PECULIARITIES OF CONDUCTING NATIONAL EDUCATIONAL WORK IN THE CAMP OF CAPTIVE UKRAINIANS WETZLAR, GERMANY (June 1916 - February 1917)

The article analyzes the peculiarities of conducting national educational work among the captured Ukrainian soldiers in the camp Wetzlar, Germany, during June 1916 – February 1917. Since the Ukrainization of the camp (September 1915), it has been held by members of the IED Education Department, and since May 1916 – after the establishment of the Educational Community named after M. Drahomanova – passed to the sphere of responsibility of its members from among the prisoners. Thanks to the arrival of a group of Ukrainian activists from the camp Freistadt (Austria-Hungary) it became possible to organize daily classes at the camp folk school of literacy and the sustainable operation of all educational courses. The community took care of providing the school with a teaching staff from among the prisoners themselves, at the same time it was very important to participate in the teaching work of civilian members of the IED Education Department – educators with high school or university education. In addition, members of the Educational Community prepared the convening of general camp meetings (chambers), appointed officers for cultural and educational work in individual blocks of the camp, took care of the camp library. Within the Community there was a teachers' group, whose members had the opportunity to improve their professional competencies at special seminars, which were convened from time to time in the camp. Given that the society brought together the most conscious and active part of the prisoners, the members of the Educational Community had a decisive influence on all aspects of cultural, educational and national-organizational life in the camp. In addition, the community actively participated in the intensification of the educational life of the prisoners, who were part of the workers' teams outside the camp. Largely due to their efforts, it became possible to nationally inform a significant number of captured Ukrainians, who later joined the ranks of the «Blue-Zhupan» division, taking an active part in the struggle for Ukrainian statehood.

Realist Ecstasy

Realist Ecstasy: Religion, Race, and Performance in American Literature recovers a series of ecstatic performances in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American realism. From camp meetings to Native American ghost dances to storefront church revivals, Realist Ecstasy explores how realism represents ecstatic bodies as objects of fascination, transforming spiritual experience into the very material of realist description. In an era of “separate but equal” religious pluralism and systematic racial terror, realism mobilized the gestural and performative idioms of religious ecstasy to confront ongoing histories of violence and imagine new modes of social affiliation. Realist Ecstasy demonstrates how the realist imagining of possessed bodies helped produce and naturalize racial difference, while excavating the complex, shifting, and dynamic possibilities embedded in ecstatic performance. Approaching realism as both an unruly archive of performance and a wide-ranging repertoire of media practices, Realist Ecstasy argues that the real was repetitively enacted and reenacted through bodily practice, at a moment when the body’s capacity to reliably signify was everywhere at stake. Interrogating realist practices that worked to order, disorder, and reify racial and religious difference under Jim Crow, Realist Ecstasy challenges and transforms conventional understandings of realism’s relationship to histories of secularization, while reframing secularism itself as a densely heterogeneous set of performances and representations.

Banjos and Ballads

America in 1860 is enjoying a spirited musical age, and the men who march off to war take their music with them: fiddles banjos, guitars, mouth harps, strong voices. The Confederacy no longer recognizes US. Copyright, so best-selling songs like “Old Folks at Home” by Stephen Foster are pirated by presses in Charleston and New Orleans. “Dixie’s Land,” written by Daniel Decatur Emmett based on a tune he heard played by two African American brothers (Ben and Lew Snowden) becomes the anthem of the Confederacy. Music is played to soothe the grief of loved ones at home. Sacred music enlivens camp meetings. The slave cabins on the line reverberate with their own spirituals about liberation from bondage, and the USCT are remarkable for their singing. The best-selling song of all time is “When This Cruel War Is Over,” (a.k.a. “Weeping Sad and Lonely”). Its fatalistic lyrics are so demoralizing that many commanders in both armies ban it.

Cowboys and Religion before Cowboy Church

Chapter 2 examines what is known about the religious lives of cowboys prior to the existence of organized forms of cowboy Christianity. Moving from the end of the Civil War through the mid-twentieth century, this chapter traces the twists and turns of cowboy life, both real and imagined, and explores various ways that religion has intersected with that history. It begins by outlining the work of cowboys in the second half of the nineteenth century and then turns to the noninstitutional means to evangelize to cowboys—in the form of wandering cowboy preachers and annual camp meetings—that were required to meet the cowboys’ lifestyle and work. The chapter then chronicles the rise and construction of the romantic image of the cowboy against the decline in the real-world cowboy profession, describing some of the uses, in entertainment and evangelism, that this image of the cowboy was put to.

A City Called Heaven

In this book, the author, a gospel announcer and music historian, shines a light on the humble origins of a majestic genre and its indispensable bond to the city where it found its voice: Chicago. The book follows gospel music from early hymns and camp meetings through the Great Migration that brought it to Chicago. In time, the music grew into the sanctified soundtrack of the city's mainline black Protestant churches. In addition to drawing on print media and ephemera, the book utilizes hours of interviews with artists, ministers, and historians—as well as discussions with relatives and friends of past gospel pioneers—to recover many forgotten singers, musicians, songwriters, and industry leaders. The book also examines how a lack of economic opportunity bred an entrepreneurial spirit that fueled gospel music's rise to popularity and granted social mobility to a number of its practitioners. As the book shows, gospel music expressed a yearning for freedom from earthly pains, racial prejudice, and life's hardships. In the end, it proved to be a sound too mighty and too joyous for even church walls to hold.