The Irish rent … and mended: transitional textual communities in nineteenth-century America

In this paper, traditional folkloric forms that were ritualised and practised in pre-Famine Ireland are examined. So, too, are the strategies that storytellers employed in disseminating the imaginative aspects of the oral tradition to their audiences. Following the disruption of the storytelling tradition precipitated by the Great Famine and emigration, the fabric of Irish storytelling lay threadbare, both in Ireland and abroad. Of interest is the fact that in America the less “heroic” and more subtle strands of Irish folklore resurfaced in the theatrical venues that developed during the second half of the nineteenth century, namely, minstrelsy, Vaudeville, and Tin Pan Alley. By the turn of twentieth century, the Irish were responding to other “heroic” depictions of themselves, not only with protestation but also with “tongue-in-cheek” laughter. Their grounding in a variety of folkloric texts in Ireland enabled them to transition to multiple kinds of accommodation and expressive resistance.     

“Land of Unfinished Monuments”: The Ruins-in-Reverse of Nineteenth-Century America

Abstract

By focusing on the design and reception of successfully completed monuments, historians have overlooked the presence in nineteenth-century America of monuments that were left unfinished for decades, or even aborted altogether. This article recovers numerous such monuments, and shows how contemporaries seized on them not merely for their aesthetic value as homegrown ruins to be visited and sketched, but also for their rhetorical value as expressions of unfinished political and social struggles. In refashioning these incipient historical memorials as ironic anti-monuments to contemporary problems, diverse groups – radical workingmen and conservative Whigs, female activists and chauvinist newspapermen, patriotic Americans and critical Englishmen, proslavery southerners and abolitionist northerners – elaborated a broader discourse of unfinishedness. The fragments of these monuments could even figure the nation itself as a work-in-progress, contrary to current arguments about the construction of national identity through notions of organic wholeness. The article also questions scholars' assumption that monuments inevitably promote a culture of forgetting by projecting images of consensus and closure. In turning to the reception of monuments during their often-lengthy construction, we can perceive their more complex relationship to dominant ideologies and narratives of the nation-state.     

‘The races and conditions of men’: women in nineteenth-century geography school texts in the United States

Geography schoolbooks published in the United States were important opinion makers in the nineteenth century, often joining the Bible as the main source of information about the world outside North America. The texts examined here are noteworthy for their static and pejorative treatment of non-American cultures and may be seen as playing a key role in forming isolationist and chauvinist American public opinion. They also played a role in reinforcing ideas about the proper niche for women in American society, even though it may seem at first that these books could not have had much influence on ideas about American women because they barely mentioned women, almost always relegating them to illustrations and captions. The few women depicted were usually characterized as ‘poor souls’ in distant lands worthy of pity. We discuss the national political context in which these writers (many of whom were women) were producing geography school texts, the social roles they were fulfilling by reinforcing such limited images of ‘foreign’ women, and the sources they may have used in their research. Furthermore, we demonstrate that much more could have been drawn ethnographically from the illustrations of women. The images of women in these geography schoolbooks reinforced the marginalization of women, particularly non-white and non-western women.     

The ‘return to Europe’: intellectual debates on the global place of Czechoslovakia in the interwar period

In the East Central European context, the phrase ‘return to Europe’ has been used mainly in the period after 1989, referring to political, economic and social changes as well as mental relocations towards a ‘Western’ system. However, debates about the national whereabouts on a mental map – whether one was part of Eastern, Central or Western Europe – also abounded in the years following the founding of the nation-states after the First World War. Concentrating on Czech discourses on the national whereabouts both in a European and a global perspective in the years preceding and following the great upheaval of 1918, this article traces the changing Czech national identity, ranging from a self-perception as a ‘small nation’ in the Habsburg Empire to a European power with colonial ambitions after the foundation of the Czechoslovak republic, and finally to the acknowledgement in the 1930s that these ambitions could not be met. The study is based on sources ranging from Czech travelogues mainly to Africa and Asia, but also South America, to economic writings and colonial brochures, which offer a broad range of debates on the role and location of both the Czech nation and the Czechoslovak state both in Europe and the world.     

“The Most Hated Woman in America”: Madalyn Murray and the Crusade against School Prayer

Throughout her life, Madalyn Murray (O'Hair) tried to obliterate the concept of God and Christianity. She first burst onto the national stage in the early 1960s with a lawsuit against the religious exercises her son was subjected to in a Baltimore, Maryland, public school. A colorful woman who flouted convention, Murray despised religion: “If people want to go to church and be crazy fools, that's their business. But I don't want them praying in ball parks, legislatures, courts and schools. … They can believe in their virgin birth and the rest of their mumbo jumbo, as long as they don't interfere with me, my children, my home, my job, my money or my intellectual views.” At a time when religious conviction was often equated with patriotism, Murray's public statements were regarded as heretical. The media naturally sought her out and as the public learned more about her, Murray was demonized as a belligerent, loudmouthed crank—“the most hated woman in America.” She was not, in fact, the first person to challenge school prayer successfully. That distinction belonged to a fellow atheist, Lawrence Roth, in Engel v. Vitale (1962), a highly unpopular decision against a state-devised prayer in New York. But unlike the reclusive Roth, Murray gravitated to the limelight and became the leader of American atheism in the late twentieth century.     

Alliance of the Hebrews, 1863–1875: The diaspora roots of an ultra-Orthodox proto-Zionist utopia in Palestine

In 1873, Akiva Yosef Schlesinger (1837–1922), a young Hungarian rabbi who combined ultra-Orthodox militancy with Jewish nationalism, published a remarkable booklet in Jerusalem that anticipated features of later Zionist utopias. It derived its original inspiration not from the active messianism that drove other religious “forerunners of Zionism,” but rather from harsh critiques of Orthodox society and culture in Hungary. Only later were Messianism and the Holy Land grafted on to the remedies he proposed for the ills of Orthodox society in the diaspora. In Palestine, his vision expanded to encompass a utopian blueprint for a revitalized, authentic Jewish society and a vision of a Jewish state.     

“The Gudeman of Ballangeich”: rambles in the afterlife of James V

This article concerns a corpus of legends in which James V of Scotland disguised himself as the “Gudeman of Ballangeich” in order to enjoy amorous adventures. The traditions may or may not be contemporary, and equally there is no certainty about whether they reflect actual behaviour (although kings in general, including the Stuart kings, have been known to disguise themselves for a variety of reasons, including pleasure). However, in later centuries, allusions to the “Gudeman of Ballangeich” were used by Scots to refer surreptitiously to a Scots king, by Jacobites to refer to a Stuart king, and members of The Beggar's Benison, an eighteenth‐century libertine club, used tales of James V to evoke memories of a better, pre‐Union, pre‐Calvinist Scotland of cultural creativity and sexual liberty. The legends of James V helped maintain the positive, popular image of this monarch as the “poor man's king” in the face of less kind judgements from contemporary elites and subsequent generations of historians.