Massachusetts and the Civil War: The Commonwealth and National Disunion
Author: edited by Matthew Mason, Katheryn P. Viens, and Conrad Edick Wright All states are not created equal, at least not when it comes to their influence on American history. That assumption underlies Massachusetts and the Civil War. The volumes ten essays coalesce around the national significance of Massachusetts through the Civil War era, the ways in which the commonwealth reflected and even modeled the Unions precarious but real wartime unification, and the Bay States postwar return to the schisms that predated the war. Rather than attempting to summarize every aspect of the states contribution to the wartime Union, the collection focuses on what was distinctive about its influence during the great crisis of national unity. In the first section, The Opposition to Slavery, essays by John Stauffer, Dean Grodzins, Peter Wirzbicki, and Richard S. Newman demonstrate the central role Massachusetts played in the rise of both the antislavery movement and abolitionism. They show how slaverys foes united, planned, and understood their cause, and how they envisioned a postwar nation free of servitude. In the second section, The War Years, Matthew Mason, Carol Bundy, and Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray investigate how the exigencies of war unified the commonwealth across party lines and over the distance between home and the front. In the final section, Reconciliation, Sarah J. Purcell, Amy Morsman, and Kanisorn Wongsrichanalai probe postwar efforts to recover from the wars profound disruptions.
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edited by Matthew Mason, Katheryn P. Viens, and Conrad Edick Wright
Author: Gregor Malantschuk
Kierkegaard's pseudonymous authorship has baffled readers, his apparent capriciousness making it difficult to determine his position at a given point and to understand his work as an organic whole. Gregor Malantschuk's study, based on careful reading of Kierkegaard's journals, papers, and texts, cuts through the authorship problem to clarify the philosopher's key ideas, see the comprehensive plan of his work, and make intelligible the dialectical coherence of his thought. Discussing Kierkegaard's dialectical method and his use of it from Either/Or to the final Two Discourses, Professor Malantschuk shows how coherently Kierkegaard set the individual works in place, so that even the conflict between the principal pseudonyms, Climacus and Anti-Climacus, serves to elucidate his major philosophical ideas. Contents: 1. Anthropological Contemplation. II. Kierkegaard's Dialectical Method. III. The Dialectic Employed in the Authorship. Index.Originally published in 1971.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Author: Raphael Sealey
This book traces continuity in the development of the Athenian constitution, whereas previous studies have usually looked for catastrophic changes. Sealey selects three features of Athenian law which are important for the structure of society and the location of authority: (1) the legal status, and to a lesser extent the socioeconomic condition, of the different kinds of inhabitants of Attica; (2) the distinction, recognized in the fourth century, between laws and decrees, analyzing what the Athians understood by law; and (3) the development of the Athenian courts.At an early stage the Athenians conceived the ideal of the rule of law and adhered to it continuously. They did so by means of a static concept of law and maintenance of an independent judiciary.The book is designed to be of importance not only for specialists in classical studies but for general historians, political scientists, and those concerned with the history of law. The book is within the reach of an advanced undergraduate and graduate audience.
Author: Barbara H. Stein and Stanley J. Stein
With a compelling narrative that weaves together story and thesis and brings to life immense archival research and empirical data, Crisis in an Atlantic Empire is a finely grained historical tour of the period covering 1808 to 1810, which is often called the age of revolutions. The study examines an accumulation of countervailing elements in a spasm of imperial crisis, as Spain and its major colony New Spain struggled to preserve traditional structures of exchangeSpain's transatlantic trade systemwith Caribbean ports at Veracruz and Havana in wartime after 1804. Rooted in the struggle between businessmen seeking to expand their economic reach and the ruling class seeking to maintain its hegemonic control, the crisis sheds light on the contest between free trade and monopoly trade and the politics of preservation among an enduring and influential interest group: merchants. Reflecting the authors masterful use of archival sources and their magisterial knowledge of the eras complex metropolitan and colonial institutions, this volume is the capstone of a research endeavor spanning nearly sixty years. Edge of Crisis: War and Trade in the Spanish Atlantic, 17891808
Author: Joseph F. Spillane
Should prisons attempt reform and uplift inmates or, by means of principled punishment, deter them from further wrongdoing? This debate has raged in Western Europe and in the United States at least since the late eighteenth century. Joseph F. Spillane examines the failure of progressive reform in New York State by focusing on Coxsackie, a New Deal reformatory built for young male offenders. Opened in 1935 to serve adolescents adrift, Coxsackie instead became an unstable and brutalizing prison. From the start, the liberal impulse underpinning the prisons mission was overwhelmed by challenges it was unequipped or unwilling to facedrugs, gangs, and racial conflict. Spillane draws on detailed prison records to reconstruct a life behind bars in which ungovernable young men posed constant challenges to racial and cultural order. The New Deal order of the prison was unstable from the start; the politics of punishment quickly became the politics of race and social exclusion, and efforts to save liberal reform in postwar New York only deepened its failures. In 1977, inmates took hostages to focus attention on their grievances. The result was stricter discipline and an end to any pretense that Coxsackie was a reform institution. Why did the prison fail? For answers, Spillane immerses readers in the changing culture and racial makeup of the U.S. prison system and borrows from studies of colonial prisons, which emblemized efforts by an exploitative regime to impose cultural and racial restraint on others. In todays era of mass incarceration, prisons have become conflict-ridden warehouses and powerful symbols of racism and inequality. This account challenges the conventional wisdom that Americas prison crisis is of comparatively recent vintage, showing instead how a racial and punitive system of control emerged from the ashes of a progressive ideal.
