American Patriotism Research Articles

Dixie's Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture (review)

Dixie's Daughters The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Culture By Karen L. Cox University Press of Florida, 2003 218 pp. Cloth, $55.00 Many young southerners today may have heard of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC). If they have, they probably did so when Congress refused to renew a patent on its insignia or when the Daughters defended the flying of the flag. A century ago, however, most southerners knew of the UDC and its activities; it was the largest independent organization of women in the region. Despite the UDC's historical importance, however, Dixie's Daughters is the first (other than official histories) book-length study of the group. Author Karen L. Cox traces the origins of the United Daughters of the Confederacy to the Civil War relief efforts of southern women and, more directly, to the numerous Ladies Memorial Associations that formed right after the war. These local organizations cared for graves and established Memorial Day, thereby shaping the South's initial memory of the Civil War. In 1894 the UDC organized and soon established chapters across the South, indeed across the nation. By the end of World War I, it boasted a membership of 100,000, made up primarily of upper-class women, both those women who had lived through the war and those descended from veterans. The group undertook various progressive benevolent projects, including college scholarships and homes for veterans and women, but the UDC's major goal always remained vindicating the Confederacy. They erected monuments across the South and in various other ways helped establish a historical record of the war. Most important, the UDC tried to indoctrinate the young with what Cox calls Confederate culture. They created an organization for them--the Children of the Confederacy--sponsored essay contests, ensured state adoption of school textbooks with a southern view of the war, and placed flags and pictures of Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis in southern schools. Through its efforts, the UDC sought not just to ensure that future generations of white southerners agreed with them but also to secure vindication from the Yankees. The group had always promoted an American patriotism, conditioned on the North's respect for the South, and in World War I southern support for the war effort evoked a northern response that the Daughters felt constituted that vindication. After the war, Cox argues, the group never again exerted the public influence it had. Dixie's Daughters provides a much-needed institutional history of the UDC at the height of its influence; that alone would be a major contribution. …

McKinley and the Spanish‐American War

This article describes and analyzes President William McKinley's foreign and domestic policies that led to the Spanish‐American War of 1898. On the domestic side it includes congressional partisan politics, economic and business concerns, religious and moral views, cultural biases, and unexpected events that inflamed American patriotism. In foreign affairs it covers U.S. interests in Cuba, McKinley's diplomatic efforts to get Spain to withdraw peacefully from Cuba, and the president's relations with Europe's Great Powers and the pope. The article concludes with an analysis of McKinley's successes and failures.

Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity

In his seminal work Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Samuel Huntington argued provocatively and presciently that with the end of the cold war, were replacing ideologies as the new fault lines in international politics.His astute analysis has proven correct. Now Professor Huntington turns his attention from international affairs to our domestic cultural rifts as he examines the impact other civilizations and their values are having on our own country.America was founded by British settlers who brought with them a distinct culture including the English language, Protestant values, individualism, religious commitment, and respect for law. The waves of immigrants that later came to the United States gradually accepted these values and assimilated into America's Anglo-Protestant culture. More recently, however, national identity has been eroded by the problems of assimilating massive numbers of primarily Hispanic immigrants, bilingualism, multiculturalism, the devaluation of citizenship, and the denationalization of American elites.September 11 brought a revival of American patriotism and a renewal of American identity. But already there are signs that this revival is fading, even though in the post-September 11 world, Americans face unprecedented challenges to our security.Who Are We? shows the need for us to reassert the core values that make us Americans. Nothing less than our national identity is at stake.Once again Samuel Huntington has written an important book that is certain to provoke a lively debate and to shape our national conversation about who we are.

Dissent from the Homeland: Essays After September 11 (review)

