Literary Indians

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angela Calcaterra
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Exchange ◽  
New Wave ◽  
Literary Aesthetics ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
White American ◽  
Early American ◽  
Cultural Encounter ◽  
History Of ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Political Negotiation

Although cross-cultural encounter is often considered an economic or political matter, beauty, taste, and artistry were central to cultural exchange and political negotiation in early and nineteenth-century America. Part of a new wave of scholarship in early American studies that contextualizes American writing in Indigenous space, Literary Indians highlights the significance of Indigenous aesthetic practices to American literary production. Countering the prevailing notion of the “literary Indian” as a construct of the white American literary imagination, Angela Calcaterra reveals how Native people’s pre-existing and evolving aesthetic practices influenced Anglo-American writing in precise ways. Indigenous aesthetics helped to establish borders and foster alliances that pushed against Anglo-American settlement practices and contributed to the discursive, divided, unfinished aspects of American letters. Focusing on tribal histories and Indigenous artistry, Calcaterra locates surprising connections and important distinctions between Native and Anglo-American literary aesthetics in a new history of early American encounter, identity, literature, and culture.

CommentsA Robust History of Arbitration in Early America: Commentary on The New Federal Arbitration Law

2021 ◽  
pp. 207-211
Author(s):  
Carli N. Conklin
Keyword(s):  
Common Knowledge ◽  
Radical Innovation ◽  
Early America ◽  
Legal Tradition ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Early American ◽  
American Law ◽  
History Of ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Rich History

Julius Henry Cohen and Kenneth Dayton’s 1926 article, The New Federal Arbitration Law, is primarily an apologetic in favor of the Federal Arbitration Act, which Congress passed in 1925. Cohen and Dayton drafted their article as a response to real or anticipated criticisms that the new Federal Arbitration Act was “a radical innovation.” What makes their article a formative article in the field of dispute resolution is not their argument that, instead of being “a radical innovation,” arbitration had a long-standing history in American law. In fact, their explicit claims on this point seem, at first glance, to be fairly anemic, with only passing references to arbitration’s Anglo-Saxon roots or its robust presence in more recent English and American legal history. The historical richness of this article is found not in what Cohen and Dayton explicitly assert, but in what they assume in their assertions. In other words, Cohen and Dayton could make seemingly anemic claims regarding the robust history of arbitration in the Anglo-American legal tradition convincing to their readers only if they were speaking to an audience whose understanding of that history was as rich as their own. In that context, each historic claim serves as a shorthand reference to a rich history of arbitration that Cohen and Dayton could fairly assume was common knowledge among their readers—including early twentieth-century arbitrators, lawyers, judges, and legal scholars—whose vantage point for understanding the history of early American arbitration was nearly a century closer in time than our own....

Women at War in the Borderlands of the Early American Northeast

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gina M. Martino
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Cultural Exchange ◽  
New France ◽  
Domestic Sphere ◽  
Gender Ideologies ◽  
Early American ◽  
Women's Participation ◽  
History Of

Across the borderlands of the early American northeast, New England, New France, and Native nations deployed women with surprising frequency to the front lines of wars that determined control of North America. Far from serving as passive helpmates in a private, domestic sphere, women assumed wartime roles as essential public actors, wielding muskets, hatchets, and makeshift weapons while fighting for their families, communities, and nations. Revealing the fundamental importance of martial womanhood in this era, Gina M. Martino places borderlands women in a broad context of empire, cultural exchange, violence, and nation building, demonstrating how women's war making was embedded in national and imperial strategies of expansion and resistance. As Martino shows, women's participation in warfare was not considered transgressive; rather it was integral to traditional gender ideologies of the period, supporting rather than subverting established systems of gender difference.In returning these forgotten women to the history of the northeastern borderlands, this study challenges scholars to reconsider the flexibility of gender roles and reveals how women's participation in transatlantic systems of warfare shaped institutions, polities, and ideologies in the early modern period and the centuries that followed.

scholarly journals Atlantic Intersections: Early American Commerce and the Rise of the Spanish West Indies (Cuba)

2005 ◽  
Vol 79 (4) ◽  
pp. 781-809 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linda K. Salvucci
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Comparative Advantage ◽  
West Indies ◽  
Revolutionary War ◽  
Early American ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
History Of ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Atlantic Economy ◽  
American Trade

An Atlantic approach to the history of early American trade challenges traditional British opinions and, indeed, much Anglo-American scholarship regarding the commercial prospects of the new United States. Contemporary Spanish observations, in contrast to the more familiar and widely cited ones in English, correctly predicted the post-Revolutionary War integration of American and Spanish imperial markets. As political, diplomatic, and economic upheavals broke down the old mercantilist system, U.S. merchants quickly succeeded in exploiting their comparative advantage in the expanding Atlantic economy. The debate over the “decline” of theBritishWest Indies is amplified by examining the concurrent “rise” of theSpanishWest Indies, particularly Cuba, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Visions in a Seer Stone

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
William L. Davis
Keyword(s):  
Performance Studies ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
John Wesley ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
Early American ◽  
Book Of Mormon ◽  
History Of ◽  
George Whitefield ◽  
Oral Composition

In this interdisciplinary work, William L. Davis examines Joseph Smith's 1829 creation of the Book of Mormon, the foundational text of the Latter Day Saint movement. Positioning the text within the history of early American oratorical techniques, sermon culture, educational practices, and the passion for self-improvement, Davis elucidates both the fascinating cultural contexts for the creation of the Book of Mormon and the central role of oral culture in early nineteenth-century America. Drawing on performance studies, religious studies, literary culture, and the history of early American education, Davis analyzes Smith’s process of oral composition. How did he produce a history spanning a period of 1,000 years, filled with hundreds of distinct characters and episodes, all cohesively tied together in an overarching narrative? Eyewitnesses claimed that Smith never looked at notes, manuscripts, or books—he simply spoke the words of this American religious epic into existence. Judging the truth of this process is not Davis's interest. Rather, he reveals a kaleidoscope of practices and styles that converged around Smith's creation, with an emphasis on the evangelical preaching styles popularized by the renowned George Whitefield and John Wesley.

