Dark Tourism and Sites of Crime

Author(s):  
John Lennon

Dark tourism (sometimes referred to as thanatourism) has become established in the last decade as a niche tourism area. Death, suffering, visitation and tourism have been interrelated for many centuries (Foley and Lennon, 1996a; Seaton, 1999). Indeed for many years, humans have been attracted to sites and events that are associated with death, disaster, suffering, violence and killing. From ancient Rome and gladiatorial combat to attendance at public executions, sites of death have held a voyeuristic appeal. As previously recorded, the site of hte first battle in the American Civil War was sold as a potential tourist site the following day (Lennon and Foley, 2000) and viewing of the battlefield of Waterlook by non-combatants was recorded in 1816 (Seaton, 1999). These sites associated with death and disaster that exert a dark fascination for visitors are frequently linked to crime locations and the perpetration of lawful and unlawful acts. The sheer diversity of forms of dark tourism sites are significant and have been the subject of emergent research (see for example: Foley and Lennon, 1996a; Lennon and Foley, 2000; Seaton, 1996; Seaton and Lennon, 2004; Dann and Seaton, 2006; Ashworth, 1996; Sharkley and Stone, 2009). However the relationship to criminal acts and punishment for crimes is an important one that has received limited direct attention.

Author(s):  
Margaret Malamud

American abolitionists not only invoked the Roman allusions and comparisons employed by the revolutionary generation’s fight for liberty from the British crown, but also adapted or subverted them in service of the black struggle for freedom. Rather than rejecting Roman society outright because it was a slaveholding society—the primal “Roman error” from their perspective—many abolitionists instead deployed figures and images from Roman antiquity in their own struggles against the despotism of chattel slavery. Supporters of emancipation and black civil rights, this chapter shows, thus engaged in an intense debate over the correct reception of ancient Rome with proslavery Southerners, who argued that slavery in both Rome and America enabled liberty and civilization. Bringing the discussion into the present day, this chapter offers a contemporary example of arguments over the correct reception of ancient Rome in relation to American slavery and the American Civil War.


Author(s):  
Jim Powell

Losing the Thread is the first full-length study of the effect of the American Civil War on Britain’s raw cotton trade and on the Liverpool cotton market. It details the worst crisis in the British cotton trade in the 19th century. Before the civil war, America supplied 80 per cent of Britain’s cotton. In August 1861, this fell to almost zero, where it remained for four years. Despite increased supplies from elsewhere, Britain’s largest industry received only 36 per cent of the raw material it needed from 1862 to 1864. This book establishes the facts of Britain’s raw cotton supply during the war: how much there was of it, in absolute terms and in relation to the demand, where it came from and why, how much it cost, and what effect the reduced supply had on Britain’s cotton manufacture. It includes an enquiry into the causes of the Lancashire cotton famine, which contradicts the historical consensus on the subject. Examining the impact of the civil war on Liverpool and its cotton market, the book disputes the historic portrayal of Liverpool as a solidly pro-Confederate town. It also demonstrates how reckless speculation infested and distorted the raw cotton market, and lays bare the shadowy world of the Liverpool cotton brokers, who profited hugely from the war while the rest of Lancashire starved.


2019 ◽  
Vol 64 (1) ◽  
pp. 194-206
Author(s):  
Jeffrey B Arnold ◽  
J Tyson Chatagnier ◽  
Gary E Hollibaugh

Abstract How do the characteristics of military leaders relate to battlefield outcomes? To answer this question, we employ original battle-level data and biographical information on hundreds of commanders in more than 250 battles in the American Civil War. We examine the relationship between two common measures of battlefield success (victory and casualties) and two latent features of commanders—competence and loyalty—that have long been seen as important in the broader study of executive appointments. We find that competent commanders are associated with more successful battlefield outcomes, as are more loyal Confederate commanders. More broadly, our analysis suggests that focusing on the relationship between military appointments and battlefield outcomes—with the latter's relatively clear definition of “success”—allows for direct examination of the relationship between appointee traits and organizational performance. As such, our results have implications for the study of conflict as well as bureaucratic politics.


