Confederate Visions

Author : Ian Binnington
Publisher : University of Virginia Press
ISBN 13 : 0813935016
Total Pages : 221 pages
Book Rating : 4.10/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Confederate Visions written by Ian Binnington and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2013-11-15 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nationalism in nineteenth-century America operated through a collection of symbols, signifiers citizens could invest with meaning and understanding. In Confederate Visions, Ian Binnington examines the roots of Confederate nationalism by analyzing some of its most important symbols: Confederate constitutions, treasury notes, wartime literature, and the role of the military in symbolizing the Confederate nation. Nationalisms tend to construct glorified pasts, idyllic pictures of national strength, honor, and unity, based on visions of what should have been rather than what actually was. Binnington considers the ways in which the Confederacy was imagined by antebellum Southerners employing intertwined mythic concepts—the "Worthy Southron," the "Demon Yankee," the "Silent Slave"—and a sense of shared history that constituted a distinctive Confederate Americanism. The Worthy Southron, the constructed Confederate self, was imagined as a champion of liberty, counterposed to the Demon Yankee other, a fanatical abolitionist and enemy of Liberty. The Silent Slave was a companion to the vocal Confederate self, loyal and trusting, reliable and honest. The creation of American national identity was fraught with struggle, political conflict, and bloody Civil War. Confederate Visions examines literature, newspapers and periodicals, visual imagery, and formal state documents to explore the origins and development of wartime Confederate nationalism.

Author : John Majewski
Publisher : Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN 13 : 9780807882375
Total Pages : 256 pages
Book Rating : 4.72/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Modernizing a Slave Economy written by John Majewski and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2011-04-01 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What would separate Union and Confederate countries look like if the South had won the Civil War? In fact, this was something that southern secessionists actively debated. Imagining themselves as nation builders, they understood the importance of a plan for the economic structure of the Confederacy. The traditional view assumes that Confederate slave-based agrarianism went hand in hand with a natural hostility toward industry and commerce. Turning conventional wisdom on its head, John Majewski's analysis finds that secessionists strongly believed in industrial development and state-led modernization. They blamed the South's lack of development on Union policies of discriminatory taxes on southern commerce and unfair subsidies for northern industry. Majewski argues that Confederates' opposition to a strong central government was politically tied to their struggle against northern legislative dominance. Once the Confederacy was formed, those who had advocated states' rights in the national legislature in order to defend against northern political dominance quickly came to support centralized power and a strong executive for war making and nation building.

Author : Ross A. Brooks
Publisher : LSU Press
ISBN 13 : 0807173703
Total Pages : 560 pages
Book Rating : 4.01/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Visible Confederacy written by Ross A. Brooks and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2019-11-27 with total page 560 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Featuring 92 images and line drawings The Visible Confederacy is a comprehensive analysis of the commercially and government-generated visual and material culture of the Confederate States of America. While historians have mainly studied Confederate identity through printed texts, this book shows that Confederates also built and shared a sense of who they were through other media: theatrical performances, military clothing, manufactured goods, and an assortment of other material. Examining previously understudied and often unpublished visual and documentary sources, Ross A. Brooks provides new perspectives on Confederates’ sense of identity and ideas about race, gender, and independence, as well as how those conceptions united and divided them. Brooks’s work complements the historiography surrounding the Confederate nation by revealing how imagery and objects offer new windows on southern society and a richer understanding of Confederate citizens. Brooks builds substantially upon previous studies of the iconology and iconography of Confederate imagery and material culture by adding a broader range of government and commercially generated images and objects. He examines not only popular or high art and government-produced imagery, but also lowbrow art, transitory theatrical productions, and ephemeral artifacts generated by southerners. Collectively, these materials provide a variety of lenses through which to explore and assay the various priorities, ideological fault lines, and worldviews of Confederate citizens. Brooks’s study is one of the first extensive academic works to use imagery and objects as the basis for studying the Confederate South. His work provides fresh avenues for examining Confederate ideas about race, slavery, gender, independence, and the war, and it offers insight into the intentions and factors that contributed to the creation of Confederate nationalism. The Visible Confederacy furthers our understanding of what the Confederacy was, what Confederates fought for, and why their vision has persisted in memory and imagination for so long beyond the Confederacy’s existence. Visual and material culture captured not only the tensions, but also the illusions and delusions that Confederates shared.

