Emotional and Sectional Conflict in the Antebellum United States

Emotional and Sectional Conflict in the Antebellum United States PDF Author: Michael E. Woods
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316062570
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
The sectional conflict over slavery in the United States was not only a clash between labour systems and political ideologies but also a viscerally felt part of the lives of antebellum Americans. This book contributes to the growing field of emotions history by exploring how specific emotions shaped Americans' perceptions of, and responses to, the sectional conflict in order to explain why it culminated in disunion and war. Emotions from indignation to jealousy were inextricably embedded in antebellum understandings of morality, citizenship, and political affiliation. Their arousal in the context of political debates encouraged Northerners and Southerners alike to identify with antagonistic sectional communities and to view the conflicts between them as worth fighting over. Michael E. Woods synthesizes two schools of thought on Civil War causation: the fundamentalist, which foregrounds deep-rooted economic, cultural, and political conflict, and the revisionist, which stresses contingency, individual agency, and collective passion.

Emotional and Sectional Conflict in the Antebellum United States

Emotional and Sectional Conflict in the Antebellum United States PDF Author: Michael E. Woods
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316062570
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 265

Get Book

Book Description
The sectional conflict over slavery in the United States was not only a clash between labour systems and political ideologies but also a viscerally felt part of the lives of antebellum Americans. This book contributes to the growing field of emotions history by exploring how specific emotions shaped Americans' perceptions of, and responses to, the sectional conflict in order to explain why it culminated in disunion and war. Emotions from indignation to jealousy were inextricably embedded in antebellum understandings of morality, citizenship, and political affiliation. Their arousal in the context of political debates encouraged Northerners and Southerners alike to identify with antagonistic sectional communities and to view the conflicts between them as worth fighting over. Michael E. Woods synthesizes two schools of thought on Civil War causation: the fundamentalist, which foregrounds deep-rooted economic, cultural, and political conflict, and the revisionist, which stresses contingency, individual agency, and collective passion.

Antislavery Violence

Antislavery Violence PDF Author: John R. McKivigan
Publisher: Univ. of Tennessee Press
ISBN: 9781572330597
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
During the sixty years preceding the Civil War, violent means were often used to combat slavery in the United States. In this collection of essays, ten scholars explore the circumstances in which such violence arose, the aims of those responsible for it, and its impact on events of the day. Reflecting a variety of perspectives and approaches, this is the first book devoted exclusively to this important subject. Previous studies have concentrated on how white, northeastern, professedly nonviolent abolitionists sometimes endorsed or engaged in forceful action against slavery. This volume goes beyond that emphasis to examine the role of antislavery violence in a variety of regional, racial, ideological, and chronological contexts. Its broad focus includes southern slave rebels, antislavery women in Kansas, violent slave rescuers in Ohio, and northern antislavery politicians. Antislavery Violence challenges the notion that violence within the antislavery movement was unusual prior to the 1850s, showing that such violence in fact lay deep in American history and culture. It establishes that antislavery violence served to unite slavery's black and white enemies and reveals how antebellum concepts of gender played a role in the justification of or participation in such violence. Finally, by stressing the role of violence within the antislavery movement, the collection encourages a fresh appreciation of that movement as a major precursor to the much more violent Civil War. Seeking neither to condemn nor to glorify acts of political violence against slavery, these essays reveal them as a product of a particular time, culture, intellectual framework, and political environment. The book will challenge readers to ponder the subtlety, ambiguity, distaste, and exaltation with which Americans living a century and a half ago wrestled with the issue of reform through violent means. The Editors: John R. McKivigan is Mary O'Brien Gibson Professor of History at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis. He is the author of The War against Proslavery Religion: Abolitionism and the Northern Churches.Stanley Harrold is professor of history at South Carolina State University and the author of The Abolitionists and the South.

Bleeding Kansas

Bleeding Kansas PDF Author: Michael E. Woods
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9781138958500
Category : HISTORY
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Covering the political, social, and military history of the era, Bleeding Kansas contextualizes and analyzes the Civil War in Kansas and Missouri and how these conflicts have been remembered ever since.

Illusions of Emancipation

Illusions of Emancipation PDF Author: Joseph P. Reidy
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469648377
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 519

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Book Description
As students of the Civil War have long known, emancipation was not merely a product of Lincoln's proclamation or of Confederate defeat in April 1865. It was a process that required more than legal or military action. With enslaved people fully engaged as actors, emancipation necessitated a fundamental reordering of a way of life whose implications stretched well beyond the former slave states. Slavery did not die quietly or quickly, nor did freedom fulfill every dream of the enslaved or their allies. The process unfolded unevenly. In this sweeping reappraisal of slavery's end during the Civil War era, Joseph P. Reidy employs the lenses of time, space, and individuals' sense of personal and social belonging to understand how participants and witnesses coped with drastic change, its erratic pace, and its unforeseeable consequences. Emancipation disrupted everyday habits, causing sensations of disorientation that sometimes intensified the experience of reality and sometimes muddled it. While these illusions of emancipation often mixed disappointment with hope, through periods of even intense frustration they sustained the promise that the struggle for freedom would result in victory.

