Marriage on the Border

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Allison Dorothy Fredette
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
Free Labor ◽  
Secession Crisis ◽  
Companionate Marriage ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Conflicting Messages ◽  
The Way

Not quite the Cotton Kingdom or the free labor North, the mid-nineteenth-century border South was a land in between. There, the clashing ideologies of this era—slavery and freedom, urban and rural, industrial and agrarian—met, merged, and melded. As they did, they formed something new—a fluid, flexible identity that somehow grew from these tensions while rising above them. This border identity would play a critical role in these states’ experiences during the secession crisis, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. Yet, this story—one of political division, internal warfare, and economic struggles—is only one part of the border South’s larger saga. Focusing on the heart of this complicated region, Marriage on the Border reveals how this border environment shaped the lives and loves of Kentuckians, West Virginians, and Appalachian Virginians. Inundated with conflicting messages about marriage, divorce, and gender, these border southerners set their own path. In an era when advice manuals urged all Americans to adopt new ideals of companionate marriage and loving mutuality, border southerners proved especially receptive to these notions. Additionally, when these marriages crumbled, border southerners found ways to divorce more easily than other southerners of this era. Marriage on the Border follows border southerners through their courtships and into their homes, through blissful marriages and turbulent divorce dramas, through secession, war, and reconstruction. Along the way, Marriage on the Border captures the turmoil and confusion of this era, not in its legislative halls or on the battlefield, but in the households of those who lived at the heart of the country.

The Roman Aura in Henry James’s Daisy Miller: A Study (1878)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Carlos Rowe
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Roman Empire ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Global Power ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Classical Culture

Concentrating on Henry James’s Daisy Miller, this chapter reveals its author engaging in arguments over the decline and fall of the Roman Empire among nineteenth-century Anglo-American writers and over the best means of using Rome’s example as a warning to contemporaries. The novella’s Roman setting and frequent references to classical culture both extend Anglo-American Romantics’ emphasis on the Roman failure to develop a comprehensive democracy and allow James to pursue his own interest in post-Civil War America as an emerging global power. Departing from earlier interpretations of Rome’s importance within Daisy Miller, this chapter argues that James employs the character of Daisy to reconceive Rome’s relevance to central issues of class and gender. If James rejects aspects of contemporary American feminism embodied by such classically inspired artists as Harriet Hosmer and Maria Louisa Lander, he nevertheless makes his unsophisticated heroine, Daisy, into a means of expressing his democratic vision.

Abolition, Chinese Indentured Labor, and the State: Cuba, Peru, and the United States during the Mid Nineteenth Century

2019 ◽  
Vol 76 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-40 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin N. Narváez
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Labor Relations ◽  
The United States ◽  
Spanish America ◽  
Slave Labor ◽  
Us South ◽  
Free Labor ◽  
Indentured Labor

Abolition forced planters in the post-Civil War US South to consider new sources and forms of labor. Some looked to Spanish America for answers. Cuba had long played a prominent role in the American imagination because of its proximity, geostrategic location, and potential as a slave state prior to the Civil War. Even as the United States embraced abolition and Cuba maintained slavery, the island presented Southern planters with potential labor solutions. Cuban elites had been using male Chinese indentured workers (“coolies” or colonos asiáticos) to supplement slave labor and delay the rise of free labor since 1847. Planters in coastal Peru similarly embraced Chinese indentured labor in 1849 as abolition neared. Before the Civil War, Southerners generally had noted these developments with anxiety, fearing that coolies were morally corrupt and detrimental to slavery. However, for many, these concerns receded once legal slavery ended. Planters wanted cheap exploitable labor, which coolies appeared to offer. Thus, during Reconstruction, Southern elites, especially in Louisiana, attempted to use Chinese indentured workers to minimize changes in labor relations.

