The Project for a New Anglo Century

Author(s):  
Duncan Bell

This chapter sketches a synoptic intellectual history of the attempt to unify the constituent elements of the “Anglo-world” into a single globe-spanning community, and to harness its purported world-historical potential as an agent of order and justice. Since the late nineteenth century numerous commentators have preached the benefits of unity, though they have often disagreed on the institutional form it should assume. These are projects for the creation of a new Anglo century. The first two sections of the chapter explore overlapping elements of the fin de siècle Anglo-world discourse. The third section traces the echoes of debates over the future relationship between the empire and the United States through the twentieth century, discussing the interlacing articulation of imperial-commonwealth, Anglo-American, democratic unionist, and world federalist projects. The final section discusses contemporary accounts of Anglo-world supremacy.

1976 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 417-447 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucy Carroll

The temperance/prohibition agitation represents a fascinating chapter in the social and political history of India which has been largely ignored. If any notice is taken of this movement, it is generally dismissed (or elevated) as an example of the uniquely Indian process of ‘sanskritization’ or as an equally unique component of ‘Gandhianism’—in spite of the fact that the liquor question has not been without political importance in the history either of England or of the United States. And in spite of the fact that the temperance agitation in India in the late nineteenth century and well into the twentieth century was intimately connected with temperance agitation in England. Indeed the temperance movement in India was organized, patronized, and instructed by English temperance agitators.


Author(s):  
Duncan Bell

Between the late nineteenth century and the First World War an ocean-spanning network of prominent individuals advocated the unification of Britain and the United States. They dreamt of the final consolidation of the Angloworld. Scholars, journalists, politicians, businessmen, and science fiction writers invested the “Anglo-Saxons” with extraordinary power. The most ambitious hailed them as a people destined to bring peace and justice to the earth. More modest visions still imagined them as likely to shape the twentieth century. This book explores this remarkable moment in the intellectual history of racial domination, political utopianism, and world order. Focusing on a quartet of extraordinary figures, the book shows how unionists on both sides of the Atlantic reimagined citizenship, empire, patriotism, race, war, and peace in their quest to secure global supremacy. Yet even as they dreamt of an Anglo-dominated world, the unionists disagreed over the meaning of race, the legitimacy of imperialism, the nature of political belonging, and the ultimate form and purpose of unification. The racial dreamworld was an object of competing claims and fantasies. Exploring speculative fiction as well as more conventional forms of political writing, the author reads unionist arguments as expressions of the utopianism circulating through fin-de-siècle Anglo-American culture, and juxtaposes them with pan-Africanist critiques of racial domination and late twentieth-century fictional narratives of Anglo-American empire. Tracing how intellectual elites promoted an ambitious project of political and racial unification between Britain and the United States, the book analyzes ideas of empire and world order that reverberate to this day.


2005 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 109-138 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helena Pycior

AbstractThis paper traces the history of the cultural icon of the "First Dog" of the United States back to the administration of President Warren G. Harding (1921-1923). It briefly explores technological and socio-cultural factors—including the early-twentieth-century cult of human and nonhuman celebrities—that laid a basis for the acceptance of Laddie Boy, Harding's Airedale terrier, as the third member of the First Family and a celebrity in his own right. Following Laddie Boy, First Dogs would greet and entertain visitors to the White House, pose for the press, make public appearances, and "talk." While recognizing that Laddie Boy's personality was essential to his success at the White House, the paper also documents the steps taken by President Harding, his wife Florence Kling Harding, and the American press to establish Laddie Boy as the First Dog of the land. The paper argues that the construction of the cultural icon of the First Dog was not simply a political ploy to humanize the President but more a calculated attempt by President Harding to further animal welfare.


2015 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 597-606
Author(s):  
NOAH B. STROTE

These two books bring fresh eyes and much-needed energy to the study of the intellectual migration from Weimar Germany to the United States. Research on the scholars, writers, and artists forced to flee Europe because of their Jewish heritage or left-wing politics was once a cottage industry, but interest in this topic has waned in recent years. During the height of fascination with the émigrés, bookstores brimmed with panoramic works such as H. Stuart Hughes's The Sea Change: The Migration of Social Thought, 1930–1965 (1975), Lewis Coser's Refugee Scholars in America: Their Impact and Their Experiences (1984), and Martin Jay's Permanent Exiles: Essays on the Intellectual Migration from Germany to America (1985). Now, while historians still write monographs about émigré intellectuals, their focus is often narrowed to biographies of individual thinkers. Refreshingly, with Emily Levine's and Udi Greenberg's new publications we are asked to step back and recapture a broader view of their legacy. The displacement of a significant part of Germany's renowned intelligentsia to the US in the mid-twentieth century remains one of the major events in the intellectual history of both countries.


2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 296-324
Author(s):  
Tyler D. Parry

This article intersects various secondary works that analyze regional memories in the US South, slave marital practices, and the intellectual history of slavery in the United States. Following a brief analysis of the “Plantation Myth,” it examines the proslavery framework established by southern apologists in the antebellum era and gauges how postbellum authors built upon these arguments. The next part critically probes memoirists’ usage of descriptive material, scrutinizing their motivations for producing the literature, the tone conveyed through their writing, and how they used the wedding ceremony as a symbol for slavery’s benignity. Following this qualitative data, this study examines a research sample found in the collections of Herman Clarence Nixon, a prolific author in the early twentieth century who interviewed former slave owners for his research on slavery in northern Alabama. Finally, this article reveals how postbellum reminiscences portrayed a myth of gender solidarity that transcended racial boundaries.


2017 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 42-66
Author(s):  
Samuel Avery-Quinn

In the late nineteenth century, camp meeting towns were a common feature of the American landscape. The boards of Methodist ministers and laity overseeing these towns adopted management and planning strategies drawn from movements for romantic suburbs, sanitary reform, and urban parks. The strategies these Methodists adopted represent a practice of vernacular planning crafted decades before the professionalization of the discipline in the United States. Analysis of the planning history of two sites—Ocean Grove, NJ, and Round Lake, NY—reveals factors shaping this development of Methodistic town planning.


2014 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 23-26
Author(s):  
Irene Stroud

Baby shows and baby contests in the late nineteenth century United States, beginning as a form of entertainment at agricultural fairs, were co-opted in the early twentieth century as a public relations vehicle for the eugenics movement. This article connects this history of display of the infant body with white Protestant practices of bodily display in infant baptism as represented etiquette manuals, women's magazines, and works of art. The author argues that infants became unwitting participants in practices of display that marked them as members of affluent white society.


Author(s):  
Wendy Kline

In the late nineteenth century, as fears of contamination latched onto eugenic anxieties about racial degeneration, the medical regulation of foreigners attempting to enter the United States became particularly intense. Ideas about contagion and degeneration characterized the medical regulation of immigrants around the turn of the twentieth century, and many of these ideas remain with us today.


1950 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-19 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas T. McAvoy

RomanCatholicism in the United States has produced able leaders among its clergy and laymen during the first decades of the twentieth century, but most of them seem to lack the lustre and verve of the Catholic leaders during the waning decades of the nineteenth century. The lay leadership which produced John Gilmary Shea, William J. Onahan, Henry F. Brownson, Patrick V. Hickey and Henry Spaunhorst had strong backing from such clergymen as James Cardinal Gibbons, John Ireland, John J. Keane, Bernard McQuaid, and Michael A. Corrigan. But the intellectual leader of American Catholicism during the late nineteenth century was John Lancaster Spalding, Bishop of Pepria, and the twentieth century Catholicism has not produced his counterpart.


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