British Television's Lost New Wave Moment: Single Drama and Race

2012 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 612-627 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eleni Liarou
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Black Population ◽  
New Wave ◽  
Audiovisual Material ◽  
British Drama ◽  
History Of ◽  
White Working Class ◽  
Written Sources

The article argues that the working-class realism of post-WWII British television single drama is neither as English nor as white as is often implied. The surviving audiovisual material and written sources (reviews, publicity material, biographies of television writers and directors) reveal ITV's dynamic role in offering a range of views and representations of Britain's black population and their multi-layered relationship with white working-class cultures. By examining this neglected history of postwar British drama, this article argues for more inclusive historiographies of British television and sheds light on the dynamism and diversity of British television culture.

“Sou Inglesa! Sou Inglesa!”: Memórias de uma Menina Anglo-Portuguesa (1907-1930)

2017 ◽  
pp. 141-155
Author(s):  
Miguel Alarcão
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Social History ◽  
Travel Literature ◽  
Growing Up ◽  
Recent Past ◽  
Self And Other ◽  
Cultural Encounter ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Times

Textualizing the memory(ies) of physical and cultural encounter(s) between Self and Other, travel literature/writing often combines subjectivity with documental information which may prove relevant to better assess mentalities, everyday life and the social history of any given ‘timeplace’. That is the case with Growing up English. Memories of Portugal 1907-1930, by D. J. Baylis (née Bucknall), prefaced by Peter Mollet as “(…) a remarkably vivid and well written observation of the times expressed with humour and not little ‘carinho’. In all they make excellent reading especially for those of us interested in the recent past.” (Baylis: 2)

White Zombie as Captivity Narrative and the Death of Certainty

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 19-25
Author(s):  
Mark C Anderson
Keyword(s):  
American Indians ◽  
American Slavery ◽  
Captivity Narrative ◽  
Early American ◽  
Arts And Culture ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Black ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
American Society ◽  
Black Other

Horror films such as White Zombie (1932) reveal viewers to themselves by narrating in the currency of audience anxiety. Such movies evoke fright because they recapitulate fear and trauma that audiences have already internalized or continue to experience, even if they are not aware of it. White Zombie’s particular tack conjures up an updated captivity narrative wherein a virginal white damsel is abducted by a savage Other. The shell of the captivity story, of course, is as old as America. In its earliest incarnation it featured American Indians in the role as savage Other, fiendishly imagined as having been desperate to get their clutches on white females and all that hey symbolized. In this way, it generated much of the emotional heat stoking Manifest Destiny, that is, American imperial conquest both of the continent and then, later, as in the case of Haiti, of the Caribbean Basin. White Zombie must of course be understood in the context of the American invasion and occupation of Haiti (1915-1934). As it revisits the terrain inhabited by the American black Other, it also speaks to the history of American slavery. The Other here is African-American, not surprisingly given the date and nature of American society of the day, typically imagined in wildly pejorative fashion in early American arts and culture. This essay explores White Zombie as a modified captivity narrative, pace Last of the Mohicans through John Ford’s The Searchers (1956), the Rambo trilogy (1982, 1985, 1988), the Taken trilogy (2008, 1012, 2014), even Mario and Luigi’s efforts to rescue Princess Peach from Bowser.

Ballet in the Cold War

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Searcy
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Cultural Exchange ◽  
The United States ◽  
Performing Artists ◽  
Exchange Programs ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War

During the Cold War, the governments of the United States and the Soviet Union developed cultural exchange programs, in which they sent performing artists abroad in order to generate goodwill for their countries. Ballet companies were frequently called on to serve in these programs, particularly in the direct Soviet-American exchange. This book analyzes four of the early ballet exchange tours, demonstrating how this series of encounters changed both geopolitical relations and the history of dance. The ballet tours were enormously popular. Performances functioned as an important symbolic meeting point for Soviet and American officials, creating goodwill and normalizing relations between the two countries in an era when nuclear conflict was a real threat. At the same time, Soviet and American audiences did not understand ballet in the same way. As American companies toured in the Soviet Union and vice versa, audiences saw the performances through the lens of their own local aesthetics. Ballet in the Cold War introduces the concept of transliteration to understand this process, showing how much power viewers wielded in the exchange and explaining how the dynamics of the Cold War continue to shape ballet today.

American Missionaries and Race

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Ruble
Keyword(s):  
Racial Difference ◽  
Cultural Imperialism ◽  
American Missionaries ◽  
History Of ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Christian Message ◽  
Unexpected Consequences

When Europeans came to the Americas, they brought with them both Christian missionaries and notions of racial difference. Since that early encounter, the story of American missions has been intertwined with issues of race. Although some might suspect a rather simple story of missionary racism and others an account of the egalitarian effects of the Christian message, the history of missions and race is a story of competing impulses and unexpected consequences. Missionaries participated in the construction of race, they challenged racism, and they reified it. In some cases, racism twined with cultural imperialism, leading to a message and to methods that valorized Anglo-American, largely Protestant, culture. In others, concerns about racism led to larger critiques of missionary practice and US presence abroad.

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