Kentucky Rebel Town

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
William A. Penn
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Confederate Army ◽  
Newspaper Editor ◽  
Secession Crisis ◽  
The Town ◽  
Union Soldiers ◽  
The Way ◽  
State Representatives

This is a detailed Civil War study of a Kentucky Blue Grass town and county. This extensive research of Cynthiana and Harrison County reveals the area’s divisive sectional animosities and personalities. As the title suggests, Cynthiana was widely perceived to be a Rebel stronghold when the secession crisis erupted. The county’s state representatives, Lucius Desha and W. W. Cleary, were among Kentucky’s pro-secession supporters during neutrality, and Desha was arrested for treason when accused of recruiting for the Confederate army. Belief that the town was a den of Southern sympathizers was further supported when Union soldiers arrested and imprisoned for disloyal activities about sixty citizens, including several county officials and newspaper editor. Countering these secession activities were Home Guards and Union supporters, such as attorney W. W. Trimble. John Hunt Morgan’s raids in Kentucky resulted in the First and Second Battles of Cynthiana, which the author carefully researched and enhanced by new battlefield maps. Readers will learn of the central role of the county in the Union military defenses of the Kentucky Central Railroad corridor. The book also describes from both the soldiers’ and citizens’ viewpoints the Confederate army march through the county on the way to threaten Cincinnati in 1862. It also describes the recruiting activities of Union and Confederate supporters, and the controversial African American enrollments.

Alcott and Tocqueville: Toward a Textual Conjugation

2010 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 223-229
Author(s):  
John Dolis
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Gender Roles ◽  
Family Relationships ◽  
Louisa May Alcott ◽  
Sentimental Novel ◽  
Democracy In America ◽  
And Gender ◽  
American Society ◽  
Societal Expectations

In 1835, Alexis de Tocquevdle (1805-1859) published Volume One of his Democracy in America in France; Volume Two followed in 1840. Translated into English, the work received critical acclaim in the States, and substantial passages were printed in American schoolbooks of the period. In 1868, Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888) published Tittle Women, a sentimental novel exploring feminist dimensions of both subject and citizen identity in light of family relationships and gender roles as each of the four March daughters— Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy—strives, in her own way, to meet parental and societal expectations regarding the duties of mothers, sisters, wives, and citizens. The récit centers around Jo (Josephine) March, a bold, frank, and passionate tomboy, whose ardor for writing situates her at troublesome odds with the constraints that nineteenth-century American society placed on women. Excluded from fighting as a soldier (during the Civil War) and attending college, Jo tenaciously rebels against familial and societal pressures to find a suitable husband and settle down.

Black Republican

Men Is Cheap ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 11-43
Author(s):  
Brian P. Luskey
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Economic Crisis ◽  
Competitive Market ◽  
Free Labor ◽  
Slave Emancipation ◽  
Financial Uncertainty ◽  
Secession Crisis ◽  
Civil War Era ◽  
Union Soldiers

During the economic crisis of the 1850s and early 1860s that made northerners’ individual and household independence seem more precarious, men like Thomas Webster gave voice to their ideology and tried to protect their interest. In doing so, they embraced both caution and speculation not only to end slaveholders’ grip on the nation’s political economy but also to benefit from slave emancipation. Their cautious hedges proved risky, and led to profound soul-searching in political and cultural debates among northern devotees of free labor. By 1860, the financial uncertainty borne of the Panic of 1857 and the secession crisis forced Webster to look for patronage from Republican allies to access a new capital stream. It was through the work of middlemen like Webster—as much as through the efforts of abolitionists, Republican politicians, Union soldiers, and enslaved people—that slavery ended and free labor’s promise for workers was unmade during the Civil War Era. Webster represented the speculative—many said the fraudulent—impulses and activities in an economy founded on the fact that having capital meant having power. That capital would make these northerners more independent in a competitive market, and their speculations would shape the contours of war and emancipation.

“Long, Long Will She Be Affectionately Remembered”: Gender and the Memorialization of an American Female Missionary

2010 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-31
Author(s):  
Christine Lindner
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Women's Work ◽  
Foreign Missions ◽  
Women’S Work ◽  
Education Of Women ◽  
Women And Girls ◽  
Protestant Missions ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Way

