Author: Stephen Cushman File Type: pdf War destroys, but it also inspires, stimulates, and creates. It is, in this way, a muse, and a powerful one at that. The American Civil War was a particularly prolific muse--unleashing with its violent realities a torrent of language, from soldiers intimate letters and diaries to everyday newspaper accounts, great speeches, and enduring literary works. In Belligerent Muse, Stephen Cushman considers the Civil War writings of five of the most significant and best known narrators of the conflict Abraham Lincoln, Walt Whitman, William Tecumseh Sherman, Ambrose Bierce, and Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain. Considering their writings both as literary expressions and as efforts to record the rigors of the war, Cushman analyzes their narratives and the aesthetics underlying them to offer a richer understanding of how Civil War writing chronicled the events of the conflict as they unfolded and then served to frame the memory of the war afterward. Elegantly interweaving military and literary history, Cushman uses some of the wars most famous writers and their works to explore the profound ways in which our nations great conflict not only changed the lives of its combatants and chroniclers but also fundamentally transformed American letters. **Review Offers a new way to understand histories of the war as complex literary expressions in their own right.--Journal of Southern History Recommended.--CHOICE Review Gorgeous and penetrating, Stephen Cushmans Belligerent Muse gives us five exquisite lessons in the anatomy of style. From the lilt of Lincolns language to the barbs of Bierce and the pageantry of Chamberlain, Belligerent Muse takes readers into the complicated literary history of how the war was spun and how a national bloodletting transformed the writing of history and the history of writing in the United States.--Stephen Berry, University of Georgia Belligerent Muse is a beautifully written, rich, and engaging work that convincingly argues we should pay attention to the aesthetics of war writing, including military history. Offering fresh insight on every page, this is not only a great pleasure to read but also a major addition to the literature of the Civil War.--Alice Fahs, University of California, Irvine Stephen Cushman presents an excellent and thoroughly researched overview of a timely topic--the relation of the Civil War to the writings of men whose engagement both with fighting the war and with writing the war resonate with nineteenth century American culture.--Shirley Samuels, Cornell University

Author: Anna Strhan File Type: pdf This is the first book to explore how religious movements and actors shape and are shaped by aspects of global city dynamics. Theoretically grounded and empirically informed, Religion and the Global City advances discussions in the field of urban religion, and establishes future research directions. David Garbin and Anna Strhan bring together a wealth of ethnographically rich and vivid case studies in a diversity of urban settings, in both Global North and Global South contexts. These case studies are drawn from both classical global cities such as London and Paris, and also from large cosmopolitan metropolises - such as Bangalore, Rio de Janeiro, Lagos, Singapore and Hong Kong which all constitute, in their own terms, powerful sites within the informational, cultural and moral networked economies of contemporary globalization. The chapters explore some of the most pressing issues of our times globalization and the role of global neo-liberal regimes urban change and in particular the dramatic urbanization of Global South countries and religious politics and religious revivalism associated, for instance, with transnational Islam or global PentecostalCharismatic Christianity. **Review This volume opens up the world of urban religions, showing how they connect globalization and urbanization through everyday acts of place-making, co-operation and conviviality. Impressive in its geographical purview and inter-disciplinary ambition, this is an important collection and one that deserves to be read by all those interested in the state of our cities. * Phil Hubbard, Professor of Urban Studies, Kings College London, UK * By taking on what makes a city truly religiously `global and what makes a global religion truly urban outside the west, on a variety of scales and in a variety of places, Garbin and Strhans edited volume successfully reframes our understanding of the urban religion-globalization nexus. * Peggy Levitt, Luella LaMer Slaner Professor in Latin American Studies and Professor of Sociology, Wellesley College, USA and author of God Needs No Passport Immigrants and the Changing American Religious Landscape (2007) * About the Author David Garbin is Senior Lecturer in Sociology in the School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research at the University of Kent, UK. His research focuses on the interplay of migration, ethnicity, diaspora, space and religion, in a diversity of ethnographic contexts in Europe, North America, South Asia and Central Africa. Anna Strhan is Lecturer in Religious Studies at the University of Kent, UK. Her research explores the interrelations between space, religion, ethics, and values. She is the author of Aliens and Strangers? The Struggle for Coherence in the Everyday Lives of Evangelicals (2015).