Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam I. P. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
Political Ideology ◽  
Great Majority ◽  
The Face ◽  
Political Choices ◽  
Civil War Era

The book opens with the claim that the great majority of Americans living in the free states in the Civil War era thought of themselves as “conservative”, even as they embraced change. Conservatism in the sense in which it was used in this period was not a political ideology but a disposition, a way of signalling a mature, measured approach to the problems of the nineteenth century. This self-defined “conservative” political culture embraced both an underlying antislavery consensus and a powerful devotion to the Union. The interplay of these two impulses—antislavery and nationalism—shaped Northerners’ political choices. In the face of each successive moment of crisis, most Northerners—whether Republicans or Democrats—sought the “conservative” solution that would reconcile the survival of the nation with their dislike of slavery.

Epilogue

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Mac Kilgore
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Walt Whitman ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Civil War Era

The epilogue to the book gestures toward the destiny of enthusiasm in the post-Civil War era. In the wake of the trauma of war, the end of slavery, and the birth of a technologically-oriented culture of disenchanted realism, political enthusiasm no longer seemed necessary or viable. At the same time, the final lesson of Walt Whitman circa the centennial of the American Revolution is not so much that political enthusiasm has come to an end but that it must take on new, unheard-of forms specific to its historical era—in Whitman’s view, that meant a struggle for the rights of labor against the corruptions of capitalism (what he called the “tramp and strike question”). As one indication of how literatures of enthusiasm continued to operate in the late nineteenth century, the chapter discusses Edward Bellamy’s utopian novel Looking Backward and Whitman’s contemporaneous interest in anti-capitalism. Enthusiasm is finally what Whitman calls the “latent right of insurrection,” a “quenchless, indispensable fire” in the convulsive context of political tyranny.

scholarly journals Studies on Anticlericalism in Contemporary Spain

2001 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-255 ◽  
Author(s):  
Manuel Pérez Ledesma
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Cultural Life ◽  
Scant Attention ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Contemporary Spain

Anticlericalism was a decisive trend in Spanish political, social, and cultural life from the beginning of the nineteenth century until the Spanish Civil War. It is true that anticlerical movements also existed in other European states, but the confrontations were much more intense in Spain. José M. Sánchez recalls this in a concise summary of the violence unleashed by these struggles: from 1822 to 1936, at least 235 members of the clergy were assassinated and around 500 churches and religious centres were burned. In addition, in the three years of the Civil War, almost 7,000 priests, monks and nuns suffered the same fate. Despite this, until a few years ago there were frequent complaints about the scant attention paid by Spanish historians to this trend. Julio de la Cueva Merino referred to this lack of research, and even to the ‘historiographic vacuum’, in a summary of publications on the subject which appeared in 1991. Three years later, Pilar Salomón mentioned the ‘absence of fruitful bibliographic production’, and, as recently as 1997, Rafael Cruz spoke of a ‘shortage of works’, or at least a very scarce production of monographs. Outside the field of history, anthropologists such as David Gilmore and Manuel Delgado have likewise criticized the lack of interest of their colleagues in the face of what Gilmore defined as ‘as powerful a social and ideological phenomenon as devotion’, and which should deserve the same intellectual consideration.

Phocion Howard Examines the Northern Pacific Railroad, 1873

2008 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 443-451 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lewis Saum
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Gilded Age ◽  
Gold Rush ◽  
Black Hills ◽  
Pacific Railroad ◽  
Economic Collapse ◽  
Northern Pacific ◽  
Civil War Era ◽  
The Moment

Editor's note: In its October 2004 issue, this journal published a vivid account by Lewis Saum, the well-known historian of the nineteenth-century press, of the dispatches and misadventures of Chicago reporter James “Phocion” Howard during the Black Hills gold rush of 1875. A complete product of an age when news correspondents made no pretence of detachment and no effort to avoid becoming part of their stories, Howard, through what he wrote and what he did, was the sort of reporter who contributed mightily to the image of the post-Civil War era as a Gilded Age. This brief account follows Howard back a little in time, to 1873, when he was noisily bursting illusions along the line of the Northern Pacific Railroad just at the moment when that line's bankruptcy hurled the country into its worst economic collapse in decades.

Response to Rebecca Scott's “Discerning a Dignitary Offense”

2020 ◽  
Vol 38 (3) ◽  
pp. 571-583
Author(s):  
Laura F. Edwards
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Legal System ◽  
Legal Change ◽  
The Law ◽  
Civil War Era

I applaud Scott's contributions. In this comment, I would like to take them up and push them further. Doing so points to a very different understanding of people's relationship to law and the legal system in the nineteenth century than is now current in much of the historiography. That perspective, I argue, can transform our understanding of the law and legal change in the Civil War era and in the nineteenth century more broadly.

Testing Our Mettle

2020 ◽  
pp. 34-55
Author(s):  
Michele Gillespie
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Political Discourse ◽  
Social Thought ◽  
Cultural Meanings ◽  
Critical Locus ◽  
American Media ◽  
The Face ◽  
Civil War Era ◽  
And Gender

Women’s and gender historians over the last fifty years have not suffered such physical horrors, they have had to test their mettle on the scholarly battlefield of Civil War history. Theirs has been a dogged fight in the face of strong opposition to gendering a past that traditional historians and popular culture have preferred to see as great battles between great men. Newer narratives that document white and black women’s resistance, agency, and leadership across the Civil War era have been contesting these persistent older accounts for several decades. Recently historians have disputed traditional historical approaches even more rigorously by exposing the cultural meanings of gender during wartime. They have argued that ideas about masculinity and femininity shaped Civil War political discourse, social thought, and economic roles, ultimately affecting the nature and outcome of the war. The Southern Association for Women Historians (SAWH) has long been a critical locus of support for these scholars who are challenging outmoded conceptions of the Civil War that emanate from within the profession and across mainstream American media and culture.

The Bible in the Civil War

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Harvey
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Abraham Lincoln ◽  
Biblical Exegesis ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Standard Mode ◽  
Civil War Era

Americans of the Civil War era expressed considerable certainty about how biblical passages applied to the dramatic contemporary events of 1861‒1865. Clergy, laypeople, and soldiers on both sides freely divined God’s purposes in history and suggested scriptures to back up their often apocalyptic prognostications. As with the battle for the Bible in the slavery controversy, however, the standard mode of biblical exegesis for mid-nineteenth-century Protestants, common-sense realism, provided such a plethora of answers about the meaning of contemporary events that there was no clear answer. The Bible did not speak plainly. More than just about any theologian or minister, Abraham Lincoln understood that and articulated it in 1865.

The Stormy Present

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam I. P. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Political History ◽  
Radical Change ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Interpretation ◽  
Civil War Era

In this engaging and nuanced political history of Northern communities in the Civil War era, Adam I. P. Smith offers a new interpretation of the familiar story of the path to war and ultimate victory. Smith looks beyond the political divisions between abolitionist Republicans and Copperhead Democrats to consider the everyday conservatism that characterized the majority of Northern voters. A sense of ongoing crisis in these Northern states created anxiety and instability, which manifested in a range of social and political tensions in individual communities. In the face of such realities, Smith argues that a conservative impulse was more than just a historical or nostalgic tendency; it was fundamental to charting a path to the future. At stake for Northerners was their conception of the Union as the vanguard in a global struggle between democracy and despotism, and their ability to navigate their freedoms through the stormy waters of modernity. As a result, the language of conservatism was peculiarly, and revealingly, prominent in Northern politics during these years. The story this book tells is of conservative people coming, in the end, to accept radical change.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document