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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities

Norms And Survival In The Heat Of War: Normative Versus Instrumental Rationalities And Survival Tactics In The Blockade Of Leningrad, Jeffrey K. Hass Dec 2011

Norms And Survival In The Heat Of War: Normative Versus Instrumental Rationalities And Survival Tactics In The Blockade Of Leningrad, Jeffrey K. Hass

Sociology and Anthropology Faculty Publications

When war challenges civilian survival, what shapes the balance between normative and instrumental rationalities in survival practices? Increasing desperation and uncertainty can lead civilians to focus on their own material interests and to violate norms in the name of survival or gain—to the detriment of the war effort and of other civilians. Do norms, boundaries against transgressions, and considerations of collective interests and identities persist, and, if so, through what mechanisms? Using diaries and recollections from the 872-day Blockade of Leningrad (1941–1944)—an extreme case of wartime desperation—this article examines how three forms of cultural embeddedness shape variation in the strength …


"Go In De Wilderness": Evading The "Eyes Of Others" In The Slave Songs, Erik Nielson Mar 2011

"Go In De Wilderness": Evading The "Eyes Of Others" In The Slave Songs, Erik Nielson

School of Professional and Continuing Studies Faculty Publications

This essay explores the trope of the wilderness in the slave spirituals, arguing that it functions to recreate symbolically the natural landscape into which slaves regularly took refuge in order to elude white surveillance. Drawing on a variety of sources, it considers the unique surveillance culture in the antebellum South, its effect on the everyday lives of the slaves, and the ways in which the slaves used their natural surroundings to avoid it. It then uses a close analysis of the song "Go in the Wilderness " as a point of departure for a broader discussion of the way the …


Imagining Jefferson And Hemings In Paris, Suzanne W. Jones Jan 2011

Imagining Jefferson And Hemings In Paris, Suzanne W. Jones

English Faculty Publications

In Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics, cultural critic Bell Hooks argues that "no one seems to know how to tell the story" of white men romantically involved with slave women because long ago another story supplanted it: "that story, invented by white men, is about the overwhelming desperate longing black men have to sexually violate the bodies of white women." Narratives of white exploitation and black solidarity have made it difficult to imagine consensual sex and impossible to imagine love of any kind across the color line in the plantation South. Hooks predicted that the suppressed story, if …


Book Review: The Mormon Menace: Violence And Anti-Mormonism In The Postbellum South, Terryl Givens Jan 2011

Book Review: The Mormon Menace: Violence And Anti-Mormonism In The Postbellum South, Terryl Givens

English Faculty Publications

“Whereas anti-Mormon violence had been characteristic of virtually every northern locale of Mormon settlement during the antebellum period,” Patrick Mason writes in his history of the subject, “violent assaults on Mormon missionaries became an increasingly southern practice in the years after the Civil War” (93). What distinguishes Mason’s book from other chapters in the sad saga of religious persecution is his excellent analysis of the complexities that result when political agendas, regional norms and interests, and theories on the proper role and limits of government all collide in the face of religious heterodoxy. Virtually all late nineteenth-century citizens and politicians …


The Identity Of Late Barbarians: Goths And Wine, Walter Stevenson Jan 2011

The Identity Of Late Barbarians: Goths And Wine, Walter Stevenson

Classical Studies Faculty Publications

Wine, symbol of civilization in the Mediterranean for millennia and still a profound cultural marker in Europe today, is not often associated with the Goths.1 But there is evidence allowing us to add this Northern European barbarian people to the tapestry of ancient wine production2 at the same time that they were beginning to cultivate the first European barbarian literature with the translation of the Bible into the Gothic language.


Surviving War And "History." Agency And Narratives Of The Blockade Of Leningrad, Jeffrey K. Hass Jan 2011

Surviving War And "History." Agency And Narratives Of The Blockade Of Leningrad, Jeffrey K. Hass

Sociology and Anthropology Faculty Publications

Кто или что творит историю? Этот вопрос не так наивен, как это может показаться. Во-первых, он затрагивает проблему самостоятельности выбора (agency) и детерминированности наших повседневных практик, воспроизводство структур и институтов. Ученые в области истории, социологии и политической науки (а также других дисциплин) делают свои предположения о том, насколько самостоятельны в своем выборе люди. Теоретики рационального выбора предполагают, что люди действуют свободно за исключением того, что все они подчиняются одному автоматическому правилу максимизации таинственного теоретического конструкта под названием «полезность»1. Другие ученые рассматривают исторические изменения и воспроизводство как результат существования институтов и структур: от материальных отношений и классовой динамики у К. Маркса …


