Courting white southerners: Theodore Roosevelt’s quest for the heart of the South

Most studies of President Theodore Roosevelt address his “southern strategy” to revive the Republican Party’s fortunes in a region where it was effectively shut out by 1900. This essay revisits Roosevelt’s approach to the South between 1901 and 1912 and argues that wooing white southerners away from the Democratic Party, more than any other approach, represented Roosevelt’s overriding strategy for the revitalization of the southern GOP.     

America’s ‘Religion of Civility’ and the Calvinization of the World

This article examines the importance of Calvinism in producing the public/political “mind-set” of the United States, and how, after the Second World War, the export of this mind-set was as significant as the export of democracy, rock-’n’-roll, jeans, and Coca-Cola. It discusses the historical legacy and evolution of Calvinism from a civil religion to a religion of civility, and how the form and manner of Calvinist thinking—more specifically its ethic and aesthetic—has persisted in a secular manner so that much that Calvin would have found damnable is now intrinsic to the “religion of civility.” It then concludes that the central principles and practices of this religion of civility have had success within nations already “Christianized” but, perhaps understandably, not outside of that sphere.     

“A Most Revolting State of Affairs”: Theodore Roosevelt’s Aldermanic Bill and the New York Assembly City Investigating Committee of 1884

In 1884 Theodore Roosevelt chaired a special committee of the New York Assembly, charged with investigating corruption in New York City departments. Roosevelt had also presented to the Assembly a bill to strip the city’s Board of Aldermen of their power to confirm mayoral appointments. The “Roosevelt bill” sought to break the power of Tammany over these appointments, and reduce waste and corruption. While the committee’s investigation provided the press lurid examples of corruption and incompetence, in the end it did little to diminish Tammany’s power. For Roosevelt, however, the committee hearings served as a perfect backdrop to his Aldermanic bill which was eventually signed into law by Governor Grover Cleveland. The parallel paths of the bill and the committee revealed Roosevelt as a shrewd politico building his reputation as an urban reformer.     

The Iranian Community of the Late Ottoman Empire and the Egyptian “Crisis” through the Persian Looking Glass: The Documentation of the ʿUrabi Revolt in Istanbul’s Akhtar

This article focuses on the coverage of the ?Urabi rebellion of 1881–82 in the Istanbul-based Persian-language newspaper Akhtar. Akhtar was the first periodical to be published in Persian outside the auspices of the Qajar state, and first appeared on 13 January 1876, from the press owned by Mohammad Tāher Tabrizi in the Valide Han in the Ottoman capital. The objective of the present article is twofold. First, it aims to interweave the history of the Persian-language publication Akhtar with broader questions of how the Hamidian state strove to situate itself within a changing international order in a bid to affirm its legitimacy and sovereignty. It then proceeds to examine the ideological leanings of Akhtar set against the complex background of censorship laws implemented by the Hamidian state (1876–1908). To this end, by scrutinizing the reportage of this one specific event—the Egyptian crisis of 1881–82—it attempts to shed light on how the editors of Akhtar successfully maintained the delicate equilibrium of appeasing both its patrons: namely, the Hamidian state and its readership across the region where Persian was spoken. Thus, the article seeks also to highlight the ways in which inter-imperial dynamics lie at the heart of the history of this “Persian” publication.     

What Remains: Repatriating and Entombing a Canadian Unknown Soldier of the Great War in the Nation’s Capital

This article chronicles and contextualizes the creation of a Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Canada’s capital. In so doing, it traces the myriad considerations, as well as complexities — political, procedural, and practical — that abounded in bringing this major memorial installation into being, namely the repatriation, from a Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemetery in France, of a Canadian unknown soldier of the Great War and his ceremonial reburial in Ottawa. Moreover, it argues that the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, situated within an existing monumental space, functions, in the coinage of geographer Owen Dwyer, as an allied symbolic accretion to the National War Memorial.     

King Solomon’s Gold: Ophir in an Age of Empire

Contemplating King Solomon’s enormous importation of gold from the mysterious land of Ophir filled Victorians with vicarious pride and glutted their pedantic appetite with no end of tempting antiquarian puzzles concerning the identity of his trading partners. This article provides details and context regarding the various putative Ophirs proposed by British travellers during the nineteenth century, which ranged from Sumatra to the Gold Coast. It concludes in the latter decades of the century, when the legend of King Solomon’s mines converged with the discovery of gold in South Africa. As scholars have noted, the mid-century discovery of ancient ruins in present-day Zimbabwe by the German explorer Karl Mauch rekindled the Ophir debate and focused most people’s attention on South Africa as its location. This was also the immediate context to Rider Haggard’s fascination with ancient African civilization in his immensely popular novel King Solomon’s Mines. Numerous subsequent explorers, adventure novelists, and armchair archaeologists added to this wave of speculation about Ophir in the three decades that followed Mauch’s original identification of Great Zimbabwe with the biblical Ophir. By connecting these later depictions of Ophir (both fictional and archaeological) with speculations from earlier in the nineteenth century, this article presents King Solomon’s gold as a common context for evolving justifications, ambivalences, and understandings of British imperialism, from an empire of trade to one of conquest and annexation.     