2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (27) ◽  
pp. 276-299
Author(s):  
JULIANA JARDIM DE OLIVEIRA E OLIVEIRA

Este artigo aborda o tema das relações entre Império e Prová­ncias no Brasil a partir de um olhar internacional e em um contexto de ”crise da década de 1860” e da Guerra Civil nos EUA. Dentro do contexto de uma guerra que tem implicações transnacionais, analisaremos dois focos de debate na Cá¢mara dos Deputados do Brasil que sofreram a influência do conflito nos EUA: as propostas de retomada de produção do algodão e os problemas relativos ao recrutamento de soldados em meio á  guerra. Busca-se demonstrar que a Cá¢mara dos Deputados foi palco importante para que os deputados se posicionassem a partir de diferentes interesses regionais ou provinciais, frente a um contexto internacionalizado. Em suas falas é possá­vel observar que em face ao conflito norte-americano e o contexto internacional, os parlamentares foram capazes de fazer uso de um ”jogo de escalas” para discutirem demandas e interesses regionais, explicitando relações nacionais, regionais e internacionais.Palavras-chave:  Estado Nacional. Guerra Civil. Prová­ncias.  PROVINCIAL INTERESTS IN BRAZIL DURING THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR:  a transnational view of the relationship between the Empire and the ProvincesAbstract:  This paper discusses the relationship between the Empire as a central power and the Provinces in Brazil from an international perspective within the context of the ”crisis of the 1860s” and the American Civil War. In view of this national conflict with transnational implications, we will focus on two debates in the Brazilian Lower House of Congress: the debates over the investments in cotton production and the army recruitment in times of war. The Lower House was an important environment for Brazilian Congressmen to defend different regional or provincial demands, in view of an internationalized context. In their speeches it is possible to assert that, when faced with the North American conflict and the international context, congressmen were able to use a game of ”scales” to expose their regional demands and interests, highlighting national, regional, and international relationships.Keywords:  Civil War. National State. Provinces.  INTERESES PROVINCIALES EN BRASIL EN LOS Aá‘OS DE LA GUERRA CIVIL NORTEAMERICANA:  una mirada transnacional sobre relaciones entre el Imperio y las ProvinciasResumen:  Este articulo trata del tema de las relaciones entre imperio y provincias de Brasil a partir de la mirada internacional en el contexto de la ”crisis de la década de 1860” y de la Guerra Civil de los EEUU. Dentro del contexto de una guerra de carácter internacional, analizaremos dos enfoques de debate en la Cámara de los Diputados de Brasil: las propuestas de retomadas en la producción del algodón y los problemas relacionados al reclutamiento de soldados en el medio de la guerra. Es objetivo probar que la Cámara de los Diputados fue un escenario importante para que los diputados se posicionaran a partir de diferentes intereses regionales o provinciales, frente a un contexto internacionalizado. En sus declaraciones es posible observar que ante el conflicto norteamericano y el contexto internacional, los parlamentarios fueron capaces de hacer uso de un ”juego de escalas” para discutir demandas e intereses regionales, explicitando relaciones nacionales, regionales e internacionales.Palabras clave:  Estado Nacional. Guerra Civil. Provincias.


2020 ◽  
pp. 254-272
Author(s):  
Jerome Tharaud

This chapter looks beyond the American Civil War to consider the ways evangelical space continued to shape how Americans saw the landscape and themselves in literary realism to the conservation movement. It mentions how Mark Twain became a representative figure of how a secularizing America remained haunted by a sense of sacred presence rooted in the soil itself. It reviews the story about the rise of white Protestant evangelicals within U.S. national culture and how their form of evangelical space became American space by the eve of the Civil War. The chapter explores the ironic story about how evangelical space escaped control as writers and artists from other traditions reconfigured the relationship between landscape representation, media, and the sacred to produce their own apocalyptic geographies. It recounts how William Apess, Frederick Douglass, Phillis Wheatley, Robert S. Duncanson, and Henry Obookiah appropriated and adapted evangelical space.


Author(s):  
Henry A. McGhie

This chapter explores Dresser’s life through the 1860s, following his return to England from Mexico and Texas. His father had been bankrupted by the American Civil War, so Dresser had to take over as head the family, as the eldest son. This was a chaotic period when Dresser considered leaving London to live abroad. Ultimately, he settled into business and became extremely successful. He worked as a leading iron-trading merchant, a line of work he remained in for over forty years. This set the background and context for all of his natural history work, which forms the subject of subsequent chapters. The chapter includes details of his business travels throughout Europe during the 1860s, mixing business and ornithology.


