Prophetic Perfectionism: The Afterlives of Nat Turner and John Brown

ABSTRACT

Recent fiction, film, art, and scholarship on nineteenth-century American abolitionists Nat Turner and John Brown shed light on the politics of their prophetic religion. Both men led violent rebellions against slavery for which they were executed. Prophetic perfectionism drove Turner and Brown but tended to fade in works about them. Exceptions to this pattern of reception include Jacob Lawrence's John Brown series (1941), Nate Parker's film The Birth of a Nation (2016), and Ted Smith's book Weird John Brown: Divine Violence and the Limits of Ethics (2014). This essay situates Turner's and Brown's prophetic perfectionism and their reception in the context of contemporary political theologies and aesthetics of religion and race.     

The sack that never happened: Little Gidding,puritan soldiers,and the making of a myth

It is commonly asserted that the manor at Little Gidding was deliberately sacked by puritan soldiers in 1646, dispersing the Ferrar family, and abruptly bringing to a permanent end their communal life of formal religious devotion. In his poem Little Gidding, T. S. Eliot used this shutting down of the Ferrars’ religious life to contrast worldly failure with the permanence of spiritual values, and the violent closure of Little Gidding and the destruction of the house is generally seen as emblematic of the religious disputes of the 1640s. But, as this paper shows, the sack never happened, and many of the supporting elements of the story are also imaginary. The myth of the sack can be traced back to one eighteenth-century account of soldiers plundering the house to steal valuables, and the paper examines the way it has since evolved and been embellished to create a compelling but untrue narrative.     

The trauma of war rape: A comparative view on the Bosnian conflict and the Greek civil war

This paper explores the practice and the political context of war rapes in the former Yugoslavia (1992-1995) and in the Greek Civil War (1946-1949). It argues that conceptions about accountability and expected gender roles may lead social actors to commit atrocities that transgress the moral codes of their own society, while condemning their victims to silence. On the other hand, a change in the political context may undermine the impunity enjoyed by the perpetrators and ultimately lead war rape victims to break their silence and bear witness. This argument is illustrated by a detailed analysis of one particular interview, in which a woman raped during the Greek Civil War decided to break her silence fifty years after the event. The interview material offers the opportunity to explore the effects of trauma and the multiple ways in which war rape victims may try to cope with past trauma and give meaning to a shattered life.     

From abolitionists to fundamentalists: the transformation of the Wesleyan Methodists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries

This article analyzes the cultural trajectory of a small, but influential denomination that formed in 1843. Wesleyan Methodism first emerged as an abolitionist protest against the Methodist compromise with slavery. The new church drew in members who championed a range of antebellum social reforms, including abolitionism, pacifism, women's rights, and temperance. By the early twentieth century, Wesleyans would become closely identified with fundamentalism, waging war against modernism, championing personal holiness, and maintaining a militant brand of protestant orthodoxy. This article places Wesleyans within a larger religious and cultural context of the Civil War era and the late nineteenth-century disenchantment of the Gilded Age and Progressive Eras. It also traces the reasons for the Wesleyans shifting focus away from social reform and toward matters of personal holiness.     

But There Was No War: The Impossibility of a United States Invasion of Canada after the Civil War

The notion that the United States threatened to invade the Canadian colonies after the Civil War persists to this day. Alleged British and Canadian support for the Confederate States angered Washington so much that Canadians feared military action. This menace started the Confederation movement that created the Dominion in 1867. This article argues otherwise by pointing to the careful diplomacy during the war—and rapid changes afterwards—each worked against the threat of a war. Tensions rose and fell with events such as the Trent Affair of 1861 and the St. Albans Raid of 1864, but each country otherwise sought to avoid trouble. Neither side deployed troops to the border during the war. After Appomattox, Union soldiers headed north but only to return home. Demobilization, combined with military deployments to the former Confederacy and the West, and resolute diplomacy afterwards, further prevented conflict. Not even the Fenian raids of 1866 and 1870 could disturb the peace.     

