Jeff Davis, a Sour Apple Tree, and Treason: A Case Study of Fear in the Post-Civil War Era

The end of the Civil War raised many questions, one being how to piece back together the violently torn apart Union. With such an unprecedented war in American history, the exact course of how to do so was unknown. Would the country survive through Reconstruction, and how would sectional reconciliation be achieved? An even larger question was who to blame for the four long years of violence. In the minds of many northerners, that man was Jefferson Davis. Davis had not only led the secessionist movement, but was a traitor to the Union. By analyzing the calls for and against Jefferson Davis’s trial and execution, the fear and uncertainty over the Union’s future that existed in 1865 and years after depicted the conflicting and paradoxical ways to heal a nation

Epistemic Schmagency?

Constructivist approaches in epistemology and ethics offer a promising account of normativity. But constructivism faces a powerful Schmagency Objection, raised by David Enoch. While Enoch’s objection has been widely discussed in the context of practical norms, no one has yet explored how the Schmagency Objection might undermine epistemic constructivism. In this paper, I rectify that gap. First, I develop the objection against a prominent form of epistemic constructivism, Belief Constitutivism. Belief Constitutivism is susceptible to a Schmagency Objection, I argue, because it locates the source of normativity in the belief rather than the agent. In the final section, I propose a version of epistemic constructivism that locates epistemic normativity as constitutive of agency. I argue that this version has the resources to respond to the Schmagency Objection

“It’s not just a dream. There is a storm coming!”: Financial Crisis, Masculine Anxieties and Vulnerable Homes in American Film

Despite the Gothic’s much-discussed resurgence in mainstream American culture, the role the late 2000s financial crisis played in sustaining this renaissance has garnered insufficient critical attention. This article finds the Gothic tradition deployed in contemporary American narrative film to explore the impact of economic crisis and threat, and especially masculine anxieties about a perceived incapacity of men and fathers to protect vulnerable families and homes. Variously invoking the American and Southern Gothics, Take Shelter (2011) and Winter’s Bone (2010) represent how the domestic-everyday was made unfamiliar, unsettling and threatening in the face of metaphorical and real (socio-)economic crisis and disorder. The films’ explicit engagement with contemporary American economic malaise and instability thus illustrates the Gothic’s continued capacity to lay bare historical and cultural moments of national crisis. Illuminating culturally persistent anxieties about the American male condition, Take Shelter and Winter’s Bone materially evoke the Gothic tradition’s ability to scrutinize otherwise unspeakable national anxieties about male capacity to protect home and family, including through a focus on economic-cultural “white Otherness.” The article further asserts the significance of prominent female assumption of the protective role, yet finds that, rather than individuating the experience of financial crisis on failed men, both films deftly declare its systemic, whole-of-society basis. In so doing, the Gothic sensibility of pervasive anxiety and dread in Take Shelter and Winter’s Bone disrupts dominant national discursive tendencies to revivify American institutions of traditional masculinity, family and home in the wakes of 9/11 and the recession

Experimentalism by contact

This essay considers literary "experimentalism" as a constructed category animated by epistemic virtues, using the case study of "contact" as both anthropological and literary values in the 1920s. Examines Language writing, the work of William Carlos Williams, and the Writing Culture group in anthropology

Review of \u3cem\u3eThe Contested Castle: The Gothic Novel and the Subversion of the Domestic Ideology\u3c/em\u3e by Kate Ellis

Kate Ellis\u27s purpose in The Contested Castle is to examine the relationship between two epi-phenomena 0f middle-class culture the idealization of the home and the popularity of the Gothic ( pp. ix-x). According to Ellis, the point of connection between the two is the female reader a newly empowered figure, eagerly courted by publishers for her discretionary time and income. The new gothic novels that these women read so voraciously however did not simply reinforce the gender construction that late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century capitalist culture proferred. The gothic novel also worked to subvert those constructions, particularly the ideology that imprisoned middle-class women in their homes like so many captives in a fictitious paradise regaine

A Plagued Mind: The Justification of Violence within the Principles of Maximilien Robespierre

A Plagued Mind: The Justification of Violence within the Principles of Maximilien Robespierre, takes a new look into the political career of the French Revolutionary Maximilien Robespierre. This work explores the reasons as to why a man who valued principles so highly would seemingly turn against them by instituting the Reign of Terror. It follows the course of Robespierre\u27s political career from beginning to end, and explains how each action taken by Robespierre was actually not an attempt to rise to power, but rather a sincere effort to create a republican France. As the French Revolution spiraled into chaos, so to did Maximilien Robespierre. As the situation of the Revolution became more dire, Robespierre began to justify acts of increasing extremity, climaxing with the infamous Reign of Terror

The Concept of Systematic Corruption in American Political and Economic History

The critical role of governance in the promotion of economic development has created intense interest in the manner in which the United States eliminated corruption. This paper examines the concept of corruption in American history; tracing the term corruption to its roots in British political philosophy of the 17th and 18th century, and from there back to Machiavelli, Polybius and Artistole. Corruption was defined prior to 1850 in a way that was significantly different from how it was defined in the Progressive Era. "Systematic corruption" embodied the idea that political actors manipulated the economic system to create economic rents that politicians could use to secure control of the government. In other words, politics corrupts economics. The classic cure for systematic corruption was balanced government. Americans fought for independence because they believed that the British government was corrupt. The structure of American constitutions was shaped by the need to implement balanced government. Conflict and debate over the implementation of balanced government dominated the political agenda until the 1840s, when states began moving regulatory policy firmly towards open entry and free competition. By the 1890s, systematic corruption had essentially appeared from political discourse. By then corruption had come to take on its modern meaning: the idea that economic interests corrupt the political process. What modern developing countries with corrupt governments need to learn is how the United States eliminated systematic corruption.