S. Weir Mitchell’s Prose and Poetry on the American Civil War

The prose and poetry of S. Weir Mitchell (1829–1914) – related to the American Civil War – encompass a very significant portion of his non-medical writings. The Civil War, more than any other single event, shaped his future career as one of the founders of American neurology. Indeed, it should not be surprising how the war was also such a driving force in his non-medical writings. His novels, once widely read, now are scarcely noted. His accounts of the social, political and economic events of the Civil War are of historical interest to students of the period. Neuroscientists as a group, like others, are apt to be unfamiliar with these writings, with the possible exception of “The Case of George Dedlow.” A major purpose of this essay is to introduce readers, especially neuroscientists, to Weir Mitchell’s fictional works in which neurological cases so often appear. One appreciates more the medical aspects of his novels, written as they were by a first-hand observer. His non-medical writings, poetry and prose, are to a large extent timeless and can be appreciated by today’s readers.     

‘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.     

Lincoln as Commander-in-Chief

Abstract

Abraham Lincoln's presidency was defined and dominated by war, yet Lincoln himself had very little direct experience with warfare; nor had the American presidency been truly tested by war when he took office. Lincoln had to negotiate very difficult political and constitutional terrain as he waged the Civil War: issues of executive authority, constitutional powers and their limitations, and the nature of civil liberties during war constantly bedeviled him. His guiding principle in all these matters, and the greatest lesson we can learn from him today, was his flexibility and his pragmatism.     

Taubeneck's Laws: Third Parties in American Politics in the Late Nineteenth Century

Third parties were a persistent and important aspect of American politics after the Civil War and have been as well a continuing focus of scholarly interest. This article discusses both the history and the historiography of the most prominent third party by examining the attitudes and actions of Herman E. Taubeneck, the national chairman of the People's or Populist Party. Taubeneck drew from his participation in and study of American politics to formulate a set of laws that he believed defined the creation, organization, direction, and success of third parties in the American political context. His analysis remarkably foreshadowed the ways in which modern scholars, drawing from several different disciplinary perspectives and methodologies, have only recently begun to explain and clarify the complex course of Populism. But Taubeneck's incomplete application of his own principles helped to disrupt and destroy the Populist Party itself.     

A ‘Murderous Affair in Lincoln County’: Politics,Violence, and Memory in a Civil War Era Kentucky Community

The 1867 assassination of Unionist James H. Bridgewater typified politically motivated community violence in central Kentucky during the Civil War Era. His assassins, members of a band of ‘regulators,’ viewed Bridgewater as representative of ongoing federal interference in the Commonwealth and thus a hindrance to their local agenda. Regulators used terror tactics both to stymie political competition for the building blocks of state power, including the offices of sheriff and magistrate, and to impose a white supremacist social order after the formal abolition of slavery. Like‐minded partisan editors sought to legitimize both the actions of these night riders and of state and local elected officials by arguing that ‘outlaws’ such as Bridgewater had to die so that law and order might be restored, while assuring readers that such things did not happen to ‘good citizens.’ In so doing, these editors laid the foundation for a usable memory of the Civil War and Reconstruction in Kentucky.     

Finding Thoreau in French Canada: The Ideological Legacy of the American Revolution

Henry David Thoreau’s Yankee in Canada is easily overlooked. Because it is so selective in its depiction of life in the St. Lawrence River valley, historians of mid-nineteenth-century Canada have shown little interest in Thoreau’s first-hand account. To American readers, it offers little of the characteristic Thoreau found in Walden and Resistance to Civil Government. Yet, it is highly significant as an expression of national self-definition. Thoreau borrowed themes at least as old as the American Revolution when noting the pernicious rule of Catholic and British power in Canada. He set out to expose the promise of republican values by emphasizing the contrast between these and the poor and morally stunted life under Old World institutions. His work must therefore be interpreted as a call to his audience to commit more deeply than ever to the ideals that animated the Great Republic’s founding moment. It must also stand as a civic interpretation of American nationality at a time when this perspective was waning. Before long, Old World peoples would be racialized and the ideological embrace of the republican values advanced by Thoreau would no longer suffice in making American citizens.     

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.     

From colonialism to theology: encounters with Martin Wight's international thought

Martin Wight's writings range far more widely than those of most leading historians and theorists of International Relations. His thought escapes from the parochialism of particular academic disciplines and departments. It also escapes from the provincialism of the present, our preoccupation with immediate issues of foreign policy, which is a preoccupation with ourselves and our society. He grappled with some of the great questions of his era, from colonialism to nuclear war. But in doing that he tried to get beyond his time, by recalling other times when similar questions were current. The mark of a leading thinker and writer is the heavy weight of his thought on his readers. Martin Wight's writings left me with a number of ideas and suggestions the accumulative effect of which is the view I hold of International Relations.     

Le fou du tzar—A nail in the body of the empire

In the Edwardian period, the essays, novels, and criticism of G.K. Chesterton gave voice to a unique but emblematic form of patriotic anti-imperialism. The article places his views in the context of the Liberal Little Englander reaction to the Boer War, and offers two comparative case studies. The first focuses on Chesterton's inheritance of the late-Victorian anti-imperialist rhetoric of William Morris; the second assesses his fraught relationship with internationalism, as represented in the writings of Morris's political collaborator, E.B. Bax. Chesterton's radical populist patriotism, it turns out, had more in common with contemporary socialist ideologies than the currently prevailing view of its parochialism would allow.     

