73 research outputs found

    Walt Whitman, Editor at the <i>New-York Atlas</i>

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    The Walt Whitman Archive&nbsp;journalism grant team introduces a new discovery and proposes a new theory of Whitman as an editor at the New-York Atlas.&nbsp

    Mystery and Possibility: Spiritualists in the Nineteenth-century South

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    Spiritualism, the belief that people could communicate with the spirits of the dead, swept through the United States and western Europe in the 1850s. Rooted in mankind's timeless yearning to understand what becomes of the human spirit after death, it was complicated by the mid-nineteenth century's urge to explain the world rationally and scientifically. The rage for scientific explanation was complicating the need to understand life and death within the comforting tenets of unquestioned Christian faith. Spiritualism promised what traditional religion could not: By asking questions of the dead through a medium, people sought proof that the spirits of departed loved ones--and personal immortality--awaited them in heaven. This dissertation examines the interpretation of this phenomenon, long thought by scholars to have been unattractive to southerners because of its association with northeastern reform movements, by individuals in the South. It explores and explains the extent to which white southerners incorporated Spiritualism into their folk, cultural and religious belief systems. It sketches a map of how Spiritualism spread through the South along networks of commerce, community and kinship. Perhaps most significantly, this project brings to light the social, geographic and racial diversity of southerners who took an active interest in parting the veil between this world and the unknown. Did it matter, does it now? Beyond denominational monographs, the history of the South must include studies of southerners' examination, construction, modification and uses of belief if we are to understand what being human meant to them and in turn see more clearly how the South was a part of the national discourse. At the same time, while their northern counterparts were linking Spiritualism with abolition and a host of other reforms, most southerners who communed with spirits seem to have believed that--whatever might be said to the contrary--doing so was every bit as orthodox as evangelical Christianity.Doctor of Philosoph

    An annotated edition of the letters of Arthur Hugh Clough to his American friends: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles Eliot Norton, James Russell Lowell, Francis James Child and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, over the period 1847-1861.

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    This is a textually complete and comprehensively annotated edition of the poet Arthur Hugh Clough’s letters to five of the leading American poets and scholars of his day: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles Eliot Norton, James Russell Lowell, Francis James Child and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, over the period 1847–1861. Fifteen of these letters have not previously been published, and those that appear in published editions are largely incomplete and unannotated. The letters in this edition have been transcribed from the original manuscripts held at the Bodleian and Houghton Libraries. They provide a great deal of valuable information about the less well-known later period of Clough’s life and have been extensively annotated to modern scholarly standards using information from primary literary and historical sources. The introduction to the thesis contextualises Clough’s visit to America and the initiation of the correspondence with his American friends, highlighting the central importance of the ‘American dimension’ to Clough’s life and work. I also discuss aspects of nineteenth-century letter-writing that have only relatively recently become the subject of critical attention, such as the impact of material factors – postage rates, steamship schedules, etc – on Clough’s transatlantic correspondence. Clough’s creation of an ‘epistolary self’ in his private letters, together with his distinctive habit of writing ‘journal-letters’ and the idea of letters as historical ‘testimony’ are the subject of detailed analysis, and I draw a number of parallels with his use of the epistolary form in his major poetry. Chapter 2 of the thesis evaluates existing ‘theories’ of annotation, reviews current practice in relation to the annotation of nineteenth-century correspondence and concludes with a reflection on my own experience of editing Clough’s letters. The absence of a definitive version of Clough’s American letters and the comprehensive introduction will make this edition an original contribution to scholarly work on nineteenth-century correspondence and poetry

    William Walker and the Seeds of Progressive Imperialism: The War in Nicaragua and the Message of Regeneration, 1855-1860

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    For a brief period of time, between 1855 and 1857, William Walker successfully portrayed himself to American audiences as the regenerator of Nicaragua. Though he arrived in Nicaragua in June 1855, with only fifty-eight men, his image as a regenerator attracted several-thousand men and women to join him in his mission to stabilize the region. Walker relied on both his medical studies as well as his experience in journalism to craft a message of regeneration that placated the anxieties that many Americans felt about the instability of the Caribbean. People supported Walker because he provided a strategy of regeneration that placed Anglo-Americans as the medical and racial stewards of a war-torn region. American faith in his ability to regenerate the region propelled him to the presidency of Nicaragua in July 1856. However, a prolonged war against an ever-growing international coalition of Central Americans diminished his ability to maintain both the territory and resources necessary to keep Nicaragua sanitary and stable. By February 1857, most Americans abandoned any sentiments of support that they once held for Walker. Lacking support, Walker retreated to the Gulf South as a defeated regenerator. Nevertheless, the continued public discourse concerning Walker as a regenerator continued. Such debates allowed Walker to amass enough followers to launch three more expeditions into Nicaragua before finally being captured and executed in Honduras in September 1860. Though William Walker did not ultimately succeed as a regenerator, American progressives, such as Theodore Roosevelt, revived his focus on medical and racial stabilization through their own policies in the Caribbean, starting in the 1890s. They did so precisely because they shared the same anxieties about disease and political disorder that originally compelled thousands of Americans to intervene in Nicaragua during the 1850s. The continuity existing between these groups of imperialists suggested that the regenerators, despite their temporary failures, succeeded in nurturing ideas about why Americans needed to intervene in the Greater Caribbean

