A Secret Society History of the Civil War

Author(s):  
Mark A. Lause

This history of the Civil War considers the impact of nineteenth-century American secret societies on the path to as well as the course of the war. Beginning with the European secret societies that laid the groundwork for Freemasonry in the United States, the book analyzes how the Old World's traditions influenced various underground groups and movements in America, particularly George Lippard's Brotherhood of the Union, an American attempt to replicate the political secret societies that influenced the European Revolutions of 1848. The book traces the Brotherhood's various manifestations, including the Knights of the Golden Circle (out of which developed the Ku Klux Klan), and the Confederate secret groups through which John Wilkes Booth and others attempted to undermine the Union. It shows how, in the years leading up to the Civil War, these clandestine organizations exacerbated existing sectional tensions and may have played a part in key events such as John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry, Lincoln's election, and the Southern secession process of 1860–1861.

2016 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. E4 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victor M. Sabourin ◽  
Ryan Holland ◽  
Christine Mau ◽  
Chirag D. Gandhi ◽  
Charles J. Prestigiacomo

The Civil War era was an age-defining period in the history of the United States of America, the effects of which are still seen in the nation today. In this era, the issue of head injury pervaded society. From the president of the United States, Abraham Lincoln, to the officers and soldiers of the Union and Confederate armies, and to the population at large, head injury and its ramifications gripped the nation. This article focuses on 3 individuals: Major General John Sedgwick, First Lieutenant Alonzo Cushing, and Harriet Tubman, as examples of the impact that head injury had during this era. These 3 individuals were chosen for this article because of their lasting legacies, contributions to society, and interesting connections to one another.


Author(s):  
Norma E. Cantú

During the first decade of the 21st century, a political movement based in Arizona sought, through legislation, to ban the use of certain books and the teaching of certain authors and concepts in high school classrooms in the Tucson Unified School District. HB 2281 was signed into law in May 2010 on the heels of one of the strictest anti-immigrant legislative acts, SB 1070. These two bills would become intertwined in the imagination of the country and would elicit protests and generate actions by activists, writers, and teachers as they wound through the legal battles that ensued. This article explores the consequences of the law and the impact both locally and nationally of such actions by focusing on two key events: The Poets Against SB 1070 and the Librotraficante project led by Houston activist Tony Díaz. Moreover, it contextualizes such a historic event within the larger history of educational disenfranchisement of Latinx in the United States.


2020 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 449-465
Author(s):  
Stanley N. Katz ◽  
Leah Reisman

AbstractThis article discusses the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement on the arts and cultural sector in the United States, placing the 2020 crises in the context of the United States’s historically decentralized approach to supporting the arts and culture. After providing an overview of the United States’s private, locally focused history of arts funding, we use this historical lens to analyze the combined effects of the pandemic and Black Lives Matter movement on a single metropolitan area – Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. We trace a timeline of key events in the national and local pandemic response and the reaction of the arts community to the Black Lives Matter movement, arguing that the nature of these intersecting responses, and their fallout for the arts and cultural sector, stem directly from weaknesses in the United States’s historical approach to administering the arts. We suggest that, in the context of widespread organizational vulnerability caused by the pandemic, the United States’s decentralized approach to funding culture also undermines cultural organizations’ abilities to respond to issues of public relevance and demonstrate their civic value, threatening these organizations’ legitimacy.


2009 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 321-343
Author(s):  
Francis Dupuis-Déri

Résumé.L'étude des discours des «pères fondateurs» du Canada moderne révèle qu'ils étaient ouvertement antidémocrates. Comment expliquer qu'un régime fondé dans un esprit antidémocratique en soit venu à être identifié positivement à la démocratie? S'inspirant d'études similaires sur les États-Unis et la France, l'analyse de l'histoire du mot «démocratie» révèle que le Canada a été associé à la «démocratie» en raison de stratégies discursives des membres de l'élite politique qui cherchaient à accroître leur capacité de mobiliser les masses à l'occasion des guerres mondiales, et non pas à la suite de modifications constitutionnelles ou institutionnelles qui auraient justifié un changement d'appellation du régime.Abstract.An examination of the speeches of modern Canada's “founding fathers” lays bare their openly anti-democratic outlook. How did a regime founded on anti-democratic ideas come to be positively identified with democracy? Drawing on the examples of similar studies carried out in the United States and France, this analysis of the history of the term “democracy” in Canada shows that the country's association with “democracy” was not due to constitutional or institutional changes that might have justified re-labelling the regime. Instead, it was the result of the political elite's discursive strategies, whose purpose was to strengthen the elite's ability to mobilize the masses during the world wars.


1923 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 312
Author(s):  
Benjamin B. Kendrick ◽  
Ellis Paxon Oberholtzer

2015 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 207-230
Author(s):  
Kim Eun Yi

This study examines how the use of different types of social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, affects public participation, drawing on the theory of motivation, which addresses the effect of internal and external political efficacy as well as the perceived political importance of social media. The study also investigates the interaction effect between social media use and perceived the political importance of social media on public participation. Employing a comparative perspective on an issue that has not been well studied, the study further seeks to discover potential variations in the impacts of different social media on public participation in the United States and Korea, both of which held presidential elections at the end of 2012. This study conducted hierarchical multiple regression analyses using data collected from college students in the United States and Korea. It shows the positive impact of social media use and its interaction effect with the perceived political importance of social media on the offline and online public participation of youth. The political motivational factor is found to be critical to driving public participation. This study also shows that the impact of Facebook use is more influential than Twitter use on public participation in the United States, whereas the opposite pattern is observed in Korea.


2022 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 358-389
Author(s):  
Anna Maria Mayda ◽  
Giovanni Peri ◽  
Walter Steingress

This paper studies the impact of immigration to the United States on the vote share for the Republican Party using county-level data from 1990 to 2016. Our main contribution is to show that an increase in high-skilled immigrants decreases the share of Republican votes, while an inflow of low-skilled immigrants increases it. These effects are mainly due to the indirect impact on existing citizens’ votes, and this is independent of the origin country and race of immigrants. We find that the political effect of immigration is heterogeneous across counties and depends on their skill level, public spending, and noneconomic characteristics. (JEL D72, J15, J24, J61, R23)


1965 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 541-556 ◽  
Author(s):  
James F. Creagan

The movement of Mexican laborers across the international boundary into the southwestern United States has been occurring since the establishment of a boundary in that area. It is a natural movement of worker toward the source of work. Interests of the governments involved have caused checks to be placed upon this movement of workers. Public Law 78 represented one of the recent attempts of the United States government, through co-operation with the Mexican government, to regulate the movement of migrant workers.In this article I will briefly trace the history of PL 78. The impact of this law upon Mexico and its relevance for United States relations with that country are of importance.


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