AbstractThis article traces the transformation of gender within nineteenth century American Protestant missions, through comparing the life and post-humus memorializations of Sarah Lanman Smith, a missionary for the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions in Ottoman Syria during 1830s. Through examining the ways that Sarah defined her own identity and gender in relation to different commemorations of her life and work, this article demonstrates that 'Sarah' was increasingly read through the lens of an narrowed binary of gender. This was done through selectively editing her history in a manner that focused upon the education of women and girls, thus affirming the emerging concept of 'women's work for women'. In so doing, this article re-introduces the life of Sarah Smith, deconstructs the way that she was remembered, and presents a new perspective on the dynamic and ever-changing culture that supported and defined nineteenth century Protestant missions. L'article retrace la transformation du genre au sein des missions américaines au 19ème siècle au travers d'une analyse de la vie et des mémorialisations posthumes de Sarah Lanman Smith, une missionnaire de l'American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, qui travailla en Syrie ottomane durant les années 1830. L'article montre, au travers d'une analyse de l'identité et du genre de Sarah et de l'analyse de commémorations de sa vie et de son travail que « Sarah » devint avec le temps de plus en plus comprise au travers d'un prisme binaire du genre. Cette réduction s'opéra par l'édition sélective de son histoire qui se centra dorénavant sur l'éducation des femmes et des filles, confirmant ainsi le concept émergent du « travail de femme pour les femmes ». Ce faisant, l'article restore la vie de Sarah Smith, déconstruit la manière dont on en vint à se souvenir d'elle, et présente une perspective nouvelle sur la culture dynamique et changeante des missions protestantes du 19ème siècle.

Upon the Altar of Work

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Betsy Wood
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Child Labor ◽  
Capitalist Society ◽  
Moral Value ◽  
Consumer Market ◽  
Free Labor ◽  
Market Society ◽  
American Life ◽  
National Movement ◽  
The Way

This book examines how debates about children and their labor shaped the way Northerners and Southerners defined fundamental concepts of American life such as work, freedom, morality, and the market from the 1850s through the 1930s. Initially, Northerners and Southerners clashed over child labor in the context of the sectional crisis over slavery. For decades after the Civil War, debates about child labor bore the traces of this sectionalist conflict. Reformers, who eventually came to see child labor as the worst evil of the nation since slavery, mobilized politically in a national movement to abolish child labor with the power of the progressive state, liberating children to develop their potential in a burgeoning consumer market society. To defeat this movement, the opponents of reform also mobilized politically, asserting an opposing vision of American freedom that drew on traditional understandings of familial authority and the moral value of free labor. Tracing the ideological origins and the politics of the battle over child labor over the course of eighty years, this book tells the story of how child labor debates bequeathed an enduring legacy of sectionalist conflict within a post-emancipation, modern capitalist society.

Deconstructing Turkey’s “Open Door” Policy towards Refugees from Syria

2015 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 209-225 ◽  
Author(s):  
Burcu Togral Koca
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Border Studies ◽  
Open Door ◽  
Open Door Policy ◽  
Security Framework ◽  
Liberal Policy ◽  
The Way

Turkey has followed an “open door” policy towards refugees from Syria since the March 2011 outbreak of the devastating civil war in Syria. This “liberal” policy has been accompanied by a “humanitarian discourse” regarding the admission and accommodation of the refugees. In such a context, it is widely claimed that Turkey has not adopted a securitization strategy in its dealings with the refugees. However, this article argues that the stated “open door” approach and its limitations have gone largely unexamined. The assertion is, here, refugees fleeing Syria have been integrated into a security framework embedding exclusionary, militarized and technologized border practices. Drawing on the critical border studies, the article deconstructs these practices and the way they are violating the principle of non-refoulement in particular and human rights of refugees in general. 

The Spanish Reception of Le Sacre du Printemps (1913–1936)

2018 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 48-66
Author(s):  
Idoia Murga Castro
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Original Work ◽  
Silver Age ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Ballets Russes ◽  
Rite Of Spring ◽  
Le Sacre Du Printemps ◽  
Cultural Expansion

Centenary celebrations are being held between 2016 and 2018 to mark the first consecutive tours of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in Spain. This study analyses the Spanish reception of Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring) (1913), one of its most avant-garde pieces. Although the original work was never performed in Spain as a complete ballet, its influence was felt deeply in the work of certain Spanish choreographers, composers, painters and intellectuals during the so-called Silver Age, the period of modernisation and cultural expansion which extended from the end of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the Spanish Civil War.

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