A Sober Desire for History

A Sober Desire for History PDF Author: Sean R. Busick
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 9781570035654
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 172

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Book Description
Widely regarded as the antebellum South's foremost man of letters, William Gilmore Simms (1806-1870) wrote novels and poetry that recently have enjoyed a remarkable resurgence of interest. While scholars have previously considered Simms as primarily a poet, editor, and writer of fiction, Sean R. Busick contends that the author is more fully understood as a historian. In this fresh look at Simms and his contributions, Busick brings to light the lasting impact of the South Carolinian's efforts to comprehend American history and to preserve important pieces of the historical record. In A Sober Desire for History, Busick argues that Simms made five significant contributions to American historiography. Simms's achievements include his work as an archivist, preserving a wealth of primary source materials that probably would not exist today if not for his efforts; as a champion of accessible and well-wrought historical writing; and as an advocate for what he considered democratic history - history that recognizes individuals rather than impersonal forces as the impetus for historical events. Loyalists and women, traditionally neglected in the telling of American history. Finally, although Busick shows that Simms published historical romances, biographies, and a state history, he also made an important, lasting contribution to the writing of American history through his support and encouragement of other historians. Busick addresses, among other topics, Simms's ideas on the relationship between history and fiction, his work as a biographer, his writing of the text that would be used to teach history to generations of South Carolina schoolchildren, and his controversial 1856 Northern lecture series on South Carolina's role in the American Revolution.

A Sober Desire for History

A Sober Desire for History PDF Author: Sean R. Busick
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 9781570035654
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 172

Get Book Here

Book Description
Widely regarded as the antebellum South's foremost man of letters, William Gilmore Simms (1806-1870) wrote novels and poetry that recently have enjoyed a remarkable resurgence of interest. While scholars have previously considered Simms as primarily a poet, editor, and writer of fiction, Sean R. Busick contends that the author is more fully understood as a historian. In this fresh look at Simms and his contributions, Busick brings to light the lasting impact of the South Carolinian's efforts to comprehend American history and to preserve important pieces of the historical record. In A Sober Desire for History, Busick argues that Simms made five significant contributions to American historiography. Simms's achievements include his work as an archivist, preserving a wealth of primary source materials that probably would not exist today if not for his efforts; as a champion of accessible and well-wrought historical writing; and as an advocate for what he considered democratic history - history that recognizes individuals rather than impersonal forces as the impetus for historical events. Loyalists and women, traditionally neglected in the telling of American history. Finally, although Busick shows that Simms published historical romances, biographies, and a state history, he also made an important, lasting contribution to the writing of American history through his support and encouragement of other historians. Busick addresses, among other topics, Simms's ideas on the relationship between history and fiction, his work as a biographer, his writing of the text that would be used to teach history to generations of South Carolina schoolchildren, and his controversial 1856 Northern lecture series on South Carolina's role in the American Revolution.

The Founding of the American Republic

The Founding of the American Republic PDF Author: H. Lee Cheek
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
ISBN: 9781441145710
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
American Founding aims to provide a fair and thorough reappraisal of the Founding of the American Republic. Oftentimes, the Founders are, when not forgotten, made to fit some "ideological box" -liberals or conservatives, villains or saints. This book proves that such views need to be reconsidered, free from past ideologies and interpretations, to recover their teaching and foster a better understanding of contemporary politics. To do so, the authors let the Founders speak for themselves, by looking first at the Declaration of Independence, which reveals their vision of state and federal authority. Next, they examine how the Declaration was incorporated into the Articles of Confederation, in effect the first Constitution, and finally the Constitution of 1787, the most profound manifestation of the Founders' view of the nature of American politics and society. American Founding takes a broad view of the Founding while resisting an ideologically charged reading of history. This lively, historically accurate analysis will serve anyone interested in American political history and culture.

The Plain and Noble Garb of Truth

The Plain and Noble Garb of Truth PDF Author: Eileen K. Cheng
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820330736
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 381

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Book Description
American historians of the early national period, argues Eileen Ka-May Cheng, grappled with objectivity, professionalism, and other “modern” issues to a greater degree than their successors in later generations acknowledge. Her extensive readings of antebellum historians show that by the 1820s, a small but influential group of practitioners had begun to develop many of the doctrines and concerns that undergird contemporary historical practice. The Plain and Noble Garb of Truth challenges the entrenched notion that America’s first generations of historians were romantics or propagandists for a struggling young nation. Cheng engages with the works of well-known early national historians like George Bancroft, William Prescott, and David Ramsay; such lesser-known figures as Jared Sparks and Lorenzo Sabine; and leading political and intellectual elites of the day, including Francis Bowen and Charles Francis Adams. She shows that their work, which focused on the American Revolution, was often nuanced and surprisingly sympathetic in its treatment of American Indians and loyalists. She also demonstrates how the rise of the novel contributed to the emergence of history as an autonomous discipline, arguing that paradoxically “early national historians at once described truth in opposition to the novel and were influenced by the novel in their understanding of truth.” Modern historians should recognize that the discipline of history is itself a product of history, says Cheng. By taking seriously a group of too-often-dismissed historians, she challenges contemporary historians to examine some ahistorical aspects of the way they understand their own discipline.