The Denbigh Project: excavation of a Civil War blockade-runner, J. Barto Arnold III

The blockade-runner Denbigh , one of the most successful and famous of the American Civil War, was located and recorded near Galveston in December, 1997. The site, 41GV143, was identified during a reconnaissance by the Institute of Nautical Archaeology, Texas A&M University. The 182-ft (55.5 m)-long, iron hulled, 258-ton displacement side-wheeler was built in 1860 by Laird, Sons & Co. of Birkenhead as a coastal paddle steamer and, when new, was considered a crack ship with all the latest features of design and technology.
This paper covers the 2000 excavation phase of an underwater archaeology project to investigate the Denbigh . It is the third in a series of preliminary progress reports. The report also provides updated findings on the ship's history.     

Archaeology of a Naval Battlefield: H. L. Hunley and USS Housatonic

The American Civil War shipwrecks H. L. Hunley and USS Housatonic have been the focus of intensive archaeological investigations since the discovery of Hunley in 1995. H. L. Hunley , the world's first successful combat submarine, sank the Union blockader USS Housatonic in 1864, but sank immediately afterwards. In work done prior to the recovery of Hunley in 2000, site-formation processes for both vessels were a primary research focus—a necessary precursor to identifying battlefield behaviour. This paper presents research on the Hunley / Housatonic Naval Engagement Site, where both wrecks are treated as complementary components of a single battlefield site.
© 2006 The Authors     

Exploitation,fascist violence and social cleansing: a study of Franco's concentration camps from a comparative perspective

One of the most noticeable topics within recent Spanish historiography is the analysis of processes of mass violence. Salient among these were the Franco concentration camps, a violent re-educational system made up of more than 180 camps, 104 of which were permanent. The camps operated from 1936 until 1947, under the control of Franco's army, with its corresponding regime of forced labour and exploitation of prisoners of war. Half a million Spaniards and Europeans experienced first hand the Spanish version of the fascist concentration-camp system. This article offers an analysis of the inside history of Franco's concentration camps and then locates them comparatively within a theoretical and empirical Fascist model of internment, exploitation and violence.     

The naming of orphans in France during World War One: A study of a nationwide cohort of pupilles de la Nation

The investigation of a simple behavior, child naming, can provide insights into the varying reactions of families confronted by the extraordinary war losses of the First World War. The current study analyses names given in a large cohort of French orphans born 1914–1916, constructed thanks to the linkage of civil registers with a nationwide database of soldiers who died during the War. It shows that a prenatal loss of father was associated with a strong increase in father's name transmission. The phenomenon was twice as intense in officers' offspring. Regression analysis suggests the precise timing of the father's death controlled this change in naming behavior: father's name transmission was at a maximum when the father died at the very beginning of pregnancy.     

战乱与生存：抗战时期鲁西冀南乡村平民生活管窥

抗战爆发后,鲁西冀南乡村平民宁静的乡土生活被打乱。他们在战乱中过着恐慌与被掠夺的日子,日伪不间歇的"扫荡"中,"跑反"成为生活的一部分。由于日伪残酷掠夺和榨取,加之灾荒连绵不断,使得鲁西冀南乡村平民百姓生活极度困苦,吃、住、行都与战前呈现出不同的样态。鲁西冀南乡村平民百姓的战时生活状态,某种意义上是中共抗日根据地某个时段老百姓日常生活的一个缩影。     

美苏冷战与中国内战的起因和结局——以东北为中心的考察

二战结束后,中国东北成为美苏两国与中国国共双方关注和争夺的焦点地区,并最终形成了以美国和国民党为一方,以共产党和苏联为另一方的对峙格局,导致了中国内战在东北的爆发,东北也成为美苏关系在东亚转冷的起点。在苏联的支持下,中国共产党取得了辽沈战役的胜利,奠定了中国革命胜利的基础,而国民党则逐渐丧失了美国的支持,这在外因上决定了中国内战的结局。     

RAF Ein Shemer: A Forgotten Case of Jewish and Arab Work in a British Army Camp in Palestine during the Second World War

This article explores lingering recollections of a marginalised sphere of participation by Jewish and Arab citizens of Mandatory Palestine in the Allied war effort. During the war, Palestine became a major staging ground for Allied troops in the Middle East. Some 15,000 Jewish and 35,000 Arab workers worked in administrative, construction, catering, and maintenances roles within the newly built army bases. The story of civilian labour in RAF Ein Shemer reveals previously neglected normative and non-normative patterns of inter-communal relations between British soldiers and Jewish and Arab workers on the social, economic, ideological, and romantic levels within the context of a colonial-era military installation.     

