Download or read book Confederate Exceptionalism written by Nicole Maurantonio and published by University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 2022-09-30 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Along with Confederate flags, the men and women who recently gathered before the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts carried signs proclaiming “Heritage Not Hate.” Theirs, they said, was an “open and visible protest against those who attacked us, ours flags, our ancestors, or our Heritage.” How, Nicole Maurantonio wondered, did “not hate” square with a “heritage” grounded in slavery? How do so-called neo-Confederates distance themselves from the actions and beliefs of white supremacists while clinging to the very symbols and narratives that tether the Confederacy to the history of racism and oppression in America? The answer, Maurantonio discovers, is bound up in the myth of Confederate exceptionalism—a myth whose components, proponents, and meaning this timely and provocative book explores. The narrative of Confederate exceptionalism, in this analysis, updates two uniquely American mythologies—the Lost Cause and American exceptionalism—blending their elements with discourses of racial neoliberalism to create a seeming separation between the Confederacy and racist systems. Incorporating several methods and drawing from a range of sources—including ethnographic observations, interviews, and archival documents—Maurantonio examines the various people, objects, and rituals that contribute to this cultural balancing act. Her investigation takes in “official” modes of remembering the Confederacy, such as the monuments and building names that drive the discussion today, but it also pays attention to the more mundane and often subtle ways in which the Confederacy is recalled. Linking the different modes of commemoration, her work bridges the distance that believers in Confederate exceptionalism maintain; while situated in history from the Civil War through the civil rights era, the book brings much-needed clarity to the constitution, persistence, and significance of this divisive myth in the context of our time.

Download or read book A Contest of Civilizations written by Andrew F. Lang and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2020-11-24 with total page 569 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most mid-nineteenth-century Americans regarded the United States as an exceptional democratic republic that stood apart from a world seemingly riddled with revolutionary turmoil and aristocratic consolidation. Viewing themselves as distinct from and even superior to other societies, Americans considered their nation an unprecedented experiment in political moderation and constitutional democracy. But as abolitionism in England, economic unrest in Europe, and upheaval in the Caribbean and Latin America began to influence domestic affairs, the foundational ideas of national identity also faced new questions. And with the outbreak of civil war, as two rival governments each claimed the mantle of civilized democracy, the United States' claim to unique standing in the community of nations dissolved into crisis. Could the Union chart a distinct course in human affairs when slaveholders, abolitionists, free people of color, and enslaved African Americans all possessed irreconcilable definitions of nationhood? In this sweeping history of political ideas, Andrew F. Lang reappraises the Civil War era as a crisis of American exceptionalism. Through this lens, Lang shows how the intellectual, political, and social ramifications of the war and its meaning rippled through the decades that followed, not only for the nation's own people but also in the ways the nation sought to redefine its place on the world stage.

Download or read book Colossal Ambitions written by Adrian Brettle and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2020-07-16 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leading politicians, diplomats, clerics, planters, farmers, manufacturers, and merchants preached a transformative, world-historical role for the Confederacy, persuading many of their compatriots to fight not merely to retain what they had but to gain their future empire. Impervious to reality, their vision of future world leadership—territorial, economic, political, and cultural—provided a vitally important, underappreciated motivation to form an independent Confederate republic. In Colossal Ambitions, Adrian Brettle explores how leading Confederate thinkers envisioned their postwar nation—its relationship with the United States, its place in the Americas, and its role in the global order. Brettle draws on rich caches of published and unpublished letters and diaries, Confederate national and state government documents, newspapers published in North America and England, conference proceedings, pamphlets, contemporary and scholarly articles, and more to engage the perspectives of not only modern historians but some of the most salient theorists of the Western World in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. An impressive and complex undertaking, Colossal Ambitions concludes that while some Confederate commentators saw wartime industrialization as pointing toward a different economic future, most Confederates saw their society as revolving once more around coercive labor, staple crop production, and exports in the war’s wake.

