Download or read book The Plain and Noble Garb of Truth written by Eileen K. Cheng and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American historians of the early national period, argues Eileen Ka-May Cheng, grappled with objectivity, professionalism, and other “modern” issues to a greater degree than their successors in later generations acknowledge. Her extensive readings of antebellum historians show that by the 1820s, a small but influential group of practitioners had begun to develop many of the doctrines and concerns that undergird contemporary historical practice. The Plain and Noble Garb of Truth challenges the entrenched notion that America’s first generations of historians were romantics or propagandists for a struggling young nation. Cheng engages with the works of well-known early national historians like George Bancroft, William Prescott, and David Ramsay; such lesser-known figures as Jared Sparks and Lorenzo Sabine; and leading political and intellectual elites of the day, including Francis Bowen and Charles Francis Adams. She shows that their work, which focused on the American Revolution, was often nuanced and surprisingly sympathetic in its treatment of American Indians and loyalists. She also demonstrates how the rise of the novel contributed to the emergence of history as an autonomous discipline, arguing that paradoxically “early national historians at once described truth in opposition to the novel and were influenced by the novel in their understanding of truth.” Modern historians should recognize that the discipline of history is itself a product of history, says Cheng. By taking seriously a group of too-often-dismissed historians, she challenges contemporary historians to examine some ahistorical aspects of the way they understand their own discipline.
Download or read book Shifting Grounds written by Paul Quigley and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The American Civil War brought with it a crisis of nationalism. This text reinterprets southern conceptions of allegiance, identity, and citizenship within the contexts of antebellum American national identity and the transatlantic 'Age of Nationalism.'
Download or read book American Exceptionalism written by Ian Tyrrell and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2024-06-19 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A powerful dissection of a core American myth. The idea that the United States is unlike every other country in world history is a surprisingly resilient one. Throughout his distinguished career, Ian Tyrrell has been one of the most influential historians of the idea of American exceptionalism, but he has never written a book focused solely on it until now. The notion that American identity might be exceptional emerged, Tyrrell shows, from the belief that the nascent early republic was not simply a postcolonial state but a genuinely new experiment in an imperialist world dominated by Britain. Prior to the Civil War, American exceptionalism fostered declarations of cultural, economic, and spatial independence. As the country grew in population and size, becoming a major player in the global order, its exceptionalist beliefs came more and more into focus—and into question. Over time, a political divide emerged: those who believed that America’s exceptionalism was the basis of its virtue and those who saw America as either a long way from perfect or actually fully unexceptional, and thus subject to universal demands for justice. Tyrrell masterfully articulates the many forces that made American exceptionalism such a divisive and definitional concept. Today, he notes, the demands that people acknowledge America’s exceptionalism have grown ever more strident, even as the material and moral evidence for that exceptionalism—to the extent that there ever was any—has withered away.
Download or read book Language Or Dialect written by Raf Van Rooy and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the intriguing and complex history of the language/dialect distinction, a puzzle which has long fascinated linguists and laypeople alike. It takes the reader from the prehistory of the distinction in antiquity, through the crucial early modern period, up to the approaches to language and dialect adopted in modern linguistics.
Download or read book Reading History in Britain and America c 1750 c 1840 written by Mark Towsey and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-05-02 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents a dramatic account of how readers across the English-speaking world used history to understand the Age of Enlightenment and Revolutions.
Download or read book New Perspectives on the Union War written by Gary W. Gallagher and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2019-06-04 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Edited by Gary Gallagher and Elizabeth Varon, two of the most prominent nineteenth-century American historians in the nation, New Perspectives on the Union War provides a more nuanced understanding of what “Union” meant in the Civil War North by exploring how various groups of northerners conceived of the term. The essays in this volume demonstrate that while there was a broad consensus that the war was fought, or should be fought, for the cause of Union, there was bitter disagreement over how to define that cause—debate not only between political camps but also within them. The chapters touch on economics, politics, culture, military affairs, ethnicity, and questions relating to just war. Contributors: Michael T. Caires, Frank Cirillo, D.H. Dilbeck, Jack Furniss, Jesse George-Nichol, William B. Kurtz, Peter C. Luebke, and Tamika Nunley
Download or read book Critique and Postcritique written by Elizabeth S. Anker and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2017-03-18 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now that literary critique's intellectual and political pay-off is no longer quite so self-evident, critics are vigorously debating the functions and futures of critique. The contributors to Critique and Postcritique join this conversation, evaluating critique's structural, methodological, and political potentials and limitations. Following the interventions made by Bruno Latour, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Sharon Marcus and Stephen Best, and others, the contributors assess the merits of the postcritical turn while exploring a range of alternate methods and critical orientations. Among other topics, the contributors challenge the distinction between surface and deep reading; outline how critique-based theory has shaped the development of the novel; examine Donna Haraway's feminist epistemology and objectivity; advocate for a "hopeful" critical disposition; highlight the difference between reading as method and critique as genre; and question critique's efficacy at attending to the affective dimensions of experience. In these and other essays this volume outlines the state of contemporary literary criticism while pointing to new ways of conducting scholarship that are better suited to the intellectual and political challenges of the present. Contributors: Elizabeth S. Anker, Christopher Castiglia, Russ Castronovo, Simon During, Rita Felski, Jennifer L. Fleissner, Eric Hayot, Heather Love, John Michael, Toril Moi, Ellen Rooney, C. Namwali Serpell
Download or read book American History in Transition written by Yoshinari Yamaguchi and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-03-02 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In American History in Transition, Yoshinari Yamaguchi provides fresh insights into early efforts in American history writing, ranging from Jeremy Belknap’s Massachusetts Historical Society to Emma Willard’s geographic history and Francis Parkman’s history of deep time to Henry Adams’s thermodynamic history. Although not a well-organized set of professional researchers, these historians shared the same concern: the problems of temporalization and secularization in history writing. As the time-honored framework of sacred history was gradually outdated, American historians at that time turned to individual facts as possible evidence for a new generalization, and tried different “scientific” theories to give coherency to their writings. History writing was in its transitional phase, shifting from religion to science, deduction to induction, and static to dynamic worldview.