The Partisan: a Romance of the Revolution

The Partisan: a Romance of the Revolution PDF Author: William Gilmore Simms
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : South Carolina
Languages : en
Pages : 744

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Book Description


Visions of Order in William Gilmore Simms

Visions of Order in William Gilmore Simms PDF Author: Masahiro Nakamura
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 9781570038174
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
One of nineteenth-century America's foremost men of letters, William Gilmore Simms (1806-1870) of Charleston, South Carolina, distinguished himself as a historian, poet, and novelist; yet his stalwart allegiance to the ideals of the Confederacy have kept him largely marginalized from the modern literary canon. In this engaging study, Masahiro Nakamura seeks to reinsert Simms in current American literary and cultural studies through a careful consideration of Simms's southern conservatism as a valuable literary counterpoint to the bourgeois individualist ideology of his northern contemporaries. For Nakamura, Simms's vision of social order runs contrary to the staunch individualism expressed in traditional American romances by authors such as James Fenimore Cooper and Nathaniel Hawthorne. In his thoughtful approaches to Simms's historical depictions of the making of American history and society, Nakamura finds consistent assertions of social order against the perils of literal and metaphoric wilderness, a conservative vision that he traces to the influence of Simms's southern genius loci. To understand how this southern conservatism also manifests itself in Simms's fiction, Nakamura contrasts Simms's historical romances with those of Hawthorne, as representative of the New England romance tradition, to differentiate the ways in which the two writers interpret the dynamic between the individual and society. Nakamura finds that Simms's protagonists struggle to establish their places within their culture while Hawthorne's characters are often at odds with their culture. The resulting comparison enriches our understanding of both writers.

History and Repository of Pulpit Eloquence

History and Repository of Pulpit Eloquence PDF Author: Henry Clay Fish
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 1250

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Book Description


History and Repository of Pulpit Eloquence, (deceased Divines,) Containing the Masterpieces of Bossuet, Bourdaloue ... Etc., Etc., with Discourses from Chrysostom, Basil ... and Others Among the "fathers", and from Wickliffe, Luther ... Etc., of the "reformers".

History and Repository of Pulpit Eloquence, (deceased Divines,) Containing the Masterpieces of Bossuet, Bourdaloue ... Etc., Etc., with Discourses from Chrysostom, Basil ... and Others Among the Author: Henry Clay Fish
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Sermons
Languages : en
Pages : 1270

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Book Description


The Gin Closet

The Gin Closet PDF Author: Leslie Jamison
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1439157871
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description
From the author of the New York Times bestselling essay collection The Empathy Exams and the memoir The Recovering, Leslie Jamison’s “exquisitely beautiful” (San Francisco Chronicle) novel about three generations of women and the inescapable brutality of love. As a young woman, Tilly flees home for the hollow underworld of Nevada, looking for pure souls and finding nothing but bad habits. One day, after Tilly has spent nearly thirty years without a family, drinking herself to the brink of death, her niece Stella—who has been leading her own life of empty promise in New York City—arrives on the doorstep of Tilly’s desert trailer. The Gin Closet unravels the strange and powerful intimacy that forms between them. With an uncanny ear for dialogue and a witty, unflinching candor about sex, love, and power, Leslie Jamison reminds us that no matter how unexpected its turns, the life we’re given is all we have: the cruelties that unhinge us, the beauties that clarify us, the addictions that deform us, those fleeting possibilities of grace that fade as quickly as they come. The Gin Closet marks the debut of a stunning new talent in fiction.

The Simms Reader

The Simms Reader PDF Author: William Gilmore Simms
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 9780813920191
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 444

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Book Description
Long considered a leading literary figure of the Old South, William Gilmore Simms (1806-1870) wrote letters, novels, short fiction, drama, essays, and poetry in his prolific career. Born in Charleston to an old South Carolina family of modest means and raised by a grandmother with whom his father left him after his mother's death, Simms felt a simultaneous sense of loyalty to and alienation from his native region. He was a major intellectual figure on the East Coast before the Civil War but saw his New York publishers abandon him after secession, of which he was a vocal supporter. Simms's novels and poetry have been published in modern editions, and he has been the subject of numerous biographies and critical studies, but until now there has been no collection covering the broad spectrum of his writings. The Simms Reader presents a selection of his nonnovelistic work--letters, short fiction, essays, historical writings, poetry, and epigrams--chosen and introduced by the preeminent Simms scholar John Caldwell Guilds.

History Wars

History Wars PDF Author: Doug Munro
Publisher: ANU Press
ISBN: 1760464775
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
‘In 1993, Manning Clark came under severe (posthumous) attack in the pages of Quadrant by none other than Peter Ryan, who had published five of the six volumes of Clark’s epic A History of Australia. In applying what he called “an overdue axe to a tall poppy”, Ryan lambasted the History as “an imposition on Australian credulity” and declared its author a fraud, both as a historian and a person. This unprecedented public assault by a publisher on his best-selling author was a sensation at the time and remains lodged in the public memory. In History Wars, Doug Munro forensically examines the right and wrongs of Ryan’s allegations, concluding that Clark was more sinned against than sinning and that Ryan repeatedly misrepresented the situation. More than just telling a story, Munro places the Ryan-Clark controversy within the context of Australia’s History Wars. This book is an illuminating saga of that ongoing contest.’ — James Curran, University of Sydney ‘The Ryan-Clark controversy … speaks to the place of Manning Clark in Australia’s national imagination. Had Ryan taken his axe to another historian, it’s unlikely that we would be still talking about it 30 years later. But Clark was the author and keeper of Australia’s national story, however imperfect his scholarship and however blinkered that story. Few, if any, historians in the Anglo-American world have occupied the space that Clark occupied by dint of will, force of personality, and felicity of pen.’ — Donald Wright, University of New Brunswick