Popular Historical Fiction

2020 ◽  
pp. 44-71
Author(s):  
Amanda Brickell Bellows
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Short Stories ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Historical Fiction ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Slavery ◽  
Thomas Nelson Page ◽  
Joel Chandler Harris ◽  
Emancipation Era

During the post-emancipation era in Russia and the United States, authors created nostalgic historical fiction that romanticized Russian serfdom and American slavery. This chapter compares the short stories of white, Southern authors Thomas Nelson Page and Joel Chandler Harris with the mass-oriented historical fiction of Russian aristocrats Grigorii Danilevskii, Vsevolod Solov’ev, Evgenii Salias, and Evgenii Opochinin. In their literature, these privileged authors created narratives targeting middle-class readers that deliberately misrepresented the histories of slavery and serfdom during a period characterized by the acquisition of critical new rights by peasants and African Americans.

Selling Servitude, Captivating Consumers

2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 72-112
Author(s):  
Amanda Brickell Bellows
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Racial Differences ◽  
The United States ◽  
Marketing Strategies ◽  
Urban Migration ◽  
Marketing Tactics ◽  
Important Distinction ◽  
Migration Patterns ◽  
American Slavery ◽  
Emancipation Era

After the abolition of Russian serfdom and American slavery in 1861 and 1865, respectively, businesses played an important role in molding popular attitudes about post-emancipation integration processes in Russia and the United States through visual representations of serfs, peasants, slaves, and freedpeople in advertisements. Both American and Russian companies developed parallel marketing strategies by constructing advertisements that depicted African Americans and peasants in positions of servitude, which appealed to consumers who were nostalgic for an idealized rural, pre-industrial and pre-emancipation era during an age of rapid industrialization, urbanization, and geographic expansion. But Russian and American companies also pursued divergent marketing tactics that beg further consideration. While US businesses predominantly disparaged African Americans in racialized caricatures, Russian businesses sometimes depicted peasants in positions of equality relative to other citizens. What accounts for this disparity? This article examines newspaper ads, posters, broadsides, and ephemera from collections at Russian and American archives, and argues that apart from perceived racial differences in the case of US ads, dissimilarities between Russian and American population compositions, urban migration patterns, and distinct notions of national identity also explain this important distinction.

Heresy Is the Only True Religion: Richard Lynch Garner (1848–1920), A Southern Freethinker in Africa and America

2013 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-94 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeremy Rich
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Southern Appalachia ◽  
William Cowper ◽  
Missionary Work ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Biological Differences

Atheists are not the first group that comes to mind when one commonly thinks of late nineteenth-century southern Appalachia. Richard Lynch Garner (1848–1920), a self-taught scientist from southwestern Virginia who moved to southern Gabon in 1892, sought to bind together conventional southern middle-class views on race and manhood with religious skepticism. Studies of unbelief in the United States have almost entirely ignored the South as well as the ways that freethinkers engaged with race, thereby leaving out men like Garner. Though Garner drew on northern and midwestern freethinkers like Robert Ingersoll for critiques of Christianity, he also saw himself as a defender of paternal southern views of race from northerners and from Christian missionaries. Still, he distanced himself from other southern agnostics, especially the race-baiting William Cowper Brann, by presenting himself as a fatherly protector of Africans and African Americans. Garner used his observations on Gabonese societies to critique colonialism and missionary work as denials of biological differences between the races. Interestingly, Garner contended that Gabonese spirituality was materialist and lacked a notion of divinity. Ultimately, Garner downplayed his freethinking and his anti-colonialism in his published work—probably to ensure his ability to continue his research in colonial Africa and perhaps to better market himself in the United States.