Download or read book Memories of Lincoln and the Splintering of American Political Thought written by Shawn J. Parry-Giles and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2017-04-27 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the aftermath of the Civil War, Republicans and Democrats who advocated conflicting visions of American citizenship could agree on one thing: the rhetorical power of Abraham Lincoln’s life. This volume examines the debates over his legacy and their impact on America’s future. In the thirty-five years following Lincoln’s assassination, acquaintances of Lincoln published their memories of him in newspapers, biographies, and edited collections in order to gain fame, promote partisan aims, champion his hardscrabble past and exalted rise, and define his legacy. Shawn Parry-Giles and David Kaufer explore how style, class, and character affected these reminiscences. They also analyze the ways people used these writings to reinforce their beliefs about citizenship and presidential leadership in the United States, with specific attention to the fissure between republicanism and democracy that still exists today. Their study employs rhetorical and corpus research methods to assess more than five hundred reminiscences. A novel look at how memories of Lincoln became an important form of political rhetoric, this book sheds light on how divergent schools of U.S. political thought came to recruit Lincoln as their standard-bearer.
Download or read book City on a Hill written by Abram C. Van Engen and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2020-02-25 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fresh, original history of America’s national narratives, told through the loss, recovery, and rise of one influential Puritan sermon from 1630 to the present day In this illuminating book, Abram Van Engen shows how the phrase “City on a Hill,” from a 1630 sermon by Massachusetts Bay governor John Winthrop, shaped the story of American exceptionalism in the twentieth century. By tracing the history of Winthrop’s speech, its changing status throughout time, and its use in modern politics, Van Engen asks us to reevaluate our national narratives. He tells the story of curators, librarians, collectors, archivists, antiquarians, and often anonymous figures who emphasized the role of the Pilgrims and Puritans in American history, paving the way for the saving and sanctifying of a single sermon. This sermon’s rags-to-riches rise reveals the way national stories take shape and shows us how those tales continue to influence competing visions of the country—the many different meanings of America that emerge from its literary past.
Download or read book Apostle of Union written by Matthew Mason and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2016-09-02 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Known today as "the other speaker at Gettysburg," Edward Everett had a distinguished and illustrative career at every level of American politics from the 1820s through the Civil War. In this new biography, Matthew Mason argues that Everett's extraordinarily well-documented career reveals a complex man whose shifting political opinions, especially on the topic of slavery, illuminate the nuances of Northern Unionism. In the case of Everett--who once pledged to march south to aid slaveholders in putting down slave insurrections--Mason explores just how complex the question of slavery was for most Northerners, who considered slavery within a larger context of competing priorities that alternately furthered or hindered antislavery actions. By charting Everett's changing stance toward slavery over time, Mason sheds new light on antebellum conservative politics, the complexities of slavery and its related issues for reform-minded Americans, and the ways in which secession turned into civil war. As Mason demonstrates, Everett's political and cultural efforts to preserve the Union, and the response to his work from citizens and politicians, help us see the coming of the Civil War as a three-sided, not just two-sided, contest.
Download or read book Time and Literature written by Thomas M. Allen and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-03-29 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Time and Literature features twenty essays on topics from aesthetics and narratology to globalisation and queer temporalities, and showcases how time studies, often referred to as 'the temporal turn', cut across and illuminate research in every field of literature, as well as interdisciplinary approaches drawing upon history, philosophy, anthropology, and the natural sciences. Part one, Origins, addresses fundamental issues that can be traced back to the beginnings of literary criticism. Part two, Developments, shows how thinking about Time has been crucial to various interpretive revolutions that have impacted literary theory. Part three, Application, illustrates the centrality of temporal theorising to literary criticism in a variety of contemporary approaches, from ecocriticism and new materialisms to media and archive studies. The first anthology to provide a synthesis of recent scholarship on the temporality of literary language from across different national and historical periods, Time and Literature will appeal to academic researchers and interested laypersons alike.
