Browse

Aberration of Mind is a social history of suicide in the American South during the Civil War era. The book casts a wide net, focusing on Confederate soldiers and veterans and their families, and the enslaved and newly freed. The central question is, how did the Civil War and the suffering it generated shape suicidal thoughts and behavior? The author seeks to understand how the suffering experienced by southerners living in a war zone contributed to psychological distress that, in extreme cases, led southerners to contemplate or act on suicidal thoughts. The unprecedented human toll the war took on southerners created a psychological crisis that has not been fully explored. Drawing on sources like letters, diaries, military service records, coroners’ reports, and asylum patient case histories, the work recovers myriad stories, previously hidden, of individuals exhibiting suicidal activity or aberrant psychological behavior linked to the war and its aftermath. In addition to expanding our understanding of the full human costs of the Civil War, the book concludes that southerners transformed the meaning of suicide from an act of cowardice to a heroic symbol of white southern identity. The book fills a neglected niche in an otherwise crowded field of Civil War scholarship – the psychological impact of war and defeat on southerners.

Through the contextualized biography of a previously unknown African American immigrant to Africa, this book illuminates slavery and freedom in multiple parts of the nineteenth century Atlantic world. A decade before the American Civil War, James Churchwill Vaughan (1828-93) set out to fulfill his formerly enslaved father’s dying wish: that he should leave his home in South Carolina for a new life in Africa. Over the next forty years, Vaughan was taken captive, fought in African wars, built and rebuilt a livelihood, and led a revolt against white racism, finally becoming a successful merchant and founder of a wealthy, educated, and politically active family in Lagos, Nigeria. Tracing Vaughan’s journey from South Carolina to Liberia to several parts of Yorubaland (present-day southwestern Nigeria), the book documents this “free” man’s struggle to find economic and political autonomy in an era when freedom was not clear and unhindered anywhere for people of African descent. By following Vaughan’s transatlantic journeys and comparing his experiences to those of his parents, contemporaries, and descendants in Nigeria and South Carolina, the book reveals the expansive reach of slavery, the ambiguities of freedom, and the surprising ways that Africa, rather than America, offered new opportunities for people of the African diaspora.

In the decades before the U.S. Civil War, the city of Boston evolved from a dilapidated, haphazardly planned, and architecturally stagnant provincial town into a booming and visually impressive metropolis. In an effort to remake Boston into the "Athens of America," neighborhoods were leveled, streets straightened, and an ambitious set of architectural ordinances enacted. However, even as residents reveled in a vibrant new landscape of landmark buildings, art galleries, parks, and bustling streets, the social and sensory upheaval of city life also gave rise to a widespread fascination with the unseen. Focusing his analysis between 1820 and 1860, Justin T. Clark traces how the effort to impose moral and social order on the city also inspired many—from Transcendentalists to clairvoyants and amateur artists—to seek out more ethereal visions of the infinite and ideal beyond the gilded paintings and glimmering storefronts. By elucidating the reciprocal influence of two of the most important developments in nineteenth-century American culture—the spectacular city and visionary culture—Clark demonstrates how the nineteenth-century city is not only the birthplace of modern spectacle but also a battleground for the freedom and autonomy of the spectator.

In this in-depth interdisciplinary study, Jenny Tone-Pah-Hote reveals how Kiowa people drew on the tribe's rich history of expressive culture to assert its identity at a time of profound challenge. Examining traditional forms such as beadwork, metalwork, painting, and dance, Tone-Pah-Hote argues that their creation and exchange were as significant to the expression of Indigenous identity and sovereignty as formal political engagement and policymaking. These cultural forms, she argues, were sites of contestation as well as affirmation, as Kiowa people used them to confront external pressures, express national identity, and wrestle with changing gender roles and representations. Combatting a tendency to view Indigenous cultural production primarily in terms of resistance to settler-colonialism, Tone-Pah-Hote expands existing work on Kiowa culture by focusing on acts of creation and material objects that mattered as much for the nation's internal and familial relationships as for relations with those outside the tribe. In the end, she finds that during a time of political struggle and cultural dislocation at the turn of the twentieth century, the community's performative and expressive acts had much to do with the persistence, survival, and adaptation of the Kiowa nation.

