History Commons^™

Conjugal Relation: The Shakers'question For Frontier Kentucky, Peter Hawes

James W. Jackson Award for Excellence in Library Research in the Social Sciences

At its heart, this is a case fraught with pain and loss that is not unique to this particular period in frontier Kentucky. Although the presence of the Shakers, and a community’s reaction to them, imbue this case with meaning historically, this divorce also speaks to unchanging questions about the nature of conjugal relation in the face of an uncertain eternity. This is a case that reveals something about broader anti-Shakerism, but it also demonstrates that for many, the broader contexts of religious change and budding institutions were not perceptible factors in their experience of life on the frontier. With …

Warriors In Drag: Performing Gender And Remaking Men In Prisoner Of War Theater, Yücel Yanikdağ

History Faculty Publications

This chapter examines Ottoman prison camp theaters in Egypt, from where more sources have survived. With the exception of some passing mentions in scholarship, entertainment in general, and theatre in particular in the Ottoman military is a neglected subject. Scholars of European history studying troop and prisoner of war entertainment during the two world wars have produced a noteworthy amount of material. Many have even focused specifically on soldiers’ cross-dressing or female impersonation in theater on various fronts and prisoner of war camps. Older scholarship viewed female impersonation as mere entertainment, but more recent studies have taken up gender related …

How The Nation’S Largest Minority Became White: Race Politics And The Disability Rights Movement, 1970–1980, Jennifer L. Erkulwater

Political Science Faculty Publications

Scholars point out a tension between racial justice and disability rights activism. Although racial minorities are more likely to become disabled than whites, both disability activism and the historiography of disability politics tends tend to focus on the experience and achievements of whites. This article examines how disability rights activists of the 1970s sought to build a united movement of all people with disabilities and explains why these efforts were unable to overcome cleavages predicated on race. Activists drew from New Left ideas of community and self-help as well as the New Right rhetoric of market freedoms to articulate a …

Singapore: Commemoration And Reconciliation, Tze M. Loo

History Faculty Publications

Commemorations are in general highly political acts; in East Asia, the period around the anniversary of Japan's surrender on August 15 has, for some time now, become highly politicized. It is a moment in which postwar Japan performs its attitude toward its war responsibility and aggressive acts-performances that are invariably evaluated for their sincerity, or lack thereof. At the same time, nation states who suffered Japan's wartime aggres­sions use the period to present their understanding of the history of Japan's wartime conduct and, as is often the case, to include a criticism of the per­ceived inadequacies of Japan's contrition. The …

Scandal And Mass Politics: Buganda's 1941 Nnamasole Crisis, Carol Summers

History Faculty Publications

Summers discusses Buganda's 1941 Nnamasole crisis following the Christian marriage of Irene Namaganda, Buganda's queen mother who was pregnant with her slightly older lover. Namaganda's Christian marriage was powerfully scandalous, profoundly violating expectations associated with marriage and royal office. The scandal produced a political crisis that toppled Buganda's prime minister, pushed his senior allies from power, deposed the queen mother, exiled her husband, and changed Buganda's political landscape. The scandal launched a new era of public mobilization and protest that took Buganda's politics beyond the realm of deals between the oligarchy and British elites, and into public gossip, newspapers and …

"Authentic Tidings": What Wordsworth Gave To William James, David E. Leary

Psychology Faculty Publications

It is widely recognized that William James had a profound and pervasive impact upon literary writers, works, styles, and genres, not to mention upon the encompassing frameworks of modernism and post-modernism, throughout the 20th century. Much less recognized is the impact of literature upon James’s life and work, whether in psychology or philosophy. This article looks at the influence of one particular author, William Wordsworth, primarily through his long 1814 poem The Excursion, from which James drew “authentic tidings” that helped him weather some early storms and create his distinctive way of thinking about the human mind and its …

Adolescence Versus Politics: Metaphors In Late Colonial Uganda, Carol Summers

History Faculty Publications

This article discusses the British deployment of metaphors of adolescence in late colonial Uganda. Topics include the psychological, physiological, sociological and anthropological implications of a modern stage of adolescent life, the presence and persistence of ideas of adolescence in the country, and British engagement in developmental politics and institutions.

Anchors, Habitus, And Practices Besieged By War: Women And Gender In The Blockade Of Leningrad, Jeffrey K. Hass

Sociology and Anthropology Faculty Publications

As war challenges survival and social relations, how do actors alter and adapt dispositions and practices? To explore this question, I investigate women's perceptions of normal relations, practices, status, and gendered self in an intense situation of wartime survival, the Blockade of Leningrad (1941–1944), an 872-day ordeal that demographically feminized the city. Using Blockade diaries for data on everyday life, perceptions, and practices, I show how women's gendered skills and habits of breadseeking and caregiving (finding scarce resources and providing aid) were key to survival and helped elevate their sense of status. Yet this did not entice rethinking “gender.” To …

Case Study Of The Eastern State Hospital As Evidence Of English Influence On American Ideas About Mental Illness, Grace Devries

James W. Jackson Award for Excellence in Library Research in the Social Sciences

Grace DeVries, Class of 2016 at the University of Richmond, received the James W. Jackson Award for Excellence in the Social Sciences. Her research paper is entitled, Case Study of the Eastern State Hospital as Evidence of English Influence on American Ideas about Mental Illness.