The Classics and American Political Rhetoric in a Democratic and Romantic Age

2017 ◽  
pp. 289-312
Author(s):  
Carl J. Richard
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Political Rhetoric ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Leaders ◽  
Classical Education ◽  
White Males ◽  
Western Frontier

This essay demonstrates that during the same period when new grammar schools, academies, and colleges were introducing the Greek and Roman classics to the western frontier of the United States, to a rising middle class, to girls and women, and to African Americans, states were expanding the voting population to include all free adult white males. While the spread of manhood suffrage led to a more democratic style of politics, the expansion of classical education ensured that American speeches continued to bristle with classical allusions. Political leaders took advantage of every opportunity to showcase their classical learning, even to broader audiences they hoped might respect, if not fully comprehend, their allusions. Classically trained, American politicians lived a double rhetorical life, attempting to assure common voters of their ability to empathize with their concerns while demonstrating their wisdom and virtue to constituents of all classes through their knowledge of the classics.

Middle-Class Victorian Street Arabs: Modern Re-creations of the Baker Street Irregulars

2012 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dominic Cheetham
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Children's Literature ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Street Children ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
The United States ◽  
Sherlock Holmes ◽  
Upward Shift

In three of Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories there are brief appearances of the Baker Street Irregulars, a group of ‘street Arabs’ who help Holmes with his investigations. These children have been re-imagined in modern children's literature in at least twenty-seven texts in a variety of media and with writers from both Britain and the United States. All these modern stories show a marked upward shift in the class of the Irregulars away from the lower working class of Conan-Doyle's originals. The shift occurs through attributing middle-class origins to the leaders of the Irregulars, through raising the class of the Irregulars in general, and through giving the children life environments more comfortable, safe, and financially secure than would have been possible for late-Victorian street children. Because of the variety in texts and writers, it is argued that this shift is not a result of the conscious political or ideological positions of individual writers, but rather reflects common unconscious narrative choices. The class-shift is examined in relation to the various pressures of conventions in children's literature, concepts of audience, and common concepts of class in society.

Questions

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
James L. Gibson ◽  
Michael J. Nelson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Legal System ◽  
Public Support ◽  
The United States ◽  
Future Research ◽  
White Americans ◽  
Two Factors ◽  
The U.S

We have investigated the differences in support for the U.S. Supreme Court among black, Hispanic, and white Americans, catalogued the variation in African Americans’ group attachments and experiences with legal authorities, and examined how those latter two factors shape individuals’ support for the U.S. Supreme Court, that Court’s decisions, and for their local legal system. We take this opportunity to weave our findings together, taking stock of what we have learned from our analyses and what seem like fruitful paths for future research. In the process, we revisit Positivity Theory. We present a modified version of the theory that we hope will guide future inquiry on public support for courts, both in the United States and abroad.

Dissent in the Atlantic World, 1787–1830

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Carté Engel
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African Americans ◽  
First Amendment ◽  
Church And State ◽  
State Level ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Population ◽  
Simple Fact ◽  
General Role

The very term ‘Dissenter’ became problematic in the United States, following the passing of the First Amendment. The formal separation of Church and state embodied in the First Amendment was followed by the ending of state-level tax support for churches. None of the states established after 1792 had formal religious establishments. Baptists, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and Methodists accounted for the majority of the American population both at the beginning and end of this period, but this simple fact masks an important compositional shift. While the denominations of Old Dissent declined relatively, Methodism grew quickly, representing a third of the population by 1850. Dissenters thus faced several different challenges. Primary among these were how to understand the idea of ‘denomination’ and also the more general role of institutional religion in a post-establishment society. Concerns about missions, and the positions of women and African Americans are best understood within this context.

Religion, Race, and Humanism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony B. Pinn
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Richard Wright ◽  
Institutional Development ◽  
The United States ◽  
Unitarian Universalist ◽  
Racial Injustice ◽  
History Of ◽  
Lorraine Hansberry

This chapter explores the history of humanism within African American communities. It positions humanist thinking and humanism-inspired activism as a significant way in which people of African descent in the United States have addressed issues of racial injustice. Beginning with critiques of theism found within the blues, moving through developments such as the literature produced by Richard Wright, Lorraine Hansberry, and others, to political activists such as W. E. B. DuBois and A. Philip Randolph, to organized humanism in the form of African American involvement in the Unitarian Universalist Association, African Americans for Humanism, and so on, this chapter presents the historical and institutional development of African American humanism.