Americans wrote fiercely during their civil war. War surprised, devastated, and opened up imagination, taking hold of Americans’ words as well as their homes and families. The personal diary—wildly ragged yet rooted in day following day—was one place Americans wrote their war. Diaries, then, have become one of the best-known, most-used sources for exploring the life of the mind in a war-torn place and time. Delving into several familiar wartime diaries kept by women of the southern slave-owning class, Steven Stowe recaptures their motivations to keep the days close even as war tore apart the brutal system of slavery that had benefited them. Whether the diarists recorded thoughts about themselves, their opinions about men, or their observations about slavery, race, and warfare, Stowe shows how these women, by writing the immediate moment, found meaning in a changing world. In studying the inner lives of these unsympathetic characters, Stowe also explores the importance—and the limits—of historical empathy as a condition for knowing the past. He demonstrates how the plain, first-draft text of a diary can offer new ways to make sense of the world in which these Confederate women lived.

This is the story of how Americans attempted to define what it meant to be a citizen of the United States, at a moment of fracture in the republic's history. As Erik Mathisen demonstrates, prior to the Civil War, American national citizenship amounted to little more than a vague bundle of rights. But during the conflict, citizenship was transformed. Ideas about loyalty emerged as a key to citizenship, and this change presented opportunities and profound challenges aplenty. Confederate citizens would be forced to explain away their act of treason, while African Americans would use their wartime loyalty to the Union as leverage to secure the status of citizens during Reconstruction. In The Loyal Republic, Mathisen sheds new light on the Civil War, American emancipation, and a process in which Americans came to a new relationship with the modern state. Using the Mississippi Valley as his primary focus and charting a history that traverses both sides of the battlefield, Mathisen offers a striking new history of the Civil War and its aftermath, one that ushered in nothing less than a revolution in the meaning of citizenship in the United States.

Nathaniel Bowditch (1773-1838) was a mathematician, astronomer, navigator, seafarer, and business executive whose Enlightenment-inspired perspectives shaped nineteenth-century capitalism while transforming American life more broadly. His scientific publications and best-selling New American Practical Navigator earned him praise from Thomas Jefferson as a “meteor in the hemisphere,” but it was his broader mathematical vision that inspired his creation of that cornerstone of capitalism, that touchstone of modern life, the impersonal bureaucracy. Enthralled with the precision of numbers and the regularity of the solar system, Bowditch operated and represented antebellum New England's most powerful financial institution as a clockwork mechanism. Elite Bostonians criticized Bowditch as a parvenu when he reformed Boston’s cultural and educational institutions, most notably Harvard University, along the same lines, but ultimately they embraced his approach for its political, ideological, and psychological advantages, and Bowditch himself as a valued cultural ornament. Though ostensibly operating with the impartiality guaranteed by impersonality, in reality these institutions functioned in the context of elite social networks, magnifying patrician power. The book argues for the transformative power of the quantitative sciences on capitalist development and the modern experience, while illuminating how powerful capitalists consolidated their power and confronted the paradox of a republican aristocracy. Bowditch’s life at sea, in science, and among urban elites also illuminates the provincial’s encounter with the exotic, the American’s challenge of gaining entry into the international Republic of Letters, and the patrician’s turn from vertical ties of patronage to horizontal ties of privilege.

Sin City North examines the history of illicit economies in the Detroit-Windsor borderland during the post-World War II period. Karibo uncovers a thriving illegal border culture in the bars, brothels, dance halls, and jazz clubs that emerged around the busiest crossing point between the United States and Canada. Prostitution and illegal drug economies gained renewed importance at a time when suburbanization, industrial decline, and racial segregation were re-shaping the region. For many residents, vice industries provided much-needed income in the fledgling labor market. Yet, the increasing visibility of illicit economies on city streets—and the growing number of African American and French Canadian women working in illegal trades—provoked strong reactions from moral reformers. Framing their efforts within the context of the Cold War, these interest groups worked together across the border in order to eliminate so-called immoral outsiders from their communities. This critical study demonstrates that struggles over the meaning of vice evolved into much more than defining the legal status of particular activities; they were also crucial avenues through which men and women attempted to define productive citizenship and community in the postwar urban borderland.

