黑人普选权与美国内战宪法修正案的制定(1860—1870)

1865年5月,长达4年的美国内战以南方联邦的战败而告结束。战争粉碎了南部的奴隶制,维护了联邦的统一,但也将一个严峻的现实推到了由共和党人主持的政府与国会面前:如何确定随内战而成为自由人的400万南方黑奴在战后美国社会的法律与政治地位?黑人的解放是南北政治家在战前未意料到的结果。这个结果的出现不仅对当时带有浓厚种族歧视色彩     

失去的机会:1866年美国“南部宅地法”与黑人获取土地的失败

内战结束后,为了解决美国南部黑人的土地问题,共和党控制的国会通过了"南部宅地法"。"南部宅地法"为广大黑人申请并获得免费的公地创造了一系列相对有利的条件。但是,由于大多数黑人长期深陷贫困,根本无力支付申请并开垦宅地的初始资本,因此,他们始终未能充分利用"南部宅地法"赋予的有利条件实现获得土地的梦想。乡村商人与种植园主的借贷剥削是广大黑人长期陷入贫困的深层次原因。联邦政府在推行"南部宅地法"的同时,并没有意识到借贷问题对于黑人申请者的重要性,因而并没有为他们提供相应的借贷扶持。对于大多数黑人而言,"南部宅地法"最终成为一次"失去的机会"。     

美国内战末期南部邦联的武装奴隶抉择

美国内战后期,南部邦联在武装奴隶问题上陷入困境。战争态势的不利和白人人力资源的枯竭,使得南部邦联有必要利用奴隶作为军人。然而如果诉诸于武装奴隶,就遇到了是否解放奴隶的问题。南部邦联的立国目的是维护奴隶制,如果解放奴隶,南部邦联就失去了既定的战争目的;如果不武装奴隶,南部邦联必将战败,奴隶制也必然被联邦所废除。面对这一难题,一部分人主张不惜以废除奴隶制为代价换取奴隶为南部而战,另一部分人则宁愿战败灭亡也不愿解放奴隶。由于存在着强大的反对力量,南部邦联政府迟至1865年3月灭亡前夕才制定了武装奴隶政策。南部邦联并没有真正组建起黑人军队就灭亡了,该政策的出台只是反映了南部奴隶主统治集团的战争困境。     

美国黑人高等教育的发展历程

美国黑人高等教育的发展,最初表现为黑人院校的建立与发展。黑人院校主要是指美国历史上的黑人学院和大学（Historically Black Colleges and Universities）,是专门为黑人接受高等教育而开办的两年制初级学院或提供学士学位教育的场所。绝大多数黑人院校创立于1964年之前,且得到州政府的认可。由于种族主义的存在,黑人院校成为美国黑人接受高等教育的惟一场所,且在相当长一段时间里代表了黑人高等教育的发展状况。直到20世纪60年代种族隔离制度被废除,实行黑人与白人合校,黑人高等教育才突破了“黑人院校”的局限。     

美国内战后至二十世纪初期的南部种植园制度

长期以来,人们普遍认为,美国内战虽然废除了奴隶制,但由于没有摧毁种植园经济,大多数黑人没有得到土地,仍然被束缚在种植园中,因而严重阻碍了美国南部的发展,使之长期成为一个“贫穷和种族压迫的社会”。 但是,近十多年来,美国史学界对于南部的研究有很大的进展,许多论著着重探讨了奴隶制关系对战后发展的影响问题,提出了很多有益的见解,显示出“忽视南部的发展的时期已趋结束”。     

20世纪初美国的“黑人文化热”现象

黑人自从来到美国后一直备受歧视,被视为低人一等的种族,并被排斥在美国主流社会生活之外。而在美国文化史上,黑人传统文化也一向被看作微不足道、比白人文化低一等的支流。然而,20世纪初,美国白人知识界曾出现过一阵“黑人文化热”,长期遭到鄙视的黑人传统文化第一次成为美国白人热衷的对象。还有不少白人知识分子开始严肃地看待黑人艺术,     

全球化视角下美国内战与南部“棉花王国”的兴衰

19世纪是美国高速发展的时期,南北经济模式差异的矛盾却愈演愈烈,最终付诸于战争。南部"棉花王国"的兴衰有着深厚的国际背景,以美国内战为转折点,美国的棉花产业经历了巨大的起落。从棉花贸易出发,探讨美国经济发展与世界的联系,及其全球化视角下世界经济的分工与合作。     

全球化时代美国史的书写——托马斯·本德的跨国史研究

跨国史研究的知名学者托马斯·本德依据个人学术经历的发展逻辑,从理论构建和学术实践层面,探讨了全球化时代如何书写美国历史这一重要课题。在民族构建理论的基础上,本德重构民族国家及其历史,批评“美国例外论”,融合跨国视角与综合性叙事,提出比较、关联和语境化三种跨国史研究方法,撰写了《万国一邦》一书。面对学界的挑战与质疑,本德依然认为跨国史是一种未来可期的研究视角与路径,它丰富了长期主宰美国学界的民族国家史学的内涵。     