Jane Addams: Spirit In Action By Louise W. Knight, Mari Boor Tonn Jan 2011

Jane Addams: Spirit In Action By Louise W. Knight, Mari Boor Tonn

Rhetoric and Communication Studies Faculty Publications

The common temptation to perceive greatness as imprinted at birth, however, is skillfully disabused in Louise Knight’s meticulous, insightful,and often poignant biography, Jane Addams: Spirit in Action, which traces the complicated odyssey of a well-heeled idealist—initially conflicted by her material privilege, disappointed by gender-codes confining her ambitions, and haunted by familial ghosts and duties—into the pantheon of U.S. political idols. Of particular interest to rhetorical scholars, Knight weaves into Addams’s arresting tale her early baptism into public speaking, writings that shaped her expression in public forums, rhetorical strategies she employed, and platform failures as well as successes. A prolific speaker, …


Narratives Of Development: Models, Spectacles, And Calculability In Nick Cullather's The Hungry World, Nicole Sackley Jan 2011

Narratives Of Development: Models, Spectacles, And Calculability In Nick Cullather's The Hungry World, Nicole Sackley

History Faculty Publications

To describe The Hungry World: America's Cold War Battle Against Poverty in Asia as a history of the green revolution does not begin to convey the ambition and rewards of Nick Cullather's new book. In less than three hundred pages, Hungry World offers a detailed diplomatic, intellectual, and cultural history that spans more than a century and three continents. Cullather deepens and revises our understanding of the "green revolution" as a history of the Rockefeller Foundation and its "transfer" of agricultural technology from Mexico to Asia, in part by showing how the green revolution's intellectual and political construction involved a …


The Village As Cold War Site: Experts, Development, And The History Of Rural Reconstruction, Nicole Sackley Jan 2011

The Village As Cold War Site: Experts, Development, And The History Of Rural Reconstruction, Nicole Sackley

History Faculty Publications

This article examines ‘the village’ as a category of development knowledge used by policymakers and experts to remake the ‘Third World’ during the Cold War. The idea of the village as a universal category of underdevelopment, capable of being remade by expert-led social reform, structured efforts to win the ‘hearts and minds’ of people from Asia to Latin America and Africa. Rooted in a transnational interwar movement for rural reconstruction, village projects were transformed in the 1950s and 1960s by a scientization of development that narrowed the range of experts in the field and by Cold War politics that increasingly …


Church Burnings, Eric S. Yellin Jan 2011

Church Burnings, Eric S. Yellin

History Faculty Publications

On 15 September 1963 a bomb exploded in the basement of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala. The ensuing fire and death of four little girls placed the violence of white supremacy on the front pages of the nation’s newspapers. It also entered the 16th Street Church into a long history of attacks against houses of worship in the American South. Though churches burn for any number of reasons, including accident and insurance fraud, church arson in southern culture has frequently been associated with a symbolic assault on a community’s core institution.


Peace Corps At 50: Bringing The World Back Home, Nicole Sackley Jan 2011

Peace Corps At 50: Bringing The World Back Home, Nicole Sackley

History Faculty Publications

Both the critics and defenders of the Peace Corps judge the organization on its ability to change other nations' views of the United States, either by offering technical assistance or by making friends for the United States in the world. What is missing from these debates is a frank acknowledgment that the Peace Corps teaches Americans as much as it serves the world. The organization's greatest value may be in "bringing the world back home" through its more than 200,000 former volunteers.


The United States On The Eve Of The Civil War, Edward L. Ayers Jan 2011

The United States On The Eve Of The Civil War, Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

The four-year war that eventually descended on the nation seemed impossible only months before it began. Powerful conflicts pulled the United States apart in the decades before 1860, but shared interests, cultures, and identities tied the country together, sometimes in new ways. So confident were they in the future that Americans expected that the forces of cohesion would triumph over the forces of division.


Mapping Time, Edward L. Ayers Jan 2011

Mapping Time, Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

Our tools for dealing with terrestrial space are well-developed and becoming more refined and ubiquitous every day. GIS has long established its dominion, Google permits us to range over the world and down to our very rooftops, and cars and cell phones locate us in space at every moment. It is hardly surprising that geography and mapping suddenly seem important in new ways. Historians have always loved maps and have long felt a kinship with geographers. The very first atlases, compiled six hundred years ago, were historical atlases. But space and time remain uncomfortable—if ever-present and ever-active—companions in the human …