The Grant Monument

1982 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 212-231 ◽  
Author(s):  
David M. Kahn
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Sheer Size ◽  
19Th Century America ◽  
The 19Th Century

The Grant Monument, popularly known today as Grant's Tomb, was comparable in sheer size and costliness to only two other memorials erected in 19th-century America-the Washington Monument and the Statue of Liberty. When General Grant died in the summer of 1885 it was anticipated that a shaft of some kind would be built over his grave. This had been the usual choice for the nation's major memorials in the post-Civil War period. The issue was widely debated and other suggestions were advanced. In an official competition for the monument in 1888/1889 a shaft was selected. The results of the competition were subsequently set aside and John Hemenway Duncan's very different proposal for a classical mausoleum was chosen in a second, decisive competition in 1890 (Fig. 1). The Grant Monument thus became the most significant of a growing number of memorials to be modeled after classical sources, indicating in part the development of more sophisticated architectural tastes, as well as the rising sense of nationalism in the last decades of the 19th century. Within this framework, classical monuments, with their aura of ancient glory, seemed to express forcefully and didactically the importance of the nation's heroes and the grandeur of its history.

Sources of the recognition of belligerent status

1977 ◽  
Vol 17 (192) ◽  
pp. 111-127 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles Zorgbibe
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
The State ◽  
Sovereign Power ◽  
Equal Status ◽  
Positive Law ◽  
Unilateral Action ◽  
The Government ◽  
The Right ◽  
The 19Th Century

“Whenever a large organized group believes it has the right to resist the sovereign power and considers itself capable of resorting to arms, war between the two parties should take place in the same manner as between nations…” This statement by de Vattel in the 19th century seemed destined to take its place as a part of positive law, constituting part of what was known as recognition of belligerency, tantamount to the recognition by the established government of an equal status for insurgents and regular belligerents. When a civil war became extensive enough, the State attacked would understand that it was wisest to acknowledge the existence of a state of war with part of the population. This would, at the same time, allow the conflict to be seen in a truer light. The unilateral action of the legal government in recognizing belligerency would be the condition for granting belligerent rights to the parties. It would constitute a demonstration of humanity on the part of the government of the State attacked and would also provide that government with prospects for effective pursuit of the war. By admitting that it was forced to resort to war, it would at least have its hands free to make war seriously.

“Old Civilized Asian States”: the Perception of Eurasian Space by Russian Public Figures and Publicists at the End of the 19th and Beginning of the 20th Centuries

2020 ◽  
Vol 58 ◽  
pp. 267-276
Author(s):  
Alexander Yu. Polunov
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Civil War ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
The State ◽  
Russian Foreign Policy ◽  
Christian Communities ◽  
Public Figures ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Public Leaders

The article analyzes the issue of conceptualization by Russian public leaders and publicists of the causes and goals of the turn of Russian foreign policy to the East at the end of the 19th century. In those years there took shape the idea of specific eastern mission of Russia that influenced later the configuring of Eurasian ideology. At the same time the ideological constructions of the publicists at the end of the 19th century were rather peculiar. In contrast to the Eurasians those authors paid special attention to the “old civilized states in Asia”, like Persia and China. The necessity to support the Celestial Empire and the Christian communities in Persia was determined, according to those publicists, by Russia’s duty to protect the weak. Besides, China was viewed as the state with established autocracy concept that was very important for Russia. At the beginning of the 20th century the ideas of the “orientalists” and other publicists contemplating Russia’s special mission in Asia, lost their former influence. Their distant echo can be found in the program of the prominent White movement leader baron R.F. Ungern, who brought forward the idea of establishing a Pan-Asian monarchy relying on China during Civil War.

Losing the Thread

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jim Powell
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
American Civil War ◽  
Full Length ◽  
Raw Material ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Cotton Trade

Losing the Thread is the first full-length study of the effect of the American Civil War on Britain’s raw cotton trade and on the Liverpool cotton market. It details the worst crisis in the British cotton trade in the 19th century. Before the civil war, America supplied 80 per cent of Britain’s cotton. In August 1861, this fell to almost zero, where it remained for four years. Despite increased supplies from elsewhere, Britain’s largest industry received only 36 per cent of the raw material it needed from 1862 to 1864. This book establishes the facts of Britain’s raw cotton supply during the war: how much there was of it, in absolute terms and in relation to the demand, where it came from and why, how much it cost, and what effect the reduced supply had on Britain’s cotton manufacture. It includes an enquiry into the causes of the Lancashire cotton famine, which contradicts the historical consensus on the subject. Examining the impact of the civil war on Liverpool and its cotton market, the book disputes the historic portrayal of Liverpool as a solidly pro-Confederate town. It also demonstrates how reckless speculation infested and distorted the raw cotton market, and lays bare the shadowy world of the Liverpool cotton brokers, who profited hugely from the war while the rest of Lancashire starved.