Epic Cruelty: On Post-Pandemic Performance

2021 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-136
Author(s):  
Rick Mitchell
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
United States ◽  
African Americans ◽  
The United States ◽  
California State University ◽  
The State ◽  
State University ◽  
White Supremacist ◽  
Systemic Racism ◽  
Disaster Capitalism

As today’s catastrophic Covid-19 pandemic exacerbates ongoing crises, including systemic racism, rising ethno-nationalism, and fossil-fuelled climate change, the neoliberal world that we inhabit is becoming increasingly hostile, particularly for the most vulnerable. Even in the United States, as armed white-supremacist, pro-Trump forces face off against protesters seeking justice for African Americans, the hostility is increasingly palpable, and often frightening. Yet as millions of Black Lives Matter protesters demonstrated after the brutal police killing of George Floyd, the current, intersecting crises – worsened by Trump’s criminalization of anti-racism protesters and his dismissal of science – demand a serious, engaged, response from activists as well as artists. The title of this article is meant to evoke not only the state of the unusually cruel moment through which we are living, but also the very different approaches to performance of both Brecht and Artaud, whose ideas, along with those of others – including Benjamin, Butler, Latour, Mbembe, and Césaire – inform the radical, open-ended, post-pandemic theatre practice proposed in this essay. A critically acclaimed dramatist as well as Professor of English and Playwriting at California State University, Northridge, Mitchell’s published volumes of plays include Disaster Capitalism; or Money Can’t Buy You Love: Three Plays; Brecht in L.A.; and Ventriloquist: Two Plays and Ventriloquial Miscellany. He is the editor of Experimental O’Neill, and is currently at work on a series of post-pandemic plays.

scholarly journals Sickle Cell Trait and Renal Function in Hispanics in the United States: the Northern Manhattan Study

2017 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicole D. Dueker ◽  
David Della-Morte ◽  
Tatjana Rundek ◽  
Ralph L. Sacco ◽  
Susan H. Blanton
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Chronic Kidney Disease ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Kidney Disease ◽  
Sickle Cell ◽  
Sickle Cell Trait ◽  
The United States ◽  
Genetic Mutation ◽  
Single Mutation ◽  
Increased Risk

<p class="Pa7">Sickle cell anemia (SCA) is a common hematological disorder among individu­als of African descent in the United States; the disorder results in the production of abnormal hemoglobin. It is caused by homozygosity for a genetic mutation in HBB; rs334. While the presence of a single mutation (sickle cell trait, SCT) has long been considered a benign trait, recent research suggests that SCT is associated with renal dysfunction, including a decrease in estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR) and increased risk of chronic kidney disease (CKD) in African Americans. It is currently unknown whether similar associations are observed in Hispanics. Therefore, our study aimed to determine if SCT is associated with mean eGFR and CKD in a sample of 340 Dominican Hispanics from the Northern Manhattan Study. Using regression analyses, we tested rs334 for association with eGFR and CKD, adjusting for age and sex. eGFR was estimated using the Chronic Kidney Disease Epidemiology Collaboration equa­tion and CKD was defined as eGFR &lt; 60 mL/min/1.73 m2. Within our sample, there were 16 individuals with SCT (SCT carriers). We found that SCT carriers had a mean eGFR that was 12.12 mL/min/1.73m2 lower than non-carriers (P=.002). Additionally, SCT carriers had 2.72 times higher odds of CKD compared with non-carriers (P=.09). Taken together, these novel results show that Hispanics with SCT, as found among African Americans with SCT, may also be at increased risk for kidney disease.</p><p class="Pa7"><em>Ethn Dis. </em>2017; 27(1)<strong>:</strong>11-14; doi:10.18865/ed.27.1.11.</p><p class="Pa7"> </p>

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