Reviving Shelved Projects for Internships in Archaeology

2000 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 21-24
Author(s):  
Matthew Palus
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
West Virginia ◽  
Public History ◽  
American Civil War ◽  
Local History ◽  
Industrial Community ◽  
Harpers Ferry ◽  
Living Region ◽  
John Brown

Between 1992 and 1994, archaeologists investigated a number of households and workshops on Virginius Island, a former industrial community on the Shenandoah River within Harpers Ferry National Historical Park, at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. For a variety of reasons, the project was derailed in its final stages, and the results of the research were never fully reported. The data and analyses sat more or less in their raw form, quickly becoming artifacts themselves. Several years later I was given the opportunity to complete the record of these investigations as a professional internship, bringing me into contact with a federally-controlled agency for the production of public history, which had in its past obliterated a local history. Harpers Ferry National Historical Park (HFNHP) focuses its attention on the story of John Brown and the American Civil War. This period remains the focus of public history at Harpers Ferry, and by simulating this historic setting the park has severed the modern, living region from its history.

Prophecies

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason Phillips
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Memory Studies ◽  
Historical Consciousness ◽  
Harpers Ferry ◽  
John Brown ◽  
Prophetic Imagination ◽  
Southern Nationalism

Focusing on Edmund Ruffin, this chapter interprets the prophecies of secessionists. During a national craze for John Brown relics after the Harpers Ferry raid, Edmund Ruffin circulated Brown’s pikes to each southern legislature or governor to promote southern nationalism and secession. This chapter inverts memory studies to interpret how antebellum novels by Ruffin, John B. Jones, and Beverley Tucker forecasted civil war and elevated white supremacy. The prophetic imagination of secessionists like Ruffin empowered masters at the expense of women, yeomen, and slaves. By identifying themselves as conservative prophets rebelling against modern transgressions of timeless laws, southern nationalists adopted a historical consciousness that predicted a looming revolution to restore order and harmony. Their prophecies imagined bloodshed and destruction that exceeded the actual war and echoed earlier revolutions, particularly the American, French, and Haitian.

scholarly journals The Relevance of Giuseppe Mazzini’s Ideas of Insurgency to the American Slavery Crisis of the 1850s

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy M. Roberts
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Guerilla Warfare ◽  
American Slavery ◽  
Harpers Ferry ◽  
John Brown

This chapter discusses Mazzini's influence in the context of the slavery crisis of the 1850s in the United States. That decade, which saw a crisis erupt in Kansas over the question of whether slavery should be allowed to expand, ended dramatically at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, where the violent abolitionist John Brown led a doomed attempt to arm and liberate slaves. Mazzini studied, wrote about, and on occasion attempted to enact popular insurrection and guerilla warfare. His ideas became essential to Brown's ideology and actions, which precipitated the Civil War. The chapter suggests an under-appreciated aspect of Mazzini's influence in America, invites a reassessment of the American sectional crisis of the 1850s for its transatlantic dimensions, and proposes a sobering but important dimension to the historical path of the spread of democratic nationalism.

The Free State of Whitman

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Mac Kilgore
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
American Civil War ◽  
Free State ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Leaves Of Grass ◽  
Global Context ◽  
War Rhetoric ◽  
John Brown

This chapter examines Walt Whitman’s poetics of enthusiasm in the 1860 Leaves of Grass, specifically in relationship to John Brown’s 1859 raid on Harper’s Ferry and the politics of the Civil War. The author makes a case for Whitman, not as the national bard of American Unionism and integralism who speaks for all and heals the nation’s fragmentation, but as the bard of American civil war and international sectarianism who speaks only for the enthusiast of justice in a global context and calls for political dismemberment of the Union. First, in an analysis of Civil War rhetoric and responses to John Brown, the chapter demonstrates that enthusiasm enacts a “fractured state,” a will to political dismemberment (civil disunion) in the name of justice towards the slave. Second, the chapter shows how Whitman’s composition of a dismembered self and poetry in the 1860 Leaves is meant to enact an insurrectionary form of democratic camaraderie and love. Next, the author does a close reading of Whitman’s cluster of poems, “Songs of Insurrection,” in order to tease out Whitman’s enthusiastic politics in detail, before turning to Whitman’s application of that enthusiasm while working in Civil War hospitals.

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