Author : Adrian Brettle
Publisher : University of Virginia Press
ISBN 13 : 0813944384
Total Pages : 424 pages
Book Rating : 4.88/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Colossal Ambitions written by Adrian Brettle and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2020-07-16 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leading politicians, diplomats, clerics, planters, farmers, manufacturers, and merchants preached a transformative, world-historical role for the Confederacy, persuading many of their compatriots to fight not merely to retain what they had but to gain their future empire. Impervious to reality, their vision of future world leadership—territorial, economic, political, and cultural—provided a vitally important, underappreciated motivation to form an independent Confederate republic. In Colossal Ambitions, Adrian Brettle explores how leading Confederate thinkers envisioned their postwar nation—its relationship with the United States, its place in the Americas, and its role in the global order. Brettle draws on rich caches of published and unpublished letters and diaries, Confederate national and state government documents, newspapers published in North America and England, conference proceedings, pamphlets, contemporary and scholarly articles, and more to engage the perspectives of not only modern historians but some of the most salient theorists of the Western World in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. An impressive and complex undertaking, Colossal Ambitions concludes that while some Confederate commentators saw wartime industrialization as pointing toward a different economic future, most Confederates saw their society as revolving once more around coercive labor, staple crop production, and exports in the war’s wake.

Author : Kathleen Diffley
Publisher : University of Georgia Press
ISBN 13 : 0820355941
Total Pages : 257 pages
Book Rating : 4.48/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Visions of Glory written by Kathleen Diffley and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2019-11-01 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Visions of Glory brings together twenty-two images and twenty-two brisk essays, each essay connecting an image to the events that unfolded during a particular year of the Civil War. The book focuses on a diverse set of images that include a depiction of former slaves whipping their erstwhile overseer distributed by an African American publisher, a census graph published in the New York Times, and a cutout of a child’s hand sent by a southern mother to her husband at the front. The essays in this collection reveal how wartime women and men created both written accounts and a visual register to make sense of this pivotal period. The collection proceeds chronologically, providing a nuanced history by highlighting the multiple meanings an assorted group of writers and readers discerned from the same set of circumstances. In so doing, this volume assembles contingent and fractured visions of the Civil War, but its differing perspectives also reveal a set of overlapping concerns. A number of essays focus in particular on African American engagements with visual culture. The collection also emphasizes the role that women played in making, disseminating, or interpreting wartime images. While every essay explores the relationship between image and word, several contributions focus on the ways in which Civil War images complicate an understanding of canonical writers such as Emerson, Melville, and Whitman.

Author : Karen L. Cox
Publisher : UNC Press Books
ISBN 13 : 146966268X
Total Pages : 219 pages
Book Rating : 4.88/5 ( download)

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Download or read book No Common Ground written by Karen L. Cox and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2021-02-23 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When it comes to Confederate monuments, there is no common ground. Polarizing debates over their meaning have intensified into legislative maneuvering to preserve the statues, legal battles to remove them, and rowdy crowds taking matters into their own hands. These conflicts have raged for well over a century--but they've never been as intense as they are today. In this eye-opening narrative of the efforts to raise, preserve, protest, and remove Confederate monuments, Karen L. Cox depicts what these statues meant to those who erected them and how a movement arose to force a reckoning. She lucidly shows the forces that drove white southerners to construct beacons of white supremacy, as well as the ways that antimonument sentiment, largely stifled during the Jim Crow era, returned with the civil rights movement and gathered momentum in the decades after the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Monument defenders responded with gerrymandering and "heritage" laws intended to block efforts to remove these statues, but hard as they worked to preserve the Lost Cause vision of southern history, civil rights activists, Black elected officials, and movements of ordinary people fought harder to take the story back. Timely, accessible, and essential, No Common Ground is the story of the seemingly invincible stone sentinels that are just beginning to fall from their pedestals.