The Underground Railroad and the Geography of Violence in Antebellum America

The Underground Railroad and the Geography of Violence in Antebellum America PDF Author: Robert H. Churchill
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108489125
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
A new interpretation of the Underground Railroad that places violence at the center of the story.

Private Confederacies

Private Confederacies PDF Author: James J. Broomall
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469649764
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
How did the Civil War, emancipation, and Reconstruction shape the masculinity of white Confederate veterans? As James J. Broomall shows, the crisis of the war forced a reconfiguration of the emotional worlds of the men who took up arms for the South. Raised in an antebellum culture that demanded restraint and shaped white men to embrace self-reliant masculinity, Confederate soldiers lived and fought within military units where they experienced the traumatic strain of combat and its privations together--all the while being separated from suffering families. Military service provoked changes that escalated with the end of slavery and the Confederacy's military defeat. Returning to civilian life, Southern veterans questioned themselves as never before, sometimes suffering from terrible self-doubt. Drawing on personal letters and diaries, Broomall argues that the crisis of defeat ultimately necessitated new forms of expression between veterans and among men and women. On the one hand, war led men to express levels of emotionality and vulnerability previously assumed the domain of women. On the other hand, these men also embraced a virulent, martial masculinity that they wielded during Reconstruction and beyond to suppress freed peoples and restore white rule through paramilitary organizations and the Ku Klux Klan.

Past and Prologue

Past and Prologue PDF Author: Michael D. Hattem
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300256051
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
How American colonists reinterpreted their British and colonial histories to help establish political and cultural independence from Britain In Past and Prologue, Michael Hattem shows how colonists’ changing understandings of their British and colonial histories shaped the politics of the American Revolution and the origins of American national identity. Between the 1760s and 1800s, Americans stopped thinking of the British past as their own history and created a new historical tradition that would form the foundation for what subsequent generations would think of as “American history.” This change was a crucial part of the cultural transformation at the heart of the Revolution by which colonists went from thinking of themselves as British subjects to thinking of themselves as American citizens. Rather than liberating Americans from the past—as many historians have argued—the Revolution actually made the past matter more than ever. Past and Prologue shows how the process of reinterpreting the past played a critical role in the founding of the nation.

Dueling Cultures, Damnable Legacies

Dueling Cultures, Damnable Legacies PDF Author: James Hill Welborn III
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813949335
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 389

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Book Description
How did white Southerners in the nineteenth century reconcile a Christian faith that instructed them to turn the other cheek with a pervasive code of honor that instructed them to do just the opposite—to demand satisfaction for perceived insults? In Edgefield, South Carolina, in the 1830s, white Southerners combined these seemingly antithetical ideals to forge a new compound: a wrathful moral ethic of righteous honor. Dueling Cultures, Damnable Legacies investigates the formation and proliferation of this white supremacist ideology that merged masculine bellicosity with religious devotion. In 1856, when Edgefield native Preston Smith Brooks viciously beat the abolitionist Charles Sumner on the Senate floor, the ideology of righteous honor reached its apogee and took national center stage. Welborn analyzes the birth of this peculiar moral ethic in Edgefield and traces its increasing dominance across the American South in the buildup to the Civil War, as white Southerners sought to cloak a war fought in defense of slavery in the language of honor and Christian piety.

The War of 1812

The War of 1812 PDF Author: J. C. A. Stagg
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 052189820X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
A narrative history of the many dimensions of the War of 1812, which places the war in transatlantic perspective.

The Business of Emotions in Modern History

The Business of Emotions in Modern History PDF Author: Mandy L. Cooper
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 135026251X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
The Business of Emotions in Modern History shows how businesses, from individual entrepreneurs to family firms and massive corporations, have relied on, leveraged, generated and been shaped by emotions for centuries. With a broad temporal and global coverage, ranging from the early modern era to the present day in Africa, Asia, Europe and North America, the essays in this volume highlight the rich potential for studying emotions and business in tandem. In exploring how emotions and emotional situations affect business, and in turn how businesses affect the emotional lives of individuals and communities, this book allows us to recognise the emotional structures behind business decisions and relationships, and how to question them. From emotional labour in family firms, to affective corporate paternalism and the role of specific emotions such as trust, fear, anxiety love and nostalgia in creating economic connections, this book opens a rich new avenue of research for both the history of emotions and business history.