Mrs. John Marshall Harlan's Memories: Hierarchies of Gender and Race in the Household and the Polity

1993 ◽  
Vol 18 (03) ◽  
pp. 453-478
Author(s):  
Linda C. A. Przybyszewski
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
White Male ◽  
Family Identity ◽  
Public Spheres ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Family ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
John Marshall

While legal papers and case decisions have been the traditional focus of judicial biography, the family papers of Justice John Marshall Harlan the Elder demonstrate the importance for understanding a judge's conception of the polity of shifting our sights to the household. Historians of the 19th century have overestimated the distance between the private and the public spheres. The memoirs of Harlan's wife Malvina offer us unparalleled, and hitherto neglected, testimony. Her depiction of the antebellum Harlan household shows its two hierarchies based on assumptions of fundamental differences—those of gender and of race—and both positing a benevolent white male paternalist at their apex. Malvina Harlan's memoirs indicate the lifelong persistence of this paternalism in her own relationship with Justice Harlan and in his relationship with a black servant. These patterns of hierachy, separation, and mutual devotion were essential to Harlan's understanding of his family identity and personal duty. His famous dissents in favor of black civil rights protections and his lapses from his color-blind rule have their roots in this paternalism even as Harlan came to embrace the racial egalitarianism of the Civil War amendments.

US South remains distinctive as divisions sharpen

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
The South ◽  
Us South ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Southern States ◽  
Contemporary Politics ◽  
The Us ◽  
The 19Th Century

Significance The US South, defined as the eleven states of the 19th-century Confederacy, was a Democratic stronghold for 100 years after the Civil War. Now, with some of the country’s heaviest concentrations of Black Democratic supporters and White evangelical Republican voters, it encompasses the intensified schisms in contemporary politics. Impacts There will be seven Senate races in the South in November, two of which will not have an incumbent. Nine Southern states will have Republican governors in 2022, with Republican-controlled legislatures in ten. Beto O’Rourke, the Democrat who gave Republican Ted Cruz a close Senate race in 2018, is running for governor of Texas.

scholarly journals 19th-Century Ame­rican Schoolbooks as Primary Sources in Cultural Studies: Their Production and Use

2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 310-320
Author(s):  
Karina Yu. Smetanina
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Cultural Studies ◽  
New England ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
American History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Mass Migration ◽  
The Usa ◽  
19Th Century America ◽  
The 19Th Century

The article focuses on the 19th-century American history schoolbooks as primary sour­ces in historiography and cultural studies. The re­levance of the topic is determined by the fact that historically several regions with different econo­mic, cultu­ral and ideological characteristics existed and deve­loped in the USA. Therefore, broad political powers of the state governments that traditionally made laws in the field of education may give us the reason to assume that the narration of the American history in books produced and used in different parts of the country might have reflected values and beliefs of those particular states.The study was based on the principle of historicism, which let us closely analyze such questions as the authorship, places of schoolbook publishing and areas of their distribution with re­ference to the changing sociocultural realia of the 19th-century America.The following conclusions were drawn. The advent and development of public education as well as the blossom of the printing industry in New England contributed to the fact that in the 1820s there emerged a big group of authors who wrote the most popular American histories. Simultaneously with the growth of the number and influence of publi­shing firms in New York and Philadelphia, the center of the textbook production moved to the Mid-Atlantic Region in the latter half of the century.The United States territorial acquisitions of the 19th century predetermined the mass migration of the American citizens who amongst other possessions carried their children’s textbooks to new places. Due to the fact that the system of public edu­cation was still in its juvenile years and did not enjoy authority among the citizens, school administrations and teachers were not able to make parents buy new schoolbooks from the lists approved by schools, counties, or states, which led to the problem of textbook diversity and to the distribution of the northern books throughout the whole country. Concurrently, high profits in textbook business attracted many people who tried to write and sell as many histories as possible. This resulted in the problem of oversupply of schoolbooks.