Author : Stephanie McCurry
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674265912
Total Pages : 456 pages
Book Rating : 4.12/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Confederate Reckoning written by Stephanie McCurry and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2012-05-07 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pulitzer Prize Finalist Winner of the Frederick Douglass Prize Winner of the Merle Curti Prize “Perhaps the highest praise one can offer McCurry’s work is to say that once we look through her eyes, it will become almost impossible to believe that we ever saw or thought otherwise.”—Drew Gilpin Faust, The New Republic The story of the Confederate States of America, the proslavery, antidemocratic nation created by white Southern slaveholders to protect their property, has been told many times in heroic and martial narratives. Now, however, Stephanie McCurry tells a very different tale of the Confederate experience. When the grandiosity of Southerners’ national ambitions met the harsh realities of wartime crises, unintended consequences ensued. Although Southern statesmen and generals had built the most powerful slave regime in the Western world, they had excluded the majority of their own people—white women and slaves—and thereby sowed the seeds of their demise. Wartime scarcity of food, labor, and soldiers tested the Confederate vision at every point and created domestic crises to match those found on the battlefields. Women and slaves became critical political actors as they contested government enlistment and tax and welfare policies, and struggled for their freedom. The attempt to repress a majority of its own population backfired on the Confederate States of America as the disenfranchised demanded to be counted and considered in the great struggle over slavery, emancipation, democracy, and nationhood. That Confederate struggle played out in a highly charged international arena. The political project of the Confederacy was tried by its own people and failed. The government was forced to become accountable to women and slaves, provoking an astounding transformation of the slaveholders’ state. Confederate Reckoning is the startling story of this epic political battle in which women and slaves helped to decide the fate of the Confederacy and the outcome of the Civil War.

Author : Jonathan W. White
Publisher : UNC Press Books
ISBN 13 : 1469632055
Total Pages : 293 pages
Book Rating : 4.56/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Midnight in America written by Jonathan W. White and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2017-02-02 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Civil War brought many forms of upheaval to America, not only in waking hours but also in the dark of night. Sleeplessness plagued the Union and Confederate armies, and dreams of war glided through the minds of Americans in both the North and South. Sometimes their nightly visions brought the horrors of the conflict vividly to life. But for others, nighttime was an escape from the hard realities of life and death in wartime. In this innovative new study, Jonathan W. White explores what dreams meant to Civil War–era Americans and what their dreams reveal about their experiences during the war. He shows how Americans grappled with their fears, desires, and struggles while they slept, and how their dreams helped them make sense of the confusion, despair, and loneliness that engulfed them. White takes readers into the deepest, darkest, and most intimate places of the Civil War, connecting the emotional experiences of soldiers and civilians to the broader history of the conflict, confirming what poets have known for centuries: there are some truths that are only revealed in the world of darkness.

Author : Edmund Wilson
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN 13 : 9780393312560
Total Pages : 852 pages
Book Rating : 4.69/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Patriotic Gore written by Edmund Wilson and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 1994 with total page 852 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Regarded by many critics as Edmund Wilson's greatest book, Patriotic Gore brilliantly portrays the vast political, spiritual, and material crisis of the Civil War as reflected in the lives and writings of some thirty representative Americans.

Author : Aaron Sheehan-Dean
Publisher : Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN 13 : 080788765X
Total Pages : 312 pages
Book Rating : 4.53/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Why Confederates Fought written by Aaron Sheehan-Dean and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2009-11-05 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the first comprehensive study of the experience of Virginia soldiers and their families in the Civil War, Aaron Sheehan-Dean captures the inner world of the rank-and-file. Utilizing new statistical evidence and first-person narratives, Sheehan-Dean explores how Virginia soldiers--even those who were nonslaveholders--adapted their vision of the war's purpose to remain committed Confederates. Sheehan-Dean challenges earlier arguments that middle- and lower-class southerners gradually withdrew their support for the Confederacy because their class interests were not being met. Instead he argues that Virginia soldiers continued to be motivated by the profound emotional connection between military service and the protection of home and family, even as the war dragged on. The experience of fighting, explains Sheehan-Dean, redefined southern manhood and family relations, established the basis for postwar race and class relations, and transformed the shape of Virginia itself. He concludes that Virginians' experience of the Civil War offers important lessons about the reasons we fight wars and the ways that those reasons can change over time.