“We’re what we are because of the Past”: History, Memory, Nostalgia, and Identity in Walter Sullivan’s The Long, Long Love

2014 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 17-36
Author(s):  
Tanfer Emin Tune

Walter Sullivan (1924–2006), a Nashville, Tennessee native who spent most of his academic and professional life at Vanderbilt University, is generally considered by critics as a literary descendent of the first two generations of Fugitive-Agrarians and the Southern Renaissance to which they belong. This essay seeks to position Sullivan’s second, largely forgotten novel, The Long, Long Love as part of the postagrarian, post-Renaissance, postmodern, and post-southern American intellectual reevaluation of the South that questions tradition through an assertion of “pro–New South, pro–urban, and pro–capitalist” values and thoroughly reconsiders Civil War “truths,” myths, history, and memory.

2011 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 105-129
Author(s):  
Alexis Peri

AbstractThis article examines the everyday practices of historical reflection, recollection, and reconstruction as revealed in diaries of the Leningrad Blockade. In particular, it focuses on how Leningraders who chose to keep diaries of their experiences worked to make sense of the siege by situating it historically and comparing it to two other historical moments, the blockade of Petrograd during the Civil War and the siege of Sevastopol' during the Crimean War. Their evaluations of these historical analogies were based on a combination of personal and collective memories as well as on their understandings of state-sanctioned accounts of these events. Ultimately, these historical refl ections alerted the diarists to what they came to see as the unique and incomparable aspects of Blockade.


2021 ◽  
pp. 627-645
Author(s):  
Andrew F. Lang

Restoring the Union and securing emancipation after the Civil War depended on the U.S. Army. But the symbolism of standing military forces operating at the domestic vanguard of social and political change hampered the army’s ability to conduct a widespread occupation. The success of Reconstruction (1865–1877) depended on the army integrating itself in unprecedented ways in political affairs, social conditions, and economic markets to forge a new South stable enough never again to threaten the Union’s survival, but not too centralized to appear coercive. Ultimately, the very institution that reintegrated the formerly rebellious states into their proper federal orbit was also regarded by White Northerners and Southerners as an unstable threat to democratic self-determination. Hampered by a consistent and rapid demobilization, the army could not wield the tools necessary to prevent former Confederates from regaining political power and “redeeming” the South into an eerie image of its prewar self.


Author(s):  
R. Scott Huffard

The introduction starts by discussing how the railroad embodied nineteenth century capitalism and it notes how the book looks at the South’s railroads as a cohesive network that connected the South through a capitalist means. It also sets the scene by describing how the South was in transition after the Civil War and Reconstruction and how the white elites in the region were seeking to reconstruct capitalism. The railroad was a powerful symbol and an economic engine of change that allowed these boosters to proclaim that a New South had risen. But the railroad’s link with progress obscured the anxieties and monsters that it generated, and the introduction introduces counter narratives to the New South story that later chapters discuss. The book argues that railroads were uniquely destructive in the region and that white elites and railroad companies exploited the region’s racial tensions to obscure these anxieties.


2004 ◽  
Vol 88 (1) ◽  
pp. 26-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
MAIKEN UMBACH

ABSTRACT This article examines how the juxtaposition between the two rival approaches to the past, history and memory, was configured in and through the built environment in the decades around 1900. It argues that memory was not, as some contemporary polemicists suggested, the opposite of academic historicism. It is better understood as a logical continuation of historicism's inherent deconstructivist tendencies.


Author(s):  
S. E. Pale ◽  

This article is about the complicated relations between Norfolk Island located in the South Pacific and Australia that possesses the island as its ‘external territory’. Over the past century Australia and its tiny but strategically important possession have overcome many difficult moments, the most dramatic of which took place in 2015, when the Australian Parliament ended self-government on the island and put Norfolk under the laws of New South Wales thus making it part of Australia.


Author(s):  
Gaetana Marrone

In his adaptation of Carlo Levi's Cristo si é fermato a Eboli (Christ Stopped at Eboli, 1979), Rosi continues to confront the problems of the South—emigration, cultural marginalization, poverty—while reclaiming its rich, forgotten culture. The film signals a shift of Rosi's style, later evident in the slow-paced Cronaca di una morte annunciata (Chronicle of a Death Foretold, 1987), an epic adaptation of Gabriel García Márquez' 1981 novel that, like Cristo, is structured as an archetypal journey back to the past. In Tre fratelli (Three Brothers, 1981), Italy's chronic political instability is reflected in the tale of a self-assured judge, an idealistic teacher, and an angry factory worker and labor organizer. Summoned home for their mother's funeral, the brothers revisit their peasant roots, confront their present, and imagine their future. The film's concluding wide shot, which unites two generations, indicates Rosi's return to ahistorical values.


C. Vann Woodward’s lecture compares two commemorations of the Civil War fifty years apart, one in 1911 and the other in 1961. The first one reflected sectional reunification predicated on a shared understanding of the tragic nature of war but also a sense that the conflict had solved the problem of sectional animosity. In so doing Woodward notes that whites in the North and South could only accomplish this by excluding meaningful African-American participation. The lecture then outlines the cycles of Reconstruction historiography, and looks at the dual psychological traumas the North and South experienced in the aftermath of Reconstruction. Woodward maintains that after the North emerged victorious from the war it failed to live up to its ideals, leaving wracked guilt, self-criticism, and remorse. The South emerged with a predilection for extortion, indignation, and extreme bellicosity, consistently blaming its own weaknesses on Reconstruction. Woodward suggests that historians should act as therapists, enabling the nation to come to terms with the psychological traumas triggered by the past.


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