2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lada Stevanović

Antiquity appears in films from the very beginning of cinema. As in other examples of reception, the presence of antiquity depends on the context of reception, the specificity of the medium which includes the relationship with the audience, as well as the personal mark of the author. The subject of this paper are two movies set in antiquity: Roman Scandals (1933) and The Life of Brian (1977). Both films are comedies, the plots of which are set in the ancient past, and both are satirical, meaning that they have a contemporary social sting. Also, both comedies belong to the genre of swords and sandals (if we take this as an umbrella term for all films related to antiquity, and not only the epic sagas of the mid-1950s and 1960s), revealing a similar, parodic attitude to the mentioned genre. The film Roman Scandals, a musical comedy with elements of burlesque, is set both in contemporary America (the midwestern city of West Rome) and ancient Rome, constructing the complex process of identification and differentiation with ancient Rome. All this has to do with the remarkable usage of Rome in American culture and history, especially since the time when America started to break ties with Britain. This is explicitly marked in the scene of the exhibition in the Museum of Rome, which, as it is emphasized, belongs to the period of the Roman invasion of Britain. Humorous twists are numerous, being constructed in language, in problems of adaptations and dialogues between cultures, and in the parody of the genre and its motifs. The Life of Brian also parodies the genre of swords and sandals and its subgenre – biblical and Christian movies. Although both films are set in antiquity, the humorous procedures construct the satirical tone, which always bears a contemporary social sting. The anachronisms, and overlapping of history and contemporariness are constructed differently in those two films. However, they both raise, among other things, a question crucial for the research field of classical reception (to which this paper belongs), and that is the way in which antiquity is used in the invention of tradition (Hobsbawm). The paper also gives attention to the genre of parody, which already appeared in antiquity, continuing its existence through the Middle Ages, especially regarding the sacred texts and forms which, according to Bakhtin, all had their parodic version. In view of the fact that both films construct humour in numerous ways, the paper focuses particularly on the humorous procedures set in the context of antiquity, which among other things, raises the question of the attitude towards antiquity that these films pose.


2012 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 663-679
Author(s):  
ANDREW MILLER

This paper involves a close reading of Herman Melville's poem “On the Photograph of a Corps Commander,” published in Melville's 1866 collection Battle-Pieces. Realizing that Melville's poem is one of the first descriptions (ekphrases) of a photograph in verse, the paper explores how Melville's poem uses physiognomy to describe the subject of the photograph: an American Civil War general, who is only identified as “the Corps Commander.” In this way, Melville's poem reflects the nineteenth-century philosophical and popular notions of photography. These notions came to regard photography as a Neoplatonic medium capable of recording and revealing the inner character of its subjects. Relying on these conceptions of photography, Melville's poem describes the photograph of the Corps Commander as having the power to reveal the Platonic absolute of American masculinity, and thus it comes to hail the photograph as a semi-sacred image that has the power to draw Anglo-Saxon American men into a common brotherhood.


2011 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 45-91 ◽  
Author(s):  
Neil Davidson

AbstractThe discussion of the American Civil War as a bourgeois revolution, reopened by John Ashworth’s recent work, needs to be based on a more explicit conceptualisation of what the category does, and does not, involve. This essay offers one such conceptualisation. It then deals with two key issues raised by the process of bourgeois revolution in the United States: the relationship between the War of Independence and the Civil War, and whether the nature of the South made conflict unavoidable. It then argues that the American Revolution is unique for two reasons: the non-feudal nature of Southern society and the fact that the Northern industrial bourgeoisie, unlike their European contemporaries, were still prepared to behave in a revolutionary way.


Author(s):  
Rachel McBride Lindsey

Intense debates around spirit photography started immediately upon its discovery in late 1862. This chapter frames these debates around the career, trial, and demise of America’s first and most notorious spirit photographer, William Howard Mumler. In the context of the American Civil War, Mumler claimed to have discovered a gift for photographing spirits of departed souls and immediately became the subject of public interest and scrutiny. His uneasy affiliation with modern Spiritualism, his public ridicule by the photographic guild, and his brief celebrity in the 1860s provide a window into the at times intense uncertainty around the camera’s ability to reveal spiritual truth to modern beholders. His hearing before the New York Police Court in the spring of 1869, in particular, facilitated a very public debate around the authority of the Bible and the camera in newspaper accounts that were circulated throughout the country. In this chapter, spirit photographs emerge as a hinge between corporeal referents in studio portraiture, on the one hand, and practices of biblical beholding, on the other, that asked beholders to see what was really there.


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