Darwin, Du Chaillu and Mr Gorilla: the lions of the season

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Horrall
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Civil War ◽  
West Africa ◽  
The United States ◽  
Origin Of Species ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The Future

This chapter explores how Charles Darwin’s 1859 book On the Origin of Species and the explorer Paul Du Chaillu’s almost simultaneous encounters with gorillas in West Africa focussed popular fears about evolution. Gorillas were a frightening suggestion that apes and humans were related, and that ancient hominids might still inhabit the unexplored parts of the Earth. Scientists and theologians publicly and angrily confronted each other, providing satirists with the basis for cartoons, songs, plays, stage sketches, acrobatic routines and literary fantasies about gorillas. These reflected a generalised knowledge about evolution. Cartoons, poems and jokes in humorous magazines adopted the gorilla’s voice, making the animal quasi-human and having it comment directly on the contemporary world. The almost invariably humorous tone in which gorillas were invoked in British popular culture deflected unease about the animal’s relationship to humans. Such ideas were far more threatening in the United States, where debates about the future of slavery were plunging the country into Civil War. Americans had little interest in comic depictions of simian prehistoric humans.

To 1750

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
William H. McNeill
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
American History ◽  
East Coast ◽  
The United States ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
Columbian Exposition ◽  
The Republic

IN THE LATTER part of the nineteenth century, east coast city dwellers in the United States had difficulty repressing a sense of their own persistent cultural inferiority vis-à-vis London and Paris. At the same time a great many old-stock Americans were dismayed by the stream of immigrants coming to these shores whose diversity called the future cohesion of the Republic into question almost as seriously as the issue of slavery had done in the decades before the Civil War. In such a climate of opinion, the unabashed provinciality of Frederick Jackson Turner's (1861-1932) paper "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," delivered at a meeting of the newly founded American Historical Association in connection with the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago (1892), began within less than a decade to resound like a trumpet call, though whether it signalled advance or retreat remained profoundly ambiguous....

scholarly journals American memory war of the protest movement «Black live matter»

2020 ◽  
pp. 9-17
Author(s):  
Andriy Martynov
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Comparative Method ◽  
The United States ◽  
Election Campaign ◽  
White Americans ◽  
Us History ◽  
Political Processes ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future

Americans as a nation are more focused on the present and the future than on the past. Until recently, various «historical traumas» have not been the subject of current American political discourse. The American dream focuses on the needs of everyday life, not on the permanent experience of the past. The aim of the article is to highlight the peculiarities of symbolic conflicts over the sites of the Civil War in the United States in the context of the 2020 election campaign. Research methods are based on a combination of the principles of historicism and special historical methods, in particular, descriptive, comparative, method of actualization of historical memory. The scientific novelty of the obtained results is determined by the historical and political analysis of the “wars of memory” during the presidential election campaign in the United States in 2020. Radical political confrontation exacerbates the conflicts of collective memory. This process is not prevented by the postmodern state of collective consciousness, the virtualization of political processes, attempts to form a «theater society». The coronavirus pandemic has raised the issue of choosing a strategy for the development of the globalization process as harshly as possible. Current events break the link between the past and the present, which makes the future unpredictable. Developed liberal democracy is considered the «end of history». Multiculturalism has created different interpretations of US history. Conclusions. Trump’s victory deepened the rift between different visions of the history of the Civil War. The Democratic majority unites African Americans, Latinos, women with higher education, and left liberals. Attacks on the memorials of the heroes of the former Confederacy became symbols of the war of memory. The dominant trend is an increase in the democratic and electoral numbers of non-white Americans. The «classic» United States, dominated in all walks of life by white Americans with Anglo-Saxon Protestant identities and relevant historical ideas, is becoming history. The situation is becoming a political reality when white Americans become a minority. It is unlikely that such a «new minority» will abandon its own interpretation of any stage of US history, including the most acute. This means that wars of memory will become an organic element of political processes.

The Wisdom of Indigenous Healers

2014 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-46 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dorene Day (Waubanewquay) ◽  
Dane Kaohelani Silva ◽  
Amshatar Ololodi Monroe
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
West Africa ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Healing Process ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
Well Being ◽  
The United States ◽  
Upper Midwest ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Health And Well Being

The wisdom of indigenous peoples is manifest in ways of knowing, seeing, and thinking that are passed down orally from generation to generation. This article takes the reader on a journey through three distinct ways of knowing, specifically as they relate to healing and health. The authors are a Midewanniquay, or Water Woman, of the Ojibway-Anishinabe people of the upper Midwest in the United States and Canada; a lomilomi healer from Hawaii; and an initiated Priest in the Yoruba tradition of West Africa. The philosophies of all three cultures emphasize the importance of spirituality to health and well-being (or healing process), but each has unique ways in which it nurtures relationship with the Creator, the earth, and humankind through sacred rituals and healing practices.