Download or read book The Anglo American Paper War written by J. Eaton and published by Springer. This book was released on 2012-11-28 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Paper War and the Development of Anglo-American Nationalisms, 1800-1825 offers fresh insight into the evolution of British and American nationalisms, the maturation of apologetics for slavery, and the early development of anti-Americanism, from approximately 1800 to 1830.
Download or read book Sociability and Cosmopolitanism written by David Burrow and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-10-06 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays expands the focus of Enlightenment studies to include countries outside the core nations of France, Germany and Britain. Notions of sociability and cosmopolitanism are explored as ways in which people sought to improve society.
Download or read book Thomas Paine written by J. C. D. Clark and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-03-16 with total page 483 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thomas Paine (1737-1809) was England's greatest revolutionary: no other reformer was as actively involved in events of the scale of the American and French Revolutions, and none wrote such best-selling texts with the impact of Common Sense and Rights of Man. No one else combined the roles of activist and theorist, or did so in the 'age of revolutions', fundamental as it was to the emergence of the 'modern world'. But his fame meant that he was taken up and reinterpreted for current use by successive later commentators and politicians, so that the 'historic Paine' was too often obscured by the 'usable Paine'. J. C. D. Clark explains Paine against a revised background of early- and mid-eighteenth-century England. He argues that Paine knew and learned less about events in America and France than was once thought. He de-attributes a number of publications, and passages, hitherto assumed to have been Paine's own, and detaches him from a number of causes (including anti-slavery, women's emancipation, and class action) with which he was once associated. Paine's formerly obvious association with the early origin and long-term triumph of natural rights, republicanism, and democracy needs to be rethought. As a result, Professor Clark offers a picture of radical and reforming movements as more indebted to the initiatives of large numbers of men and women in fast-evolving situations than to the writings of a few individuals who framed lasting, and eventually triumphant, political discourses.
Download or read book The Disappearing Christ written by Phil Maciak and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2019-08-27 with total page 431 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the turn of the twentieth century, American popular culture was booming with opportunities to see Jesus Christ. From the modernized eyewitness gospel of Ben-Hur to the widely circulated passion play films of Edison, Lumière, and Pathé; from D. W. Griffith’s conjuration of a spectral white savior in Birth of a Nation to W. E. B. Du Bois’s “Black Christ” story cycle, Jesus was constantly and inventively visualized across media, and especially in the new medium of film. Why, in an era traditionally defined by the triumph of secular ideologies and institutions, were so many artists rushing to film Christ’s miracles and use his story and image to contextualize their experiences of modernity? In The Disappearing Christ, Phillip Maciak examines filmic depictions of Jesus to argue that cinema developed as a model technology of secularism, training viewers for belief in a secular age. Negotiating between the magic trick and the documentary image, the conflicting impulses of faith and skepticism, the emerging aesthetic of film in this period visualized the fraught process of secularization. Cinematic depictions of an appearing and disappearing Christ became a powerful vehicle for Americans to navigate a rapidly modernizing society. Studying these films alongside a multimedia, interdisciplinary archive of novels, photographs, illustrations, and works of theology, travel writing, and historiography, The Disappearing Christ offers a new narrative of American cultural history at the intersection of cinema studies and religious studies.
Download or read book Edinburgh Companion to Nineteenth Century American Letters and Letter Writing written by Celeste-Marie Bernier and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2016-02-15 with total page 752 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides a wide-ranging entry point and intervention into scholarship on nineteenth-century American letter-writingThis comprehensive study by leading scholars in an important new field-the history of letters and letter writing-is essential reading for anyone interested in nineteenth-century American politics, history or literature. Because of its mass literacy, population mobility, and extensive postal system, nineteenth-century America is a crucial site for the exploration of letters and their meanings, whether they be written by presidents and statesmen, scientists and philosophers, novelists and poets, feminists and reformers, immigrants, Native Americans, or African Americans. This book breaks new ground by mapping the voluminous correspondence of these figures and other important American writers and thinkers. Rather than treating the letter as a spontaneous private document, the contributors understand it as a self-conscious artefact, circulating between friends and strangers and across multiple genres in ways that both make and break social ties.Key FeaturesDraws together different emphases on the intellectual, literary and social uses of letter writing Provides students and researchers with a means to situate letters in their wider theoretical and historical contextsMethodologically expansive, intellectually interrogative chapters based on original research by leading academicsOffers new insights into the lives and careers of Louisa May Alcott, Charles Brockden Brown, Emily Dickinson, Frederick Douglass, Margaret Fuller, Henry James, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Edgar Allan Poe, among many others
