie
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Visual Field ◽  
Herman Melville ◽  
Nathaniel Hawthorne ◽  
Edgar Allan Poe ◽  
The United States ◽  
Planar Surface ◽  
Postmodern Theory ◽  
Mise En Scene ◽  
Historical Past

This chapter reads the Coens’ film Fargo as a typical Gothic narrative, replete with paternal sin, uncanny doubles, and a dark historical past that returns to trouble a violent present. It traces the Gothic’s history in the United States and notes its uniquely American features in describing Fargo’s affinity with writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Herman Melville, in the latter case by way of the film’s concern with whiteness—both the visual field of the film’s mise-en-scéne and the ethnic whiteness (or historical whitening) of the American interior. It shows a particularly cinematic version of the Gothic due to Fargo’s use of an offscreen, “unlawful” space associated with the film’s criminal element. It posits a postmodern sublime in the film’s tonal and visual ironies and, by way of postmodern theory, in a stubbornly immanent sublimity through affinities between the snowbound scene and the screen’s planar surface.

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

Diálogos militares by Diego García de Palacio: The first American work on the law of nations

1992 ◽  
Vol 32 (290) ◽  
pp. 446-451 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alejandro Valencia Villa
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Code Of Conduct ◽  
The United States ◽  
Internal Conflict ◽  
Humanitarian Law ◽  
Law Of Nations ◽  
Simon Bolivar ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Government

Over the years the Americas have made significant contributions to the development of international humanitarian law. These include three nineteenth-century texts which constitute the earliest modern foundations of the law of armed conflict. The first is a treaty, signed on 26 November 1820 by the liberator Simón Bolívar and the peacemaker Pablo Morillo, which applied the rules of international conflict to a civil war. The second is a Spanish-American work entitled Principios de Derecho de Genres (Principles of the Law of Nations), which was published in 1832 by Andrés Bello. This work dealt systematically with the various aspects and consequences of war. The third is a legal instrument, signed on 24 April 1863 by United States President Abraham Lincoln, which codified the first body of law on internal conflict under the heading “Instructions for the Government of Armies of the United States in the Field” (General Orders No. 100). This instrument, known as the Lieber Code, was adopted as the new code of conduct for the armies of the Union during the American Civil War.

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 American Art of Memory

2021 ◽  
Vol 25 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 70-98
Author(s):  
John Michael Corrigan
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nathaniel Hawthorne ◽  
Ralph Waldo Emerson ◽  
Henry David Thoreau ◽  
American Art ◽  
The United States ◽  
Ancient World ◽  
Human Cognition ◽  
American Renaissance ◽  
Interior Space

Abstract This article provides a genealogy of the architectural figuration of human cognition from the ancient world to Renaissance Europe and, finally, to the American Renaissance where it came to possess a striking cultural and literary potency. The first section pursues the two-fold task of elucidating this archetypal trope for consciousness, both its ancient moorings and its eventual transmission into Europe. The second section shows that three of the most prominent writers of the American Renaissance—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Nathaniel Hawthorne—engaged this mystically inspired architectonic symbolism, employing far older techno-cultural suppositions about interior space. I thereby offer an account of the intellectual and spiritual heritage upon which Romantic writers in the United States drew to articulate cognitive interiority. These Romantics did more than value creativity in contradistinction to Enlightenment rationalism; they were acknowledging themselves as recipients of the ancient belief in cosmogenesis as self-transformation.

Morris Ranger: The Rise and Fall of the Liverpool Cotton Market’s Greatest Speculator, 1835 to 1887

2021 ◽  
Vol 170 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-92
Author(s):  
Nigel Hall
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil War ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Civil War

In the period 1878 to 1883 there was heavy speculation in the Liverpool raw cotton market associated with a trader named Morris Ranger. Little has previously been written about Ranger and his background. Ranger was born in Germany and emigrated to the United States in 1855. He initially traded in tobacco but branched out into cotton during the American Civil War. He settled in Liverpool in 1870. His cotton speculations were enormous, but he fell bankrupt in 1883. The speculations associated with Ranger involved other Liverpool traders and drew heavy criticism from the spinning industry. The speculations played a part in a reorganisation of the Liverpool market and attempts to circumvent it, including the building of the Manchester Ship Canal.

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