Download or read book The Slaveholding Crisis written by Carl Lawrence Paulus and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2017-01-03 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In December 1860, South Carolinians voted to abandon the Union, sparking the deadliest war in American history. Led by a proslavery movement that viewed Abraham Lincoln’s place at the helm of the federal government as a real and present danger to the security of the South, southerners—both slaveholders and nonslaveholders—willingly risked civil war by seceding from the United States. Radical proslavery activists contended that without defending slavery’s westward expansion American planters would, like their former counterparts in the West Indies, become greatly outnumbered by those they enslaved. The result would transform the South into a mere colony within the federal government and make white southerners reliant on antislavery outsiders for protection of their personal safety and wealth. Faith in American exceptionalism played an important role in the reasoning of the antebellum American public, shaping how those in both the free and slave states viewed the world. Questions about who might share the bounty of the exceptional nature of the country became the battleground over which Americans fought, first with words, then with guns. Carl Lawrence Paulus’s The Slaveholding Crisis examines how, due to the fear of insurrection by the enslaved, southerners created their own version of American exceptionalism—one that placed the perpetuation of slavery at its forefront. Feeling a loss of power in the years before the Civil War, the planter elite no longer saw the Union, as a whole, fulfilling that vision of exceptionalism. As a result, Paulus contends, slaveholders and nonslaveholding southerners believed that the white South could anticipate racial conflict and brutal warfare. This narrative postulated that limiting slavery’s expansion within the Union was a riskier proposition than fighting a war of secession. In the end, Paulus argues, by insisting that the new party in control of the federal government promoted this very insurrection, the planter elite gained enough popular support to create the Confederate States of America. In doing so, they established a thoroughly proslavery, modern state with the military capability to quell massive resistance by the enslaved, expand its territorial borders, and war against the forces of the Atlantic antislavery movement.

Download or read book The Cause of All Nations written by Don H Doyle and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2014-12-30 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address in 1863, he had broader aims than simply rallying a war-weary nation. Lincoln realized that the Civil War had taken on a wider significance -- that all of Europe and Latin America was watching to see whether the United States, a beleaguered model of democracy, would indeed "perish from the earth." In The Cause of All Nations, distinguished historian Don H. Doyle explains that the Civil War was viewed abroad as part of a much larger struggle for democracy that spanned the Atlantic Ocean, and had begun with the American and French Revolutions. While battles raged at Bull Run, Antietam, and Gettysburg, a parallel contest took place abroad, both in the marbled courts of power and in the public square. Foreign observers held widely divergent views on the war -- from radicals such as Karl Marx and Giuseppe Garibaldi who called on the North to fight for liberty and equality, to aristocratic monarchists, who hoped that the collapse of the Union would strike a death blow against democratic movements on both sides of the Atlantic. Nowhere were these monarchist dreams more ominous than in Mexico, where Napoleon III sought to implement his Grand Design for a Latin Catholic empire that would thwart the spread of Anglo-Saxon democracy and use the Confederacy as a buffer state. Hoping to capitalize on public sympathies abroad, both the Union and the Confederacy sent diplomats and special agents overseas: the South to seek recognition and support, and the North to keep European powers from interfering. Confederate agents appealed to those conservative elements who wanted the South to serve as a bulwark against radical egalitarianism. Lincoln and his Union agents overseas learned to appeal to many foreigners by embracing emancipation and casting the Union as the embattled defender of universal republican ideals, the "last best hope of earth." A bold account of the international dimensions of America's defining conflict, The Cause of All Nations frames the Civil War as a pivotal moment in a global struggle that would decide the survival of democracy.

Download or read book More Confederate faces written by William A. Albaugh and published by . This book was released on 1972 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Confederate and Neo Confederate Reader written by James W. Loewen and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2011-01-05 with total page 439 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most Americans hold basic misconceptions about the Confederacy, the Civil War, and the actions of subsequent neo-Confederates. For example, two thirds of Americans—including most history teachers—think the Confederate States seceded for “states' rights.” This error persists because most have never read the key documents about the Confederacy. These documents have always been there. When South Carolina seceded, it published “Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union.” The document actually opposes states' rights. Its authors argue that Northern states were ignoring the rights of slave owners as identified by Congress and in the Constitution. Similarly, Mississippi's “Declaration of the Immediate Causes. . .” says, “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery—the greatest material interest of the world.” Later documents in this collection show how neo-Confederates obfuscated this truth, starting around 1890. The evidence also points to the centrality of race in neo-Confederate thought even today and to the continuing importance of neo-Confederate ideas in American political life. The 150th anniversary of secession and civil war provides a moment for all Americans to read these documents, properly set in context by award-winning sociologist and historian James W. Loewen and coeditor, Edward H. Sebesta, to put in perspective the mythology of the Old South.