Reviewed by: Dissent From the Homeland: Essays After September 11 Christopher Porter Stanley Hauerwas and Frank Lentricchia, eds. Dissent From the Homeland: Essays After September 11. Durham: Duke UP, 2003. viii + 226 pp. This collection must have opened eyes when it originally appeared in 2002 as a special issue of the South Atlantic Quarterly. Co-editor Frank Lentricchia asserts that “[a]ll of the essays are united in the belief that America is threatened by the most powerful enemy in its history, the administration of George W. Bush” (5). Each essay in the collection wakens the reader, urges a change in the tone of the American response to terror. The essays can be grouped by content as the West’s response to the terrorist attack, meditations upon the politics of American patriotism, or questions about the actions of the religious after such a horrific national event. In examining the American response, authors discern a line increasingly blurred between right and wrong. Fredric Jameson’s “The Dialectics of Disaster” highlights the initial American hysterical reaction, finding in the country’s rush to war the legitimization of a minority president. Yet Osama Bin Laden is Bush-like, “the very prototype of the accumulation of money in the hands of private individuals and the poisoned fruit of a process that, unchecked, allows an unimaginable autonomy of action of all kinds” (60–61). The actions carried out [End Page 305] by Al Qaeda have thus found success in our country’s overreaction, which enkindle the Arab reaction against us. Slavoj Žižek finds the events of 9/11 just what America wanted, couching our reaction in terms of The Matrix. We are introduced to the Outside through this attack, and in the fantasy fulfilled we suffer symbolically and respond by attacking the weak, i.e. Afghanistan. Jean Baudrillard, in “L’Esprit du Terrorisme,” equates the huge military response to the terrorism with the laws of chaos theory at work, the “initial shock provoking innumerable consequences” (157). Like Žižek, Baudrillard believes that in our subconscious we wanted this attack, though we respond in a way that heightens our ineffectiveness. Robert Bellah’s “Seventy-Five Years” posits a national propensity to lose at war, not based on body counts but because America inevitably grows to resemble our enemies, whether by establishing strong central authority, the military bombing of civilians, or our horrible track record supporting authoritarian regimes. President Bush’s promise to “rid the world of evil” while at the same time putting a bounty on Bin Laden’s head is seen as a mirror to the rhetoric of Al Qaeda. Rowan Williams sounds the theme for this group in faulting blind support of the war. We are too lazy, he insists, to work to find a proper response, and in this failure “there is no moral difference in kind between our military action and the terror which it attacks” (30). Those who address issues of American patriotism highlight the discrepancies between American symbol and the US reality. Frank Lentricchia and Jody McAuliffe defend the sentiments of Karlheinz Stockhausen, who was lambasted for declaring the terrorist attacks “the greatest work of art that is possible in the whole cosmos” (104). The authors read the American monument at Ground Zero as typical of a popular work in a gallery, with the added bonus of the visitation as a patriotic pilgrimage. Susan Willis examines social contradictions evident in the American flag used as signifier of patriotism, while Catherine Lutz examines part of the war machine, noting the poverty and homelessness rampant in Fayetteville, NC, home of Fort Bragg. Too often, the writers show, symbol becomes exploited to create a ruling imperative. The essays on the religious theme call for a more stringent adherence to spiritual dicta. Noteworthy among this group is Stanley Hauerwas, who insists that the American determination to dictate exactly who and what is evil in this conflict leads to “a war without clear purpose, but also a war without end” (187). Like the other authors represented, Hauerwas demands action from today’s believers, but finds instead those too willing to follow their government’s secular logic. The well-written and thoughtful essays call to...

Patriotism and Progressivism

Many Americans believe that the left is “anti-patriotic” (and even anti-American) whereas the political right truly expresses the American spirit and reveres its symbols. Particularly since the late 1960s-when the movement against U.S. intervention in Vietnam gained momentum-the terms “progressive” and “patriotism” have rarely been used in the same sentence, at least in the mainstream media. It has become conventional wisdom that conservatives wave the American flag while leftists burn it. Patriotic Americans display the flag on their homes; progressives turn it upside down to show contempt.Since the World Trade Center bombing on September 11, 2001, the U.S. has seen a dramatic increase in the number of Americans proudly displaying the Stars and Stripes on their cars, homes, businesses, T-shirts, caps, lapel pins and even tattoos, along with sales of CDs with patriotic songs. Retail stores have redesigned everything from coffee mugs to bikinis in red-white-and-blue. SinceSeptember 11, bills to make the Pledge of Allegiance mandatory in publicschools have been introduced in seven states; half the states already require it. On October 12, 2001, a month after the tragic event, a right-wing group based in Orange County—Celebration U.S.A., Inc.—enlisted President Bush and Secretary of Education Rod Paige to participate in a synchronized nationwide recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance in schools across the country, a ritual that was repeated a year later. In October 2001, the U.S. House of Representatives voted 404 to 0 for a resolution encouraging the display of signs in public schools proclaiming “God Bless America.”This outpouring of flag waving signifies a variety of sentiments—from identification with the victims of the September 11 attacks to support for themilitary’s invasion of Afghanistan and, later, Iraq. But in U.S. popular culture, displays of the American flag are—along with the very idea of “patriotism”—-typically viewed as expressions of “conservative” politics. The patriotic fervor since September 11 has revitalized that belief and, as in other times, has given conservative politicos and pundits a handy means to undermine dissent and progressive initiatives.

The mixed nature of American patriotism

The mixed nature of American patriotism

On the fault line: race, class, and the American Patriot Movement

1 February 27, 1997: Garrard County, Kentucky 2 What's Class Got to