美国州与大麻管制"联邦化"的形成

州是美国大麻管制的先驱和领头雁,是大麻从合法到非法蜕变的旗手,同时也是大麻管制从分散到初步统一再到“联邦化”的积极倡导者和参与者,简言之,州的活动是美国大麻管制“联邦化”的决定性因素;反过来,联邦政府通过联邦麻醉品局的活动又推动了州大麻法的出台和统一。这样,大麻管制“联邦化”的确立使州与联邦在大麻管制上逐渐形成了良性的互动关系,从而推动了美国20世纪前半期大麻问题的解决,遏阻了大麻在美国第一次吸毒浪潮中的泛滥。     

“尼亚加拉运动”的兴起及其对美国黑人民权斗争发展的影响

“尼亚加拉运动”是20世纪初美国黑人争取种族平等的代表性组织。在白人种族主义泛滥的社会背景下,黑人知识分子的民权理念在世纪之交出现了妥协主义与激进主义的分歧。杜波依斯和激进派黑人逐渐团结在一起,成立了“尼亚加拉运动”组织,为这一时期的黑人民权活动注入了活力。该组织不仅提出了黑人的民权诉求,并将妇女、青年拓展为黑人争取民权的中坚力量,还通过创立官方媒体,开拓了自己的宣传阵地。此外,该组织以游说、资助和提供法律援助等形式,帮助“波普案”等一系列民权活动取得了成功。“尼亚加拉运动”的兴起标志着美国黑人民权斗争由妥协到激进的转向。该组织的发展促使20世纪美国黑人民权事业朝着组织建构更为系统、斗争目标更加明确、参与人员更加广泛的方向发展,有效地促进了黑人社会影响力的提升,为现代黑人民权事业打下了坚实的基础。     

‘The Charter of its Birthright’: The Civil War and American Nationalism

Abstract. This article examines the role of warfare in the development of American nationalism, focusing in particular on the American Civil War (1861–5). The American response to warfare, and especially to the two major conflicts that created and consolidated the American nation -the Revolution and the Civil War - is revealing in terms of how Americans went about the process of defining themselves as a nation. Evidence is offered here of how nineteenthcentury Americans used the American Revolution for both national and sectional definition; and how it in turn came to be supplanted by the Civil War as the positive act of American national construction. This article argues that the American response to the Civil War provides an opportunity for scholars to trace the development of the myths that are central to the construction of nationalism but that have, to date, only been examined in any depth in a European context. Specifically, it addresses the question of how and why a destructive, internecine Civil War is still regarded today as the ‘salvation drama’ of the American nation.     

Patriot Graves: American national identity and the Civil War dead

The Civil War was America’s defining conflict, the war that made the nation and the fulcrum for the development of American national identity in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Yet the role that the Civil War dead played in this process has only begun to be explored. Although the monuments raised to honor the dead, along with the battlefields on which they fought, attract considerable interest, the cemeteries constructed to inter them have been integrated into the landscape – literal and figurative – of the American nation so fully that the need they answered, the manner of their development, the form they took, and their longer‐term symbolic message has been relatively neglected. Yet the Civil War dead were a crucial – indeed, the crucial – component in the construction of American national identity. Although scholars interpret American attitudes toward the Civil War dead within the context of the mourning rituals of the antebellum era, the war required, and produced, a different approach to death, for which antebellum precedent had ill‐prepared Americans. Removed from its antebellum religious and societal framework, death in the Civil War acquired a new and more potent national meaning that not only validated American nationalism through warfare, but anticipated the response to fallen soldiers in future European conflicts.     

The shadow of the civil war: A historiography of civil war memory

The memory of the Civil War has become one of the most vibrant and contested subjects in nineteenth-century American history over the past two decades. Studies of Civil War memory potentially can reveal much about the cultural, political, and intellectual world of the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Gilded Age. Whereas the Civil War has often been studied in historical isolation, histories of memory thrust off the standard constraints of periodization to emphatically link the Civil War with late nineteenthcentury history. David W Blight's award-winning synthesis Race and Reunion (2001) both indicates the topic's rapid maturation and heightens the need for a historiographical excursion to assess the collective strengths and weaknesses of this burgeoning subfield. The following essay explores the convergence of factors, both within and outside of the historical profession, which have encouraged the boom in memory studies. In addition, it traces the emerging historiography to examine both the creative diversity of the field as well as its common assumptions, insights, and strategic limits.     

“We knew no North,no South”: U.S.–Mexican War Veterans and the Construction of Public Memory in the Post-Civil War United States, 1874–1897

In 1874, American veterans of the U.S.–Mexican War 1846–1848 formed the National Association of Veterans of the Mexican War (NAVMW). Until the organization’s demise in 1897, NAVMW members crafted and celebrated a vision of their war with Mexico as a national triumph which had united Americans from all sections of the Union in a common cause. This article examines how, by promoting this particular memory of the war to the American public, NAVMW members sought to remind their countrymen of their shared national history, and so aid the process of reconciliation between North and South in the post-Civil War era.     