Download or read book Confederate Minds written by Michael T. Bernath and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2010-07-10 with total page 429 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the Civil War, some Confederates sought to prove the distinctiveness of the southern people and to legitimate their desire for a separate national existence through the creation of a uniquely southern literature and culture. Michael Bernath follows the activities of a group of southern writers, thinkers, editors, publishers, educators, and ministers--whom he labels Confederate cultural nationalists--in order to trace the rise and fall of a cultural movement dedicated to liberating the South from its longtime dependence on Northern books, periodicals, and teachers. By analyzing the motives driving the struggle for Confederate intellectual independence, by charting its wartime accomplishments, and by assessing its failures, Bernath makes provocative arguments about the nature of Confederate nationalism, life within the Confederacy, and the perception of southern cultural distinctiveness.

Download or read book Exceptional written by Dick Cheney and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2015-09-01 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new book by former Vice President and #1 New York Times bestselling author Dick Cheney and Liz Cheney.

Download or read book The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism written by Matthew D. Lassiter and published by Oxford University Press on Demand. This book was released on 2010 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "More than one-third of the population of the United States now lives in the South, a region where politics, race relations, and the economy have changed dramatically since World War II. Yet scholars and journalists continue to disagree over whether the modern South is dominating, deviating from, or converging with the rest of the nation. This collection asks how the stories of American history chance if the South is no longer seen as a region apart--as the conservative exception to a liberal nation."--Back cover.

Download or read book Confederate Citadel written by Mary A. DeCredico and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2020-05-19 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Richmond, Virginia: pride of the founding fathers, doomed capital of the Confederate States of America. Unlike other Southern cities, Richmond boasted a vibrant, urban industrial complex capable of producing crucial ammunition and military supplies. Despite its northern position, Richmond became the Confederacy's beating heart—its capital, second-largest city, and impenetrable citadel. As long as the city endured, the Confederacy remained a well-supplied and formidable force. But when Ulysses S. Grant broke its defenses in 1865, the Confederates fled, burned Richmond to the ground, and surrendered within the week. Confederate Citadel: Richmond and Its People at War offers a detailed portrait of life's daily hardships in the rebel capital during the Civil War. Here, barricaded against a siege, staunch Unionists became a dangerous fifth column, refugees flooded the streets, and women organized a bread riot in the city. Drawing on personal correspondence, private diaries, and newspapers, author Mary A. DeCredico spotlights the human elements of Richmond's economic rise and fall, uncovering its significance as the South's industrial powerhouse throughout the Civil War.

Download or read book American Exceptionalism Vol 1 written by Timothy Roberts and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 429 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American exceptionalism the idea that America is fundamentally distinct from other nations is a philosophy that has dominated economics, politics, religion and culture for two centuries. This collection of primary source material seeks to understand how this belief began, how it developed and why it remains popular.

Download or read book The Elements of Confederate Defeat written by and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 1988 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Why the South Lost the Civil War, four historians considered the dominant explanations of southern defeat. At end, the authors found that states' rights disputes, the Union blockade, and inadequate southern forces did not fully account for the surrender. Rather, they concluded, the South lacked the will to win. Its strength sapped by a faltering Confederate nationalism and weakened by a peculiar brand of evangelical Protestantism, the South withdrew from a war not yet lost on the field of battle. Roughly one-half the size of its parent study, The Elements of Confederate Defeat retains all the essential arguments of the earlier edition, forming for the student a book that at once follows the events of the war and presents the major interpretations of its outcome in the South.