Author: Glenn Hughes
As more and more people in North America and Europe have distanced themselves from mainstream religious traditions over the past centuries, a crisis of faith has emerged and garnered much attention. But Glenn Hughes, author of A More Beautiful Question: The Spiritual in Poetry and Art, contends that despite the withering popularity of faith-based worldviews, our times do not evince a decline in spirituality. One need only consider the search for alternative religious symbolisms, as well as the growth of groups espousing fundamentalist religious viewpoints, to recognize that spiritual concerns remain a vibrant part of life in Western culture. Hughes offers the idea that the modern crisis of faith is not a matter of vanishing spiritual concerns and energy but rather of their disorientation, even as they remain pervasive forces in human affairs. And because art is the most effective medium for spiritually evocation, it is our most significant touchstone for examining this spiritual disorientation, just as it remains a primary source of inspiration for spiritual experience. A More Beautiful Question is concerned with how art, and especially poetry, functions as a vehicle of spiritual expression in todays modern cultures. The book considers the meeting points of art, poetry, religion, and philosophy, in part through examining the treatments of consciousness, transcendence, and art in the writings of twentieth-century philosophers Eric Voegelin and Bernard Lonergan. A major portion of A More Beautiful Question is devoted to detailed case studies of three influential modern poets: Gerard Manley Hopkins, Emily Dickinson, and T. S. Eliot. In these and its other chapters, the book examines the human need for artistic symbols that evoke the mystery of transcendence, the ways in which poetry and art illuminate the spiritual meanings of freedom, and the benefits of an individuals loving study of great literature and art. A More Beautiful Question has a distinctive aimto clarify the spiritual functions of art and poetry in relation to contemporary confusion about transcendent realityand it meets that goal in a manner accessible by the layperson as well as the scholar. By examining how the best art and poetry address our need for spiritual orientation, this book makes a valuable contribution to the philosophies of art, literature, and religion, and brings deserved attention to the significance of the spiritual in the study of these disciplines.
Author: Denver Brunsman
A fundamental component of Britains early success, naval impressment not only kept the Royal Navy afloatit helped to make an empire. In total numbers, impressed seamen were second only to enslaved Africans as the largest group of forced laborers in the eighteenth century. In The Evil Necessity, Denver Brunsman describes in vivid detail the experience of impressment for Atlantic seafarers and their families. Brunsman reveals how forced service robbed approximately 250,000 mariners of their livelihoods, and, not infrequently, their lives, while also devastating Atlantic seaport communities and the loved ones who were left behind. Press gangs, consisting of a navy officer backed by sailors and occasionally local toughs, often used violence or the threat of violence to supply the skilled manpower necessary to establish and maintain British naval supremacy. Moreover, impressments helped to unite Britain and its Atlantic coastal territories in a common system of maritime defense unmatched by any other European empire. Drawing on ships logs, merchants papers, personal letters and diaries, as well as engravings, political texts, and sea ballads, Brunsman shows how ultimately the controversy over impressment contributed to the American Revolution and served as a leading cause of the War of 1812.Early American HistoriesWinner of the Walker Cowen Memorial Prize for an Outstanding Work of Scholarship in Eighteenth-Century Studies
Author: Elda E Tsou
Until quite recently, Asian American literary criticism had little to do with form. Instead, the tendency was to bind the literary tradition to identity formation. For Elda Tsou, however, the distinctions of ethnic writing extend beyond such facile referential practices to incorporate form and aesthetics.
Author: Geoff Baker
This book examines the activities of William Blundell, a seventeenth-century Catholic gentleman, and using the approaches of the history of reading provides a detailed analysis of his mindset.Blundell was neither the passive victim nor the entirely loyal subject that he and others have claimed. He actively defended his family from the penal laws and used the relative freedom that this gave him to patronise other Catholics. Not only did he rewrite the histories of recent civil conflicts to show that Protestants were prone to rebellion and Catholics to loyalty, but we also find a different perspective on his religious beliefs. Blundells commonplaces suggest an underlying tension with aspects of Catholicism, a tension manifest throughout his notes on his practical engagement with the world, in which it is clear that he was wrestling with the various aspects of his identity. This is an important study that will be of interest to all who work on the early modern period.
Author: Paula Harrington and Ronald Jenn
Blending cultural history, biography, and literary criticism, this book explores how one of America's greatest icons used the French to help build a new sense of what it is to be American in the second half of the nineteenth century. While critics have generally dismissed Mark Twains relationship with France as hostile, Harrington and Jenn see Twains use of the French as a foil to help construct his identity as the representative American. Examining new materials that detail his Montmatre study, the carte de visite album, and a chronology of his visits to France, the book offers close readings of writings that have been largely ignored, such as The Innocents Adrift manuscript and the unpublished chapters of A Tramp Abroad, combining literary analysis, socio-historical context and biographical research.