Historical Roots of Regional Sentencing Variation, The Symposium

I am a law professor and a criminal defense lawyer, not a historian. It is with some trepidation that I stand before you to suggest that our very persistent regional sentencing variations have roots in the political struggles of Reformation England and the cultures of the subgroups that populated the first American colonies. I rely upon others for the historical proof, as you will see, but I think I do have standing to argue to you that we should consider whether or not there is room, even in federal sentencing, to account for deeply embedded regional variations in our basic conceptions of why and how we should punish. Aware as I am of the dangers of essentializing and the ugly history of regional variation in American penal practices, I still want to ask whether Pennsylvanians really should be expected to punish transgressors in exactly the same way as Virginians. I will suggest to you that perhaps we should respect a modicum of regional variation and not seek to eliminate every vestige of regional legal culture in America

\u27Conformists\u27 and \u27Church Trimmers\u27: the Liturgical Legacy of Restoration Anglicanism

The attention paid to religion in recent accounts of Restoration England has had the refreshing result of adding complexity to the traditionally one-dimensional image of the established Church in this period. No longer is Anglicanism seen as synonymous with the reactionary creed of country gentlemen

Knights, Puritans, and Jesus: Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, Stonewall Jackson, and the archetypes of American masculinity

I interpret Civil War romanticism by looking at well-known archetypal characters such as the knight, the Puritan, and the Christ figure. I argue that sectional reunion occurred, in part, because Americans shared a common celebration of the Christian/chivalrous hero expressed through stories about the lives and personalities of leading figures of the Civil War. Western traditions like Christianity and its medieval warrior code, chivalry, conditioned Americans to seek heroes who conformed to a certain pattern that resembled the knightly ideal. Chivalry did not crowd-out other forms of masculine behavior, but during the nineteenth century, the British century, Americans had not yet created a man in their own image. That would come later with the twentieth century’s most favored man: the cowboy. Americans created Robert E. Lee as a knight figure resembling Western heroes such as King Arthur. Unlike the more controversial Confederate notables Stonewall Jackson and Jefferson Davis, the Lee figure offered Americans the genteel, Christ-like, hero who could be made to represent all of white America. Davis was too defiantly unreconstructed to ever affect much sectional agreement, and Jackson simply could not be made to fit the chivalrous pattern. Thus, Lee allowed southerners to identify themselves as uniquely chivalrous and honorable compared to the modern North. At the same time, the Lee figure provided northerners the opportunity to romanticize a charming, orderly, Old South while rejecting the violent, narrow-minded, states\u27 rights South best symbolized by Davis. I prefer to interpret commentary about the Civil War as storytelling and do not use terms such as the Lost Cause or Civil War memory. High-ranking officers, the common solider, and those who never participated in the Civil War each told stories about it. Due to the large number of stories told, certain common themes became evident in American interpretations of the Civil War era. Common stories include: Lee at Appomattox, Jackson\u27s unmerciful marches against Union forces, and Davis (almost) eluding capture dressed as a woman. Taken together the sub-stories reveal much about the grand narrative of the Civil War, and how Americans, though succeeding to a great extent, failed to completely reunite

Andrew Marvell : the most eclectic poet

The poetry of Andrew Marvell reflects all the literary styles and manners that illuminated his seventeenth-century milieu. Refracting rather than mirroring sources and influences, his work projects no single ray. Instead, like the soul in "The Garden," it "Waves in its Plumes the various Light." Even antithetical philosophies combine as in "A Dialogue between the Resolved Soul and Created Pleasure," where the Platonic, the Aristotelian, the metaphysical, and the classical are diffused

Early American Costumes

It shall be the plan of this thesis to present a careful and detailed discussion of the various articles of costume and their related accessories from the beginning of the American Colonies through the successive periods of development up to the period lmown as the Gay Nineties. There shall be no attempt made to determine the character of our ancestors from their dress; no attempt to determine what they were or what they did. The aim of the discussion will be solely to cover the periods of dress as represented by those groups of Americans most influential in the matters of dress. The paper will deal primarily with the variations and development in the costumes of men and women. In this paper, the author makes no claim to originality. Informational details have been gathered from the most reliable and authentic sources;for this reason only recognized sources have been drawn upon