Download or read book The Green and the Gray written by David T. Gleeson and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2013-09-02 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why did many Irish Americans, who did not have a direct connection to slavery, choose to fight for the Confederacy? This perplexing question is at the heart of David T. Gleeson's sweeping analysis of the Irish in the Confederate States of America. Taking a broad view of the subject, Gleeson considers the role of Irish southerners in the debates over secession and the formation of the Confederacy, their experiences as soldiers, the effects of Confederate defeat for them and their emerging ethnic identity, and their role in the rise of Lost Cause ideology. Focusing on the experience of Irish southerners in the years leading up to and following the Civil War, as well as on the Irish in the Confederate army and on the southern home front, Gleeson argues that the conflict and its aftermath were crucial to the integration of Irish Americans into the South. Throughout the book, Gleeson draws comparisons to the Irish on the Union side and to southern natives, expanding his analysis to engage the growing literature on Irish and American identity in the nineteenth-century United States.

Download or read book Neo Confederacy written by Euan Hague and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2009-09-15 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A century and a half after the conclusion of the Civil War, the legacy of the Confederate States of America continues to influence national politics in profound ways. Drawing on magazines such as Southern Partisan and publications from the secessionist organization League of the South, as well as DixieNet and additional newsletters and websites, Neo-Confederacy probes the veneer of this movement to reveal goals far more extensive than a mere celebration of ancestry. Incorporating groundbreaking essays on the Neo-Confederacy movement, this eye-opening work encompasses such topics as literature and music; the ethnic and cultural claims of white, Anglo-Celtic southerners; gender and sexuality; the origins and development of the movement and its tenets; and ultimately its nationalization into a far-reaching factor in reactionary conservative politics. The first book-length study of this powerful sociological phenomenon, Neo-Confederacy raises crucial questions about the mainstreaming of an ideology that, founded on notions of white supremacy, has made curiously strong inroads throughout the realms of sexist, homophobic, anti-immigrant, and often "orthodox" Christian populations that would otherwise have no affiliation with the regionality or heritage traditionally associated with Confederate history.

Download or read book Civil War Monuments and the Militarization of America written by Thomas J. Brown and published by Civil War America. This book was released on 2019 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This ... assessment of Civil War monuments unveiled in the United States between the 1860s and 1930s argues that they were pivotal to a national embrace of military values. Americans' wariness of standing armies limited construction of war memorials in the early republic, ... and continued to influence commemoration after the Civil War. ... distrust of standing armies gave way to broader enthusiasm for soldiers in the Gilded Age. Some important projects challenged the trend, but many Civil War monuments proposed new norms of discipline and vigor that lifted veterans to a favored political status and modeled racial and class hierarchies. A half century of Civil War commemoration reshaped remembrance of the American Revolution and guided American responses to World War I"--

Download or read book America s Unending Civil War written by William Nester and published by Frontline Books. This book was released on 2025-06-30 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Civil War fascinates Americans like no other war in their history. Many Americans are still fighting some of the war’s issues in an Odyssey that stretches back to the first settlement and will persist until the end of time. The war itself was an Iliad of brilliant generals like Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan for the Union, or Lee, Jackson, and Forrest for the Confederacy; epic battles like Gettysburg and Chickamauga; epic sieges like Vicksburg and Petersburg; and epic naval combats such as Monitor versus Merrimack, or Kearsarge versus Alabama. It was America’s most horrific war, with more dead than all others combined. Around 625,000 soldiers and 125,000 civilians died from various causes, bringing the total to 750,000 people. Of 31 million Americans, 2.1 million northerners and 880,000 southerners donned uniforms. Why did eleven states eventually ban together to rebel against the United States? President Jefferson Davis began an answer when he said: ‘If the Confederacy falls, there should be written on its tombstone, Died of a Theory.’ That theory justified the enslavement of blacks by whites as a natural right and duty of a superior race over an inferior race; a theory, it was believed, that morally and economically elevated both races. Although slavery was the Civil War’s core cause, there were related chronic conflicts over the nature of government, citizenship, liberty, property, equality, wealth, race, identity, justice, crime, voting, power, and history – some of which issues have never entirely gone away. America’s Unending Civil War is unique among thousands of books on the subject. None before has explored the Civil War’s related and enduring conflicts of ideas and principles through four centuries of a nation’s history.