Civil War heritage as American diplomacy, 1957–1965

This paper explores the role of Civil War heritage in U.S. public diplomacy during the Cold War era. Especially during the celebration of the Civil War’s centennial, between 1961 and 1965, the Americans endeavoured to harness the conflict’s heritage to promote U.S. interests in Europe. How they intended to do this is demonstrated primarily through an examination of Colonel Sidney Morgan’s mission to Europe to find how the commemoration of the Civil War could be used for public diplomacy. Additionally, by exploring how Civil War heritage was spread and used in the British public sphere, the paper examines and underlines the key role saved to unofficial cultural agents, such as Civil War re-enactment clubs and private people, in heritage diplomacy. The focus on unofficial agents and networks enable this study to show how heritage diplomacy works at the un-institutionalised level and to explore the interaction between the official and unofficial level in heritage diplomacy. The historical perspective and methodology cast new light on the use of history, historical memory and heritage for diplomatic ends and introduces both historians and heritage scholars with new avenues to explore, such as the role of memory and historical consciousness in shaping international relations.     

Gettysburg and the Great War

Fifty years after the conclusion of the Civil War, the town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania faced the challenge of another war. From 1914 to 1917, the townspeople followed events in Europe closely, becoming vehement supporters of the American entry into the war by April 1917. In 1918, the Gettysburg Battlefield became inundated with American soldiers for the second time in its history, as doughboys trained for overseas service on the site of Pickett’s Charge. This paper considers the way the town of Gettysburg reacted to and mobilized for the First World War. It explores the notion of a ‘forgotten’ American war in a place that is perpetually haunted by war memories.     

Guerra civile: experience,memory and contrasting histories of the Resistance in Italy

This article examines the disagreement between two partisans turned historians, Nuto Revelli and Claudio Pavone, on the legitimacy of the term ‘civil war’ to describe the Italian Resistance of 1943–1945. ‘Civil war’ is a controversial term in Italian and European discussions of World War II. Accordingly, ‘civil war’ provokes a study of the intersection of ideology and ethics, experiential memory and history in postwar Europe. But why should Revelli and Pavone, two men who had been on the same side during the Resistance, see things so differently? This article demonstrates that each historian’s experience before and during World War II shaped their participation in the Resistance and their subsequent representation of it. Consequently, their divergent experiences offer an explanation as to why Pavone argues that the Resistance was a civil war and Revelli argues that it was not, without relativizing in political and ethical analysis.     

Coming to Terms with Violence: Sacrifice,collective memory and reconciliation in inter-war Finland

This article connects notions of collective memory to the notion of cultural memory. Special interest is given to the role of national myths and other cultural reservoirs in organizing Finnish collective memories during the period from the Civil War of 1918 until the beginning of the Second World War. First the author seeks to uncover the ways both sides of the conflict utilized cultural reservoirs in their memory cultures. Then the author looks into ways in which the Social Democrats especially tried in the late 1930s to transform divisive and even traumatic experiences resulting from the Civil War into socially productive narratives. The transformation of the memory of the internal and reciprocal violence into unifying self-sacrifices proved to be the most crucial act in Finnish memory culture during the first half of the 20th century. This interpretation dates the first acts of public reconciliation to the late 1930s, or the time before the Winter War.     

The curious case of Catherine Mary Hewitt and U.S. Major General of Volunteers John Fulton Reynolds: bodies,mourning the dead,and religion in the era of the American Civil War

ABSTRACT

At the time of his death at the Battle of Gettysburg, General Reynolds was the highest-ranking Union officer killed in the American Civil War. The return of the General’s body from the battlefront represented an uncommon feature of a war noted for its industrial scale and for the casualties it produced. How loved ones grieved Reynolds illustrates mourning practices among middle- to upper-class women in the Civil War North and underscores the centrality of death in nineteenth-century America. The death of Reynolds also occasioned the introduction of Reynolds’s sisters to the General’s secret fiancée, a Roman Catholic convert. Writers have attributed the clandestine nature of the engagement, and the General’s reluctance to introduce his fiancée to family, to Catherine Hewitt’s Roman Catholicism. But Catholics in the North received greater accommodation in mainline Protestant society than previously imagined, and the many kindnesses that the Reynolds family showed Hewitt point to an increasing acceptance of Catholics among Protestants in established social settings. Finally, Reynolds’s loved ones mourned him in religious and Victorian overtones, but it is not altogether clear that for them religion functioned as the predominant paradigm from which they elicited a transcendent meaning of the General’s death. In this local context, the responses of Reynolds’s loved ones to his death suggest the waning of religious belief in the era of the American Civil War.     

On the shock of civil war: cultural trauma and national identity in Finland and Ireland

What role does national identity play after civil war? Is reconstruction possible on the basis of an existing identity, or does a new identity have to be found? Much depends on whether narratives of conflict are unifying. I use the tools of cultural sociology to explain why the Finnish Civil War of 1918 has become a unifying ‘cultural trauma’ for the Finns, whereas the Irish Civil War of 1922–23 never became the dominant referent in Irish national identity. The difference is explained by the greater shock civil war posed to Finnish national identity.