From Beyond the Grave and Across the Ocean: Washington Irving and the Problem of Being a Questioning American, 1809–20

This article is a reconsideration of Washington Irving’s early career between the productions of his first two major works: A History of New York (1809) and The Sketch Book (1819–20). His life and writings in that period are treated as a study in the individual problem of being a ‘questioning American,’ specifically a questioning American writer, in the new republic, and as a broader critique of the developing new nation. Specifically it places those writings in dialogue with the dominant Jeffersonian narrative of a glorious national future. It thus rediscovers Irving as a critical alternative witness to this important period in American history and the entwined attempt to critique his country and to come to terms with it as the central, underappreciated theme both in neglected writings (his contributions to the Analectic Magazine (1812–15)) and familiar tales (Rip van Winkle, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow).     

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.     

东西互鉴：胡适诗学与意象主义关系再考察

胡适诗学致力于意象的构建与运用,主张以白话入诗,推崇朴实简约的诗风,追求诗体大解放。这与同时代大洋彼岸由埃兹拉·庞德引领的意象派主张有诸多相似之处。基于跨文化的视角,我们不难发现,这两个文学事件间的关系实际上源远流长,彼此遥相呼应,构成了一道特殊的文学景观。胡适的诗学思想是其中国基础、美国经验以及意象主义者的中国想象这三重资源碰触、融合的结果,是东西互鉴的产物,是中美文学、文化交流双向性特点的典型呈现。     

The Southern Conservative Thought of John C. Calhoun and the Cultural Foundations of the Canadian Identity

Besides the largely ignored fact of general Canadian support for the Southern Confederacy during the American Civil War, the consociational dimensions of Canadian Confederation, as something opposed to American unionism in cultural terms, finds its historical roots legitimized in the Southern conservative writings of John C. Calhoun. It is the tension between an institutionally entrenched foundation of consociational pluralism and growing urban cosmopolitanism within Canadian history that has defined the debates and divides over the meaning of the Canadian identity, just as it is. Alternatively it is the tension between enforced constitutionalist unionism and consociational cultural tradition within the American South that has largely defined their historical experience. Both Canada and the American South find the tensions of their cultural identities rooted in the consociational values originally laid out by nineteenth century Southern conservative political thought.     

Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes on phrenology: Debunking a fad

ABSTRACT

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809–1894) was a Boston physician, a professor of medicine at the Harvard Medical School, and a writer of prose and poetry for general audiences. He was also one of the most famous American wits of the nineteenth century and a celebrity not bashful about exposing costly, absurd, and potentially harmful medical fads. One of his targets was phrenology, and the current article examines how he learned about phrenology during the 1830s as a medical student in Boston and Paris, and his head-reading with Lorenzo Fowler in 1858. It then turns to what he told readers of the Atlantic Monthly (in 1859) and Harvard medical students (in 1861) about phrenology being a pseudoscience and how phrenologists were duping clients. By looking at what Holmes was stating about cranioscopy and practitioners of phrenology in both humorous and more serious ways, historians can more fully appreciate the “bumpy” trajectory of one of the most significant medical and scientific fads of the nineteenth century.     

The role of the physician: Eugene Sanger and a standard of care at the Elmira prison camp

The conduct of American military physicians in prisoner of war (POW) camps has been called into question by the abuse scandals at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay. This essay explores the experiences of the first U.S. military physicians to confront POW patients in large numbers-events that occurred during the American Civil War. While POWs received sub-standard care in camps north and south, the war also saw the issuance of the first document to outline the rights of POWs. This ambivalence toward the proper care and treatment of the POW is evident in the career of Dr. Eugene Sanger, the first Union surgeon at the prison camp in Elmira, New York. Sanger demonstrated both concern about the sanitary condition of the camp and pride in the deaths of POWs as furthering the overall war aims. His cruelty attracted some censure, but Sanger never faced disciplinary action. He was honorably discharged and went on to become the Surgeon General of his home state. This article places his actions at Elmira in the context of medical ethics, Army orders, and Northern opinion in 1864, and it will argue that the lack of Federal response to Eugene Sanger's poor record while serving at the prison set a precedent for inferior medical care of POWs by American military physicians.     

Mouzinho da Silveira and the Political Culture of Portuguese Liberalism, 1820–1832

Summary

Liberalism as an identity and as a political ideology was non-existent in Portugal, as in most of the countries of Ibero-America, before the beginning of the nineteenth century. But the semantic development of the term ‘liberal’ in Portuguese underwent a clear and rapid mutation in the following decades. It became associated with specific meanings in relation to constitutional issues and civil law matters. While the former prevailed between 1820 and 1823, the latter were dominant in the writings of Mouzinho da Silveira and his Civil War legislation of 1832 to 1834.     

川端康成早期作品的位相——面对死亡的抗拒意识的流露

川端康成的早期作品由于自传性较强,经常作为研究的资料被引用,而作品本身的某些蕴含却很少成为研究的对象,即如早期流露在这些作品中的对死亡的抗拒意识没有受到足够的重视。超越死亡的意识可以说贯穿了川端康成的整个创作生涯,如果忽略了川端康成早期作品中的对死亡的抗拒意识,便会从整体上影响对川端康成及其作品的认识。     

Enigmas of the Great War: Thomas Kettle and Francis Ledwidge

Recent publications in the field of Irish Studies have begun to address the previously neglected issue of Irish involvement in the First World War, including some limited attention to Irish First World War literature. This article explores the poetry of two nationalist writers who joined the British army, namely Thomas Kettle and Francis Ledwidge. Kettle was a public figure who had served as a Westminster MP and his poetry expresses the political complexity of his responses to the outbreak of war and to the Easter Rising. Ledwidge was first and foremost a poet and the article explores and evaluates that aspect of his oeuvre which can be described as war poetry.