On Jordan\u27s Banks: Emancipation and its Aftermath in the Ohio River Valley

Review of: "On Jordan\u27s Banks: Emancipation and Its Aftermath in the Ohio River Valley," by Darrel E. Bigham

The Won Cause: Black and White Comradeship in the Grand Army of the Republic

Race Relations and the Grand Army of the Republic Barbara A. Gannon, assistant professor of military history at the University of Central Florida, makes a significant contribution to the literature on Civil War memory and the Union veterans who were active in their postwar veterans’ org...

After the Glory: The Struggles of Black Civil War Veterans

Postwar prominence Former soldiers experienced elevated status Donald R. Shaffer has written an important book that examines the lives of African-American Civil War veterans from the war\u27s end to the turn of the 20th century. While the years of actual combat are receiving increas...

Defining Moments: African American Commemoration & Political Culture in the South, 1863-1913

African American Commemorations The Control of Past and a Hold on the Future In 1989 David W. Blight\u27s Frederick Douglass\u27 Civil War helped pave the way for increasing scholarly attention to the ways in which the then emergent field of memory studies might be applied to th...

The Black Newspaper And The Chosen Nation

Being Chosen, Being Free Over the past two decades scholars from several disciplines and subfields have been steadily expanding our knowledge about African American print culture, with attention devoted to black writers and publishers, readers, newspapers, and the communities they helped to create....

The politics and aesthetics of commemoration: national days in southern Africa

The contributions to the special section in this issue study recent independence celebrations and other national days in South Africa, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Madagascar and the Democratic Republic of Congo. They explore the role of national days in state-making and nation-building, and examine the performativity of nationalism and the role of performances in national festivities. Placing the case studies in a broader, comparative perspective, the introduction first discusses the role of the state in national celebrations, highlighting three themes: firstly, the political power-play and contested politics of memory involved in the creation of a country’s festive calendar; secondly, the relationship between state control of national days and civic or popular participation or contestation; and thirdly, the complex relationship between regional and ethnic loyalties and national identifications. It then turns to the role of performance and aesthetics in the making of nations in general, and in national celebrations in particular. Finally, we look at the different formats and meanings of national days in the region and address the question whether there is anything specific about national days in southern Africa as compared to other parts of the continent or national celebrations world-wide.Web of Scienc