Visions of Victory

2019 ◽  
pp. 186-231
Author(s):  
Thomas J. Brown
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Urban Planning ◽  
Art History ◽  
Political Change ◽  
The United States ◽  
Public Parks ◽  
The Future ◽  
Post War

This chapter situates northern and southern monuments to Civil War victory within longstanding traditions in art history. The triumphal arch came to the United States after the war. Proposals for arches framed debates about the future of antebellum landscapes like town commons and parade grounds, and arches also figured prominently in the shaping of public parks, largely a key feature of post-war urban planning. Increasingly sexualized statues of Nike, or Winged Victory, imagined Union triumph as a more comprehensive consummation than the most renowned successes of antiquity. Early attempts to represent peace incorporated a foundation in social or political change, but peace gradually converged with martial victory. The shift in Union memorials from regeneration to self-congratulation paralleled the rise of Confederate victory memorials. These works partly celebrated the overthrow of Reconstruction and consolidation of white supremacism but also illustrated a deepening national reluctance to engage in critical introspection.

Keeping what real? Vinyl records and the future of independent culture

2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 643-656 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Palm
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Supply Chain ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
Media Studies ◽  
The United States ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Ideal Case ◽  
The Future ◽  
Vinyl Records

The revived popularity of vinyl records in the United States provides a unique opportunity for ‘rethinking the distinction between new and old media’. With vinyl, the new/old dichotomy informs a more specific opposition between digital and analog. The vinyl record is an iconic analog artifact whose physical creation and circulation cannot be digitized. Making records involves arduous craft labor and old-school manufacturing, and the process remains essentially the same as it was in 1960. Vinyl culture and commerce today, however, abound with digital media: the majority of vinyl sales occur online, the download code is a familiar feature of new vinyl releases, and turntables outfitted with USB ports and Bluetooth are outselling traditional models. This digital disconnect between the contemporary traffic in records and their fabrication makes the vinyl revival an ideal case example for interrogating the limitations of new and old as conceptual horizons for media and for proffering alternative historical formulations and critical frameworks. Toward that end, my analysis of the revitalized vinyl economy in the United States suggests that the familiar (and always porous) distinction between corporate and independent continues to offer media studies a more salient spectrum, conceptually and empirically, than new-old or analog-digital. Drawing on ethnographic research along vinyl’s current supply chain in the United States, I argue that scholars and supporters of independent culture should strive to decouple the digital and the analog from the corporate, rather than from one another. The pressing question about the future of vinyl is not, will there continue to be a place for analog formats alongside the digital; but rather, to what extent can physical media circulate independently of the same corporate interests that have come to dominate popular culture in its digital forms?

scholarly journals DINAMIKA PASCA ARAB SPRING

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (02) ◽  
pp. 283-302
Author(s):  
Muhammad Syaroni Rofii
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil War ◽  
The United States ◽  
National Interests ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
Syrian Crisis ◽  
Proxy War ◽  
Universal Values ◽  
The Stability ◽  
External Actors

The civil war that occurred in Syria shows a humanitarian tragedy in the twenty-first century.This conflict originally was part of a dynamic in democratic transition but turned into a prolonged civil war. It can be concluded that the cause of this tragedy is none other than because of a proxy war involving big countries. In this research, it was found that the failure of peace in Syria is inseparable from the influence of the big powers who use their influence to block any vetos related to Syrian crisis in United Nations. Each external actors attempt to protect their national interests and agendas at the same time reduce universal values. Conflict in Syria involving Rusia on one hand and the United States on other hand. Both coutries have different plan toward regime change in Syria which lead to other dimension of proxy war in contemporary world. This article attempted to explore the pattern of proxy war in Syria and its influence toward the stability of the region.

scholarly journals “So many foolish virgins”: nuns and anti-Catholicism from Maria Monk to the Know-Nothings

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Cassandra L. Yacovazzi
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Civil War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Party Politics ◽  
Second Best ◽  
American Popular Culture ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Maria Monk

This dissertation examines opposition to nuns and convent life in America as it was expressed through vigilante violence, propaganda literature, and party politics. While nuns may seem like an unlikely target of hostility, a vast cohort of Americans singled them out as a serious threat to the republic. Between 1830 and 1860 anti-convent propaganda, including Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu by “escaped nun” Maria Monk, flooded the literary market. Monk’s work warned of a Catholic conspiracy in the United States through the cloister, depicted alleged horrors of convent life, and cast nuns variously as masculine tyrants, foolish slaves, and whores. Investigators quickly unveiled Maria Monk as an impostor, but her book became the second best-seller after Uncle Tom’s Cabin before the Civil War, and it has never gone out of print. In order to “protect” American women from the nun’s life, mobs stormed convents from Massachusetts to Maryland. By the 1850s, suspicion of nuns became formally politicized by Know-Nothing legislators who established “Nunnery Committees” for convent investigations. Although the Civil War quieted the outcry against nuns for a time, the campaign against convents had far-reaching implications. Members of the second Ku Klux Klan relied on anti-convent propaganda to buttress their positions, and common stereotypes of nunsâ€"first evident in nineteenth-century convent narrativesâ€"have also persisted in popular culture. This dissertation argues that the campaign against nuns and convent life was a much greater part of nineteenth-century American popular culture and politics than previous historians have recognized.

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