Thomas Nast (1840–1902), the founding father of American political cartooning, is perhaps best known for his cartoons portraying political parties as the Democratic donkey and the Republican elephant. Nast's legacy also includes a trove of other political cartoons, his successful attack on the machine politics of Tammany Hall in 1871, and his wildly popular illustrations of Santa Claus for Harper's Weekly magazine. Throughout his career, his drawings provided a pointed critique that forced readers to confront the contradictions around them. This biography focuses not just on Nast's political cartoons for Harper's but also on his place within the complexities of Gilded Age politics and highlights the many contradictions in his own life: he was an immigrant who attacked immigrant communities, a supporter of civil rights who portrayed black men as foolish children in need of guidance, and an enemy of corruption and hypocrisy who idolized Ulysses S. Grant. He was a man with powerful friends, including Mark Twain, and powerful enemies, including William M. “Boss” Tweed. The author interprets Nast's work, explores his motivations and ideals, and illuminates Nast's lasting legacy on American political culture.

From the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 to the Immigration Act of 1924 to Japanese American internment during World War II, the United States has a long history of anti-Asian policies. But Lon Kurashige demonstrates that despite widespread racism, Asian exclusion was not the product of an on-going national consensus; it was a subject of fierce debate. This book complicates the exclusion story by examining the organized and well-funded opposition to discrimination that involved some of the most powerful public figures in American politics, business, religion, and academia. In recovering this opposition, Kurashige explains the rise and fall of exclusionist policies through an unstable and protracted political rivalry that began in the 1850s with the coming of Asian immigrants, extended to the age of exclusion from the 1880s until the 1960s, and since then shaped the memory of past discrimination. In this first book-length analysis of both sides of the debate, exclusion-era policies are more than just enactments of racism; they are also catalysts for U.S.-Asian cooperation and the basis for the 21^st century’s tightly integrated Pacific world.

How did Civil War soldiers endure the brutal and unpredictable existence of army life? This question is at the heart of Peter S. Carmichael’s sweeping study of men at war. Digging deeply into soldier letters, Carmichael focuses not on what soldiers thought, but rather on how they thought. He resists the idea that there was “a common” experience but looks into their own words to find shared threads in soldiers’ experiences.

Material objects lie at the crux of understanding individual and social relationships throughout history, and the Civil War generation is no exception. Before, during, and after the war, Americans from all walks of life created, used, revered, exploited, discarded, mocked, and destroyed objects for countless reasons. These objects had symbolic significance for millions of people. The essays in this volume consider a wide range of material objects, including weapons, Revolutionary artifacts, landscapes, books, vaccine matter, human bodies, houses, clothing, and documents. Together, the contributors argue that material objects can shed new light on the social, economic, and cultural history of the conflict. This book will fundamentally reshape our understanding of the war.

Across the borderlands of the early American northeast, New England, New France, and Native nations deployed women with surprising frequency to the front lines of wars that determined control of North America. Far from serving as passive helpmates in a private, domestic sphere, women assumed wartime roles as essential public actors, wielding muskets, hatchets, and makeshift weapons while fighting for their families, communities, and nations. Revealing the fundamental importance of martial womanhood in this era, Gina M. Martino places borderlands women in a broad context of empire, cultural exchange, violence, and nation building, demonstrating how women's war making was embedded in national and imperial strategies of expansion and resistance. As Martino shows, women's participation in warfare was not considered transgressive; rather it was integral to traditional gender ideologies of the period, supporting rather than subverting established systems of gender difference.In returning these forgotten women to the history of the northeastern borderlands, this study challenges scholars to reconsider the flexibility of gender roles and reveals how women's participation in transatlantic systems of warfare shaped institutions, polities, and ideologies in the early modern period and the centuries that followed.