Nineteenth-Century American Magazines

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ashlyn Stewart ◽  
Kenneth M. Price
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Book History ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Distribution Networks ◽  
Business Practices ◽  
Literature History ◽  
The Many ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
19Th Century America ◽  
The 19Th Century

Studying the literature, history, or culture of 19th-century America often requires one to read magazines from the time period. Even more so than today, 19th-century magazines were a place for readers of all kinds across the growing nation to consume news, literature, entertainment, advice, illustrations, and more. Therefore, they provide a valuable record of what the 19th century was like for various segments of society and make for a compelling topic of research in their own right. As printing machinery, distribution networks, and business practices advanced, magazines evolved from short-lived, largely local affairs in the 1830s to long-lasting, wide-reaching publications in the 1880s. Magazines grew in their reach, influence, and sometimes page count; improved in quality of contributor content, presentation, and illustrations; and became more numerous, stable, and enduring. Despite all the changes magazines underwent during the 19th century, one characteristic remained consistent: they were essential forums for 19th-century print culture. For the purposes of this bibliography, we rely on the Oxford English Dictionary definition of “magazine”: the term has been used since at least the early 18th century to describe “a periodical publication containing articles by various writers”—particularly ones that are prepared for a readership with a specialized interest. This definition is broad enough to capture other serialized print publications, and we embrace the inclusive interpretation. The line dividing newspapers from magazines is especially unclear because these media have elastic boundaries; the line has become even more muddied within modern magazine scholarship because studies treating marginalized groups often rely heavily on newspapers. Therefore, we have chosen to be expansive in our treatment of magazines, meaning our sources occasionally consider other serial forms of print because they were an integral part of the wider print landscape of the 19th century. We often use the term “periodical” to include these serialized publications that weren’t strictly magazines. In this bibliography, some studies make heavy use of newspapers oriented toward readers with specific cultural, racial, or ethnic identities. Similarly, scholarship about books is not the focus of this bibliography; however, magazines were often printed in the same shops as books by the same publishers and were distributed along the same routes. Therefore, information about the larger book market and distribution is frequently essential to the works included here. Finally, studying magazines usually requires a multidisciplinary approach that draws on the established fields of literature, history, book history, and cultural studies. It also can require several methodological lenses, including close reading of texts; consideration of historical contexts; biographies of writers and publishers; sensitivity to class, gender, and race; concern for material and economic constraints in production; an eye for audience; thought about distribution; and attention to both niche and mass cultures. This bibliography attempts to wrangle sources from disparate fields and approaches to provide a starting place for those curious about the many facets of 19th-century American magazines.

The Nineteenth-Century South in Film

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Christopher Hulbert
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
American Exceptionalism ◽  
The South ◽  
Gone With The Wind ◽  
Territorial Expansion ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 19Th Century

Representations of the 19th-century South on film have been produced in America from the Silent Era to the present. These movies include some of the most critically acclaimed and influential in American cinematic history—Gone with the Wind (1939), Glory (1989), 12 Years a Slave (2013)—and have produced some of the most iconic onscreen characters—Scarlett O’Hara, Josey Wales, Uncle Remus, Django Freeman—and onscreen moments—Rhett Butler not giving a damn, Mede boiling to death in a giant cauldron—in all of American popular culture. Depictions of the 19th-century South on film have also accounted for some of American film’s most notorious offerings—see the section entitled Anti-Slavery: Blaxploitation—and some of its biggest financial disappointments, such as Raintree County (1957) or Gods and Generals (2003). The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Gone with the Wind (1939) set standards for how southerners and other Americans would imagine the 19th-century South and subsequent films have been responding ever since. Prior to the apex of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 60s, Lost Cause themes dominated at the box office. After integration, the Civil Rights Act (1964), the Voting Rights Act (1965), and the assassinations of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert Kennedy, movies about the 19th-century South gradually shifted toward African American and female protagonists. Films also became increasingly graphic, violent, and sexualized in the late 1960s and 1970s as the pendulum swung fully away from the moonlight and magnolia, pro-slavery narratives of Gone with the Wind. In the 1990s, Hollywood began to carve out a middle position; however, neither extreme—exemplified by The Birth of a Nation and Mandingo, respectively—ever completely disappeared. Filmic coverage of the antebellum (1820–1860) and war years (1861–1865) dominates portrayals of the 19th-century South. These movies home in on major themes involving the legacy of slavery in America, the legacy of the Civil War, American territorial expansion, and American exceptionalism. Moreover, the South is habitually depicted as unique compared to the rest of the nation—for its hospitality, pace of living, race relations, mysteriousness, exoticism—and southerners are represented as innately more violent than their northern counterparts. Generally, the messaging of these films has been untethered from contemporary academic interpretations of the region, slavery, or the Civil War—yet their scripts and visuals have played, and continue to play, an outsized role in how Americans imagine the South and use the South to forge regional and national identities.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document