    The Rhetoric of Democracy in American Musical Discourse, 1842-1861

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    In the United States, art music has long operated in an uneasy cultural space, divided between associations with the elite and aspirations to mass appeal. This tension became especially acute in the antebellum years, when dramatic changes to the country’s social and political landscape, including massive immigration from Europe, conflict over the institution of slavery, and increasing social and economic inequalities posed serious threats to the democratic American experiment. These circumstances prompted many commentators to voice idealistic hopes about the capacity of classical music in general and instrumental music in particular to unify, uplift, and democratize American society. This dissertation examines antebellum American public discourse about classical music and the powerful rhetoric that promoted this music as a means of realizing the ideal of democratic egalitarianism during a period of palpable discord. Commentaries about music and its social role in newspapers, periodicals, and magazines generally addressed one or more of three interrelated currents. First, the spiritual aspect of art music—the tradition of Kunstreligion inherited from early-nineteenth-century central Europe—figured prominently for many writers. They posited that art music could serve as a means of personal and social improvement, a quasi-religion by which listeners might better themselves morally and spiritually, and in doing so, help to realize a more democratic and socially unified society. The New England Transcendentalists especially championed the alleged spiritual power of music. Second, given the fact that so much art music was of German origin, the political and national implications of this music constituted a major concern for writers in the public sphere. Many observers harbored profound admiration both for German music and for what they perceived as inherently democratic and communal musical practices among the German immigrants who flooded the country after 1848. Third, commentators portrayed Beethoven’s music as heralding the coming state of human freedom and the perfection of democratic life in the American nation. A study of these three themes makes clear that when numerous internal struggles seemed to jeopardize the democratic project, the idealistic rhetoric of antebellum American writers reflected the hope that high musical culture might salvage and sustain that project.Doctor of Philosoph

    Domesticating San Francisco: Home, Women, and Womanhood in a Settler Colonial City, 1849 – 1900

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    This thesis examines how white, middle class, Protestant American women and their allies transported the East coast’s leading nineteenth-century value system – domesticity – westward and enlisted it in a settler colonial project between 1849 and 1900. By linking home building and benevolent labour to discourses of race, empire, and civilization, it reveals the crucial role reserved for women and concepts of ‘womanhood’ in ‘Americanising’ a Far Western city that was largely populated in early years of U.S. rule by a heterogeneous, homosocial, and often unruly male population. San Francisco’s isolation from established Eastern communities led to an adjusted, pliable version of domestic ideology developing in the West that has received little scholarly attention. In a gendered inversion of Frederick Jackson Turner’s infamous and male-dominated 1893 frontier thesis, this is termed ‘frontier domesticity’. The thesis sheds light on the transformation domestic ideology underwent as, like thousands of hopeful settlers, it travelled across recently annexed lands to San Francisco. Employing ideas about women, womanhood, and homes in efforts to reform what I term the anti-domestic orders of miners and sailors – and violently exclude California’s Chinese – reveal San Francisco’s ‘Americanisation’ hinged on understandings of the city’s private sphere, alongside the better-known public realm of politics and mass culture that have predominantly been scholars’ focus. Domesticity is treated as a protean discourse which, while resting on the idealisation of pure white womanhood, proved malleable enough to justify ambitious schemes for female emigration, women’s interventions in debates over men’s work and play, and racist assaults on immigrant enclaves. Its class, race, and religious limits, though, made advocates of transplanting domesticity to the West prone to contradiction. The thesis encourages historians to conceptualise women’s efforts in domestic reform in San Francisco and the wider West as an important component of the nation’s imperialist and expansionist vision

    Lincoln\u27s Journalist

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    https://opensiuc.lib.siu.edu/siupress_lincoln/1004/thumbnail.jp

    Papers of the Bi-National Conference on the War Between Mexico and the United States

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    Introduction -- Conference Program -- The War With Mexico and the American Republic / Robert Johannsen -- Crossroads to Destiny : The Annexation of Texas and its Consequences / Wesley Allen Riddle -- El peligro de una guerra en dos frentes : el papel de Gran Bretaña en el conficto entre Mexico y los Estados Unidos de 1846-1848 / Lawrence Douglas Taylor -- The 1848 Oregon Debate : Test Case for the Wilmot Proviso and Southern Sectional Unity / John E. Grenier -- Veracruz: A Grand Design - D-Day, 1847 / Paul C. Clark, Jr. and Edward H. Moseley -- Six Silver Bands : Company A , Corps of Engineers in the Mexican War / Stephen R. Riese -- Soldiers in Black : Father John McElroy and Father Anthony Rey in the Mexican-American War / Steven O\u27Brien -- Bucking and Gagging / Dale R. Steinhauer -- Composed of a Different Material: Democracy, Discipline, and the Mexican War Volunteer / Richard Bruce Winders -- The First Alabama Volunteers: Portrait of a Regiment / Steven R. Butler
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