The American Civil War Considered as a Bourgeois Revolution

2011 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 45-91 ◽  
Author(s):  
Neil Davidson

AbstractThe discussion of the American Civil War as a bourgeois revolution, reopened by John Ashworth’s recent work, needs to be based on a more explicit conceptualisation of what the category does, and does not, involve. This essay offers one such conceptualisation. It then deals with two key issues raised by the process of bourgeois revolution in the United States: the relationship between the War of Independence and the Civil War, and whether the nature of the South made conflict unavoidable. It then argues that the American Revolution is unique for two reasons: the non-feudal nature of Southern society and the fact that the Northern industrial bourgeoisie, unlike their European contemporaries, were still prepared to behave in a revolutionary way.

Author(s):  
Nigel Hall

In the period 1878 to 1883 there was heavy speculation in the Liverpool raw cotton market associated with a trader named Morris Ranger. Little has previously been written about Ranger and his background. Ranger was born in Germany and emigrated to the United States in 1855. He initially traded in tobacco but branched out into cotton during the American Civil War. He settled in Liverpool in 1870. His cotton speculations were enormous, but he fell bankrupt in 1883. The speculations associated with Ranger involved other Liverpool traders and drew heavy criticism from the spinning industry. The speculations played a part in a reorganisation of the Liverpool market and attempts to circumvent it, including the building of the Manchester Ship Canal.


Author(s):  
Alan Gallay

Indian slavery was neither fleeting nor secondary to the story of colonialism, imperialism, and economic exploitation in the Americas. Persisting for centuries, it both pre-dated African slavery in the Americas, and survived African slavery's abolition in the United States. Not until the American government's five-year program to eradicate Indian slavery in Colorado and Utah after the American Civil War did slavery officially end, though it likely persisted in several areas of the American West. This article examines the contours of Indian slavery in the Americas, its evolution and character, the varieties of labour systems implemented to control Indian labour and lives, and the existence of Indian slave trades that paralleled African slave trades.


Author(s):  
Thomas J. Brown

This introduction traces antebellum American skepticism about public monuments to the distrust of standing armies that was central to the ideology of the American Revolution. The popularity of Independence Day illustrates the iconoclasm of the early republic, which paralleled a widespread resistance to compulsory military service. Remembrance of the Civil War vastly increased the number of public monuments in the United States. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, these memorials became a vehicle for the militarization of American culture.


Author(s):  
Walter LaFeber

This chapter examines how the United States evolved as a world power during the period 1776–1945. It first considers how Americans set out after the War of Independence to establish a continental empire. Thomas Jefferson called this an ‘empire for liberty’, but by the early nineteenth century the United States had become part of an empire containing human slavery. Abraham Lincoln determined to stop the territorial expansion of this slavery and thus helped bring about the Civil War. The reunification of the country after the Civil War, and the industrial revolution which followed, turned the United States into the world’s leading economic power by the early twentieth century. The chapter also discusses Woodrow Wilson’s empire of ideology and concludes with an analysis of U.S. economic depression and the onset of the Cold War.


2013 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ricardo A. Herrera

Military service was the vehicle by which American soldiers from the War of Independence through the Civil War demonstrated and defined their beliefs about the nature of American republicanism and how they, as citizens and soldiers, were participants in the republican experiment. This military ethos of republicanism, an ideology that was both derivative and representative of the larger body of American political beliefs and culture, illustrates American soldiers’ faith in an inseparable connection between bearing arms on behalf of the United States and holding citizenship in it. Patterns of thought and behavior within the ethos were not exclusively military traits, but were characteristic of the larger patterns within American political culture.


1940 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 220-237 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alice Morrissey McDiarmid

When the present European war broke out and neutral rights came into the foreground of America’s anxieties, the President advised the public to study the conduct of the United States during the Civil War. That desperate struggle is inevitably the American touchstone for belligerent rights because, as Secretary of State Seward pointed out in 1863.It is… obvious that any belligerent claim which we make during the existing war, will be urged against us as an unanswerable precedent when [we] may ourselves be at peace.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily McKibbon

This thesis addresses the use of a set of photographs of returned prisoners of war (POWs) published both as tipped-in albumen prints and as wood engravings in six different publications from 1864 and 1865, including three versions of Narrative of Privations and Sufferings of United States Officers and Soldiers while Prisoners of War in the Hands of the rebel Authorities, one pamphlet, and two magazine articles, The discussion focuses on the dissemination of these images by the United States Sanitary Commission, the ways in which the photographs were presented in the individual publications that contained them, the decisions that the engravers made in translating the photographs into wood engravings and the visual codes that informed the photographs and the related engravings. The illustrated essay situates these photographs and wood engravings within the political context of the American Civil War and the history of photography in the 1860s. The dissemination of photographic imagery via wood engravings before the widespread use of halftone reproductions, beginning in the 1880s, is presently under researched. The paper encourages consideration of wood engravings when examining the history of photographic reproduction during this transitional time period.


2020 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ana T. Duggan ◽  
Edward C. Holmes ◽  
Hendrik N. Poinar

AbstractWe thank Brinkmann and colleagues for their correspondence and their further investigation into these American Civil War Era vaccination strains. Here, we summarize the difficulties and caveats of work with ancient DNA.


Author(s):  
Axel Körner

This book concludes with a discussion of the ways that America offered Italians an outlook on a wider range of possible futures, most of which were set in conditions that stood in stark contrast to Italy's own experiences. It examines the connection between the American Civil War and the Unification of Italy, noting how the Italians' experience of that war helped them to make the experience of their own Unification meaningful. It also describes the sudden change in Italian attitudes toward American modernity during the finesecolo, which coincided with the start of Italian mass migration to the United States. Finally, it considers how the assassination of Abraham Lincoln transformed political culture in the United States and views the event as a final example of cross-Atlantic exchange that illustrates how Italians explored what they knew about America for their own purposes, without having to imitate foreign prescriptions.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document