Empire,Colonial Enterprise,and Speculation: Cape Breton’s Coal Boom of the 1860s

ABSTRACT

During the 1860s Cape Breton Island’s Sydney coalfield, at the northeastern tip of Nova Scotia, experienced dramatic economic expansion. Historical interpretation of this understudied coal boom has emphasised the transition towards a liberal era of competition and growing dependence upon American capital and markets. This article presents a revised interpretation, and reflects a renewed engagement with empire in the writing of the history of Canadian capitalism. Drawing upon the work of James Belich and John Darwin, it locates this coal boom in an evolving and expanding ‘Angloworld’ and ‘British world-system,’ and demonstrates how the Sydney coalfield was shaped by the social and economic configurations that developed in the region under the British Empire. During this period, established colonial elites captured coal property and sought to integrate Cape Breton coal into the Atlantic economy in which their region had historically operated. They treated coal as a new commodity to trade and profit from, but coal mining required the mobilisation of credit and infrastructure expenditures that exceeded what was typically required to participate in the region’s traditional staples trades. Large fixed investments engendered economic and political commitments that spurred growth even under highly volatile circumstances, as promotion and speculation drove growth from the supply side and attracted London capital. Overcapacity, ruinous competition, and social crisis eventually resulted, as the Atlantic economy that gave rise to the boom fell apart. This episode reveals the operation of colonial networks and an ‘empire effect’ that produced a distinctive pattern of development on the Sydney coalfield whose legacy would be lasting.     

Reassessing the ‘Crisis of Faith’ in the Victorian Age: Eclecticism and the Spirit of Moral Inquiry

This article examines both recent scholarship in the field of Victorian religion and conviction alongside new research on secularization that have cast doubt on an older historical narrative about the ‘crisis of faith’ and the ‘triumph’ of the secular. My discussion challenges the emergence of an alternative narrative of crisis that focuses on the ‘crisis of doubt’ rather than the ‘crisis of faith’. In particular, it answers the recent work of Timothy Larsen who argues that many past (and some present) approaches to Victorian religious culture have overemphasized doubt at the expense of considering enduring forms of Christian religiosity. By reappraising the career histories of the radical secularists (notably, Annie Besant) that Larsen uses to support his thesis, I test some of the key assumptions and conclusions of his influential account. My analysis questions the positioning of faith and scepticism as polar opposites and the usefulness of the idea of ‘crisis’ when examining either belief or doubt. Changes in individuals' convictions and practices might be better seen as part of their life-long quest for an all-embracing morality.     

“Inhabitants of rustic parts of the world”: John Locke’s collection of drawings and the Dutch Empire in ethnographic types

This article analyses a collection of 26 watercolour drawings which portray ethnographic types from the Americas, Asia, and Africa. These drawings, presently kept at the British Library, were made for John Locke by his servant Sylvester Brounower during Locke’s exile in the Netherlands in the 1680s.     

Revisiting Bula Matari and the Congo Crisis: Successes and Anxieties in Belgium’s Late Colonial State

It is the era of decolonisation in central Africa: angry mobs in the streets; authorities struggling to contain agitation by communists and other subversives; reports of Africans strangled to death or dragged behind cars by European settlers; whites arming themselves. One might presume these scenes of disorder and abuse took place during the Congo crisis from 1960 to 1965, when events appeared to spin out of control in central Africa. In fact, they occurred during the years after the Second World War, when Belgians seemed to have affairs well in hand in their central African colony. The Congo crisis is almost always viewed in sharp contrast to the peaceful era that preceded it—as if the lifting of Belgian rule unleashed chaos—and the relative stability post-1965 that came with the Mobutu dictatorship. There is broad agreement that Congo’s independence was a fiasco, with the former colonial ruler, Belgium, largely to blame. This essay argues that the Belgian authorities were not as in control as has been believed. Historians have known for years now that things were not as rosy as they might have seemed at the time, in the years leading up to independence in 1960, but recently available archival documents reveal the situation was even more fluid than previously thought. Bula Matari was not as far-reaching as believed, and many controls signalled a nervousness inherent in the late colonial state more than they did its strength. Reports by administrators reveal a lack of domination in the 1950s and underlying tensions in the colony, even conflicts. The public impression that Belgians had affairs well in hand is due in part to post-Second World War propaganda depicting an idyllic Congo. Belgians wanted to build support for colonialism, bolster their authority, forestall foreign interference and combat their own anxieties. Images produced persuaded many that the Congo was more peaceful than it was. The shock at independence ought to be attributed less to events unfolding as of June 1960 and more to the impressions of tranquillity projected by the authorities beforehand.     

When is a Nation not a Nation? The Crisis of American Nationality in the Mid-Nineteenth Century

Abstract. The United States of America is conspicuous by its absence from most studies of nations and nationalism. The reasons for this omission are essentially twofold: America is a ‘nation of immigrants’, and therefore clearly lacks the ethnic homogeneity that sustains many modern European nations; more importantly, the focus, the core of the American nation has, since the late-nineteenth century, become obscured as American society has continued to diversify and expand. In those studies which do examine the American case, an over-concentration on the colonial and revolutionary periods has led both scholars of nationalism and historians of the United States to miss the most crucial period in the development of the American nation, the early to mid-nineteenth century. Evidence is offered here that this period witnessed an identifiable process of ‘nation building’. In order to demonstrate this, the period 1854 through 1856 has been isolated for particular attention, since those years witnessed the emergence of a new political party, the Republicans, whose ideology and rhetoric were aggressively national, yet whose appeal was essentially sectional.