War, Fields, And Competing Economies Of Death. Lessons From The Blockade Of Leningrad, Jeffrey K. Hass

Sociology and Anthropology Faculty Publications

War can create a massive amount of death while also straining the capacity of states and civilians to cope with disposing of the dead. This paper argues that such moments exacerbate contradictions between three fields and “economies” (logics of interaction and exchange) – a political, market, and moral economy of disposal – in which order and control, commodification and opportunism, and dignity are core logics. Each logic and economy, operating in its own field, provides an interpretation of the dead that emerges from field logics of normal organization, status, and meanings of subjects (as legal entities, partners in negotiation, and …

Ugandan Politics World War Ii (1939-1949), Carol Summers

History Faculty Publications

World War II shaped Uganda's postwar politics through local understandings of global war.¹ Individually and collectively Ugandans saw the war as an opportunity rather than simply a crisis. During the War, the acquired wealth and demonstrated loyalty to a stressed British empire, inverting paternalistic imperial relations and investing loyalty and money in ways they expected would be reciprocated with political and economic rewards. For the 77,000 Ugandan enlisted soldiers and for the civilians who grew coffee and cotton, contributed money and organizational skills, and followed the war news, the war was not a desperate struggle for survival. Ideological aspects …

Empire's Children: Child Emigration, Welfare, And The Decline Of The British World, 1869-1967 (Book Review), Christopher Bischof

History Faculty Publications

Empire’s Children is far from the now well-worn tale of imperial decline. It locates the shifting fortunes of the child emigration movement at the heart of the reconfiguration of identities, political economies, and nationalisms in Britain, Canada, Australia, and Rhodesia. Though Britons eventually had to face the diminishing importance of Britishness as either a cultural or racial ideal in the eyes of even their settler colonies, on the whole the story of the child emigration movement’s shifting fortunes testifies to the malleability and resilience of Britishness.

The Sodomy Trial Of Nicholas Sension, 1677: Documents And Teaching Guide, Richard Godbeer, Douglas L. Winiarski

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

The sodomy trial of Nicholas Sension in 1677 has long fascinated historians, in part because the surviving documentation from this particular case is exceptionally full and richly detailed, but also because it challenges long-held assumptions about attitudes toward sodomy in early America. The trial records cast light not only on the history of sexuality but also on a broad range of themes relating to seventeenth-century New England’s society and culture. Yet until now no complete edition of the documents from Sension’s trial has appeared in print. This edition is intended primarily for use in undergraduate courses. It includes a substantial …

Diagnosing The Third World: The “Map Doctor” And The Spatialized Discourses Of Disease And Development In The Cold War, Timothy Barney

Rhetoric and Communication Studies Faculty Publications

In the early 1950s, the American Geographical Society, in collaboration with the United States Armed Forces and international pharmaceutical corporations, instituted a Medical Geography program whose main initiative was the Atlas of Disease, a map series that documented the global spread of various afflictions such as polio, malaria, even starvation. The Atlas of Disease, through the stewardship of its director, Jacques May, a French-American physician trained in colonial Hanoi, evidenced the ways in which cartography was rhetorically appropriated in the Cold War as a powerful visual discourse of development and modernization, wherein both the data content of the maps and …

An Assignment From Our Students: An Undergraduate View Of The Historical Profession, Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

The students confidently measured the world through what they knew, and what they knew was popular culture. That culture, often electronic in one way or another, was more pervasive and powerful than anything else they had experienced, including school. The only history books most had seen were high school textbooks, books they universally detested. The students, not surprisingly, liked the idea that historical understanding arrives in many forms

Spirits Of The Cold War: Contesting Worldviews In The Classical Age Of American Security Strategy. By Ned O’Gorman, Timothy Barney

Rhetoric and Communication Studies Faculty Publications

In February 1952, Congressman O. K. Armstrong of Missouri was invited to give a keynote speech at a convention called the Conference on Psychological Strategy in the Cold War, where he declared a maxim that, by that time, likely did not raise many eyebrows: “Our primary weapons will not be guns, but ideas . . . and truth itself.” Rep. Armstrong spoke from experience—a few months before, he had made national headlines at a peace treaty signing in San Francisco by blindsiding Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko with a map locating every secret Gulag prison camp. Calling the Soviet …

Queen Elizabeth’S Leadership Abroad: The Netherlands In The 1570s, Peter Iver Kaufman

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

In 1576, after Edmund Grindal, archbishop of Canterbury, presumed to lecture Queen Elizabeth on the importance of preaching and on her duty to listen to such lectures, his influence diminished precipitously, and leadership of the established English church fell to Bishop Aylmer. Grindal’s friends on the queen’s Privy Council, “forward” Calvinists (or ultra-Protestants), were powerless to save him from the consequences of his indiscretion, which damaged the ultras’ other initiatives’ chances of success. This paper concerns one of those initiatives. From the late 1560s, they urged their queen “actively” to intervene in the Dutch wars. They collaborated with Calvinists on …

A Personal Look At America's Foremost Communist, Laura Browder

English Faculty Publications

There is nothing quite like the experience of being in the beautiful, sunlit special collections reading room on the top floor of Bird Library—especially when one is about to dive into 86 meticulously cataloged boxes of family history. I was there to do research for a documentary about my grandfather, Earl Browder, as well as a joint biography of him and my grandmother, Raissa Berkmann Browder—a task that was almost overwhelming to contemplate.