War and city size: The asymmetric effects of the Spanish Civil War

Populations are affected by shocks of different kinds, and wars, a priori, may be among the most prominent. This article studies the effect of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) shock on the distribution of population, especially on cities. One of the main contributions of this study is that it underlines the importance of distinguishing between winning and losing sides, an aspect which until now has been largely overlooked. While previous research on war shocks has also tended to be concerned with inter-state wars, this paper concentrates on a civil war. We take advantage of a new, long-term, annual data set. Our results show that, overall, the Spanish Civil War did not have a significant effect on city growth. However, we also find a significant and negative effect in the growth of cities that aligned themselves with the losing side. These results are robust to heterogeneity in the effect of the war shock, measured as war severity and duration. Although short lived, the temporary effect on growth results in a permanent effect on the size of cities on the losing side.     

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.     

Mirrors of the Nation: The Construction of National Character and Difference in the Historical Writings of E. G. Geijer

This article suggests that marriageable young upper-class women can be taken as indicators of the longue durée of the ancien régime mentality and the stepwise advancement of the bourgeois mentality. This is so because of factors that made such women particularly prone not to break with established conventions. Source materials in this analysis are taken from contemporary non-fiction texts in which 19th-century St Petersburg and Helsinki serve as the scenes and in which marriageable young women feature as the protagonists or objects of appraising gazes. It is suggested that the differences emerging around the mid-19th century between the two societies with regards to the habitus and education of upper-class girls and marriageable women can at least in part be explained by different institutional settings vis-à-vis land, labour and the status of the bourgeoisie.     

The Non‐Adult Cohort from Le Morne Cemetery,Mauritius: A Snap Shot of Early Life and Death after Abolition

The cemetery of Le Morne in Mauritius dates from the 1830s and is thought to contain the remains of slaves, freed slaves or potentially free Madagascans, which in itself has economic and social implications and makes the cemetery all the more intriguing. During 2010, excavations recovered the remains of 11 individuals, of which six were children. Although a small sample, the burials of the non‐adults show several interesting features. Two neonates were buried contemporaneously and may have been twins, while a late term foetus in a grave with a young woman may represent an incident of coffin birth. This sample has the potential to cast light on the burial practices of the slave/ex‐slave community in Mauritius, about which little is currently known. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Touching from a Distance: The Younger Generation of One Nation Conservatives and Thatcherism

It is argued here that the younger generation of One Nation Conservatives made a concerted effort to conform to the requirements of the free market agenda of the Thatcher governments during the 1980s. This served to distinguish them from the older generation of wets who had preceded them in the cabinet and who had been more inclined to engage in coded criticism of that agenda. The younger One Nation Conservatives knew that they had to conform if they wanted to hold office and the problems which Britain faced gave them a structural, as well as a personal, motive for conformity. Their willingness to conform made them important members of the second and third Thatcher governments. They provided a renewed radical impetus to government policy in the mid and late 1980s, which culminated in the introduction of the community charge or poll tax, and they possessed the communication skills needed to promote those policies in public. The efforts which the younger generation of One Nation Conservatives made to conform in the sphere of domestic economic policy were undone, after Thatcher had been replaced by Major in November 1990, by the issue on which they retained their distinctiveness: Europe. Their continued expression of pro‐European views became a problem for them after Thatcher had recoiled from the prospect of economic and monetary union in the late 1980s, because it proved to those on the right of the Conservative Party that they were not really ‘one of us’ at all.