That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession. Peter Novick

Charles Reagan Wilson documents that for over half a century there existed not one, but two civil religions in the United States, the second not dedicated to honoring the American nation. Extensively researched in primary sources, Baptized in Blood is a significant and well-written study of the South's civil religion, one of two public faiths in America. In his comparison, Wilson finds the Lost Cause offered defeated Southerners a sense of meaning and purpose and special identity as a precarious but distinct culture. Southerners may have abandoned their dream of a separate political nation after Appomattox, but they preserved their cultural identity by blending Christian rhetoric and symbols with the rhetoric and imagery of Confederate tradition.\"Civil religion\" has been defined as the religious dimension of a people that enables them to understand a historical experience in transcendent terms. In this light, Wilson explores the role of religion in postbellum southern culture and argues that the profound dislocations of Confederate defeat caused southerners to think in religious terms about the meaning of their unique and tragic experience. The defeat in a war deemed by some as religious in nature threw into question the South's relationship to God; it was interpreted in part as a God-given trial, whereby suffering and pain would lead Southerners to greater virtue and strength and even prepare them for future crusades. From this reflection upon history emerged the civil religion of the Lost Cause.While recent work in southern religious history has focused on the Old South period, Wilson's timely study adds to our developing understanding of the South after the Civil War. The Lost Cause movement was an organized effort to preserve the memory of the Confederacy. Historians have examined its political, literary, and social aspects, but Wilson uses the concepts of anthropology, sociology, and historiography to unveil the Lost Cause as an authentic expression of religion. The Lost Cause was celebrated and perpetuated with its own rituals, mythology, and theology; as key celebrants of the religion of the Lost Cause, Southern ministers forged it into a religious movement closely related to their own churches.In examining the role of civil religion in the cult of the military, in the New South ideology, and in the spirit of the Lost Cause colleges, as well as in other aspects, Wilson demonstrates effectively how the religion of the Lost Cause became the institutional embodiment of the South's tragic experience.

Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865-1920

Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory

secrets of life’s beginning and the social potential of the female body. Later in the century, practitioners compared pelvises, breasts, and menstrual flows to classify racial and national differences. They determined, for instance, that African women were masculine and thus inferior, for they seemed to have remarkably short labor after which they immediately returned to work. Other taxonomies targeted cultural and medical practices to deem continentals barbaric for using the Cesarean section and native peoples primitive for the rituals of the couvade (the mimicking of childbirth by the father). In the nineteenth century, men-midwives solidified their authority over the anatomy and subjectivity of women, offering expert opinion in cases of infanticide, molestation, and rape. By then the state interjected itself into the sphere of reproduction, measuring demography through the census and devising intrusive policy on illegitimacy, abortion, and parenthood, especially among the poor. Birthing the Nation breaks ground in its interdisciplinary reach. Jettisoning sweeping notions of gender and power in favor of fresh insight, Cody’s study is the first to account fully for the political and social circumstances that produced male-midwifery as well as for its manifold historical ramifications; the “birth” it gave to defining aspects of British science, nationalism, and a unique sense of the social. The book also excels in its employment of images. Cody highlights the corporality of reproductive knowledge embedded in prints and caricatures and the capacity of visual representations to generate distinct sets of meanings. In a segment that is particularly timely, she shows how men-midwives contributed to the creation of the modern subject position of the fetus by, among other means, commissioning highly sentimental detailed illustrations of the fetus-as-child resting in utero. Thus, “the unborn was endowed with a sense of personhood and even a notion of rights that had not been seen in previous centuries” (278).

A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration

The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory: Brundage, W. Fitzhugh: Cambridge: Belknap Press, 418 pp., Publication Date: September 2005

...................................................................................................ii DEDICATION................................................................................................iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.....................................................................................iv INTRODUCTION.............................................................................................1 CHAPTER ONE: UNIFYING FOR THE CAUSE: THE ALLIANCE HONEYMOON PERIOD, 1877-1889.....................................................................................................14 CHAPTER TWO: “UNION IT IS”: THE SOUTHERN FARMERS’ ALLIANCE GOES NATIONAL...................................................................................................46 CHAPTER THREE: THE SOUTHERN ALLIANCE AND NATIONAL IDENTITY............81 CHAPTER FOUR: “PATRIOTIC DEVOTION” OR “SECTIONAL BITTERNESS”: RECONCILIATION, PRODUCERISM, AND POLITICS..........................................128 CHAPTER FIVE: OCALA, POLITICS, AND SECTIONALISM..................................174 CHAPTER SIX: SECTIONAL POLITICS AND THE SEEDS OF DESTRUCTION...........212 BIBLIOGRAPHY............................................................................................269 VITA.........................................................................................................281

/pdf/sectionalism-nationalism-and-the-agrarian-revolt-1877-1892-13q8dneb1g.pdf

Sectionalism, Nationalism, And The Agrarian Revolt, 1877-1892

A framework for a responsible circular economy

By employing a retrospective collaborative autoethnographic approach, this work aims to better understand how an interdisciplinary context shaped the authors' experiences of British academia during their Ph.D research. The authors bring together their individual observations and experiences to collectively interrogate and critically reflect on their position as postgraduate researchers (PGRs) on a collaborative interdisciplinary research project. These reflections are taken as a lens through which to interrogate the contemporary British university. Pre-existing tensions within the academy are characterised as 'asymmetries' along dimensions of risk, disciplinary hierarchy, and knowledge. It is argued that the authors' experience of uncertainty and precarity as junior academics stems principally from pre-existing structures within British academia, rather than the interdisciplinary environment in which they were immersed. By emphasising the role of the successfully trained doctoral candidate as an outcome itself, it is argued that indicators of success can be reframed, shifting the power asymmetry to place greater value on PGRs within the neoliberal academy. Highlighting the ambiguity of their convergent and divergent personal experiences, the authors suggest there is a need for a greater focus on the contested role of the PGR within the contemporary university system. 

/pdf/critical-reflections-of-postgraduate-researchers-on-a-6qti8ezq.pdf

Benjamin Houston Turner Purvis

Papers

Sectionalism, Nationalism, And The Agrarian Revolt, 1877-1892

A framework for a responsible circular economy

Critical reflections of postgraduate researchers on a collaborative interdisciplinary research project

Better or different? A reflection on the suitability of indicator methods for a just transition to a circular economy