After all, my grandfather Earl Browder was the head of the American Communist Party (CPUSA) during its most influential period—the Great Depression. He coined the slogan “Communism …

Revisions In Red, Laura Browder

English Faculty Publications

In this article the author reflects on her experience of researching the history of her grandfather Earl Browder, a former leader in the U.S. Communist Party, and exploring his significance both in historical and personal terms. She comments on her research regarding his status as a spy of the Soviet Union, share her views on her father's reluctance to discuss his past, and notes Browder's campaigns for President of the U.S. in the 1930s.

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 …

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, …

Church Burnings, Eric S. Yellin

History Faculty Publications

On 15 September 1963 a bomb exploded in the basement of the 16^th 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 16^th 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.

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 …

Turning Toward Place, Space, And Time, Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

A critical geography and a new historicism have reoriented many humanists and social science disciplines. Like the spatial turn, the temporal turn now grounds the analysis of everything from literature to sociology in new kinds of contexts. The exciting challenge before us now is integrating those new perspectives, taking advantage of what they have to teach us.

Lincoln's America 2.0, Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

For most people at the time, far from battles or capitals, the Civil War arrived in long gray columns of text. A new system of telegraph stations, railroads, and press organizations spread words with unprecedented speed and in enormous quantity. Reports form the battlefield poured out in brief messages and long torrents, editorials commenting on every event and utterance. Even generals and presidents understood the shape and meaning of the Civil War through print.

The Experience Of War And The Construction Of Normality. Lessons From The Blockade Of Leningrad, Jeffrey K. Hass

Sociology and Anthropology Faculty Publications

In this essay I use the example of the Blockade of Leningrad - an extreme example of the Soviet experience of World War II, and an extreme example of the experience of war generally - to address two issues. The first is a more general, theoretical issue: the importance of war to the construction of political and social normality and practices. Political science and sociology have examined the impact of war on structures and institutions, such as states or gender roles and relations; but the impact of war on meanings and meaning systems is addressed only empirically, often without much …

Personal Memoirs Of U.S. Grant, And Alternative Accounts Of Lee's Surrender At Appomattox, George R. Goethals

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

It is somewhat troubling that as we try to understand leaders and leadership we are confronted with the problem that our knowledge of central historical events is highly subject to the differing perspectives of various scholars. What can we know? How can we know it?

This chapter considers these questions by examining the implications of a particular variation on the general problem of differing historical perspectives. That is, how do we weigh autobiographical accounts of events by the actors themselves? Is there something distinctive about these accounts, or are they best thought of as just one more rendering of history, …

Mccarthy Hearings, Paul Achter

Rhetoric and Communication Studies Faculty Publications

What have become known as the “McCarthy hearings” refer to 36 days of televised investigative hearings led by Senator Joseph McCarthy in 1954. After first calling hearings to investigate possible espionage at the Army Signal Corps Engineering Laboratories in Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, the junior senator turned his communist-chasing committee’s attention to an altogether different matter, the question of whether the Army had promoted a dentist who had refused to answer questions for the Loyalty and Security Board. The hearings reached their climax when McCarthy suggested that the Army’s lawyer, Joseph Welch, had employed a man who at one time …

The Creative Intelligentsia And The Rise Of Official Russocentrism Under Stalin, David Brandenberger

History Faculty Publications

In the mid-to-late 1930s, Soviet society witnessed a major ideological about-face as party propaganda and mass culture assumed an increasingly patriotic, Russo-centric orientation. Heroes, imagery, and legends from the Russian national past were deployed to bolster the legitimacy of the Soviet state and provide a complement to the reigning Marxist-Leninist ideology, then in a trend threatening to eclipse the stress on revolutionary class consciousness that had characterized the Soviet experiment for nearly two decades.

This shift away from proletarian internationalism toward Russo-centric etatism has been a source of considerable scholarly controversy. Some have linked this phenomenon to nationalist sympathies within …

Stalin's Holy War: Religion, Nationalism, And Alliance Politics, 1941–1945 (Book Review), David Brandenberger

History Faculty Publications

The Kremlin tête-à-tête and the iconoclastic revival of the Russian Orthodox Church that followed have long intrigued those writing about ideological change in the USSR under Stalin. Many believe that the concessions to the church were an exigency of war designed to increase the party’s ability to rally support from among even the most reluctant members of Soviet society. Others consider the revival of the church to have been part of a more thoroughgoing Russiªcation of the USSR in the mid- to late 1930s that rehabilitated aspects of the Russian national past for mobilizational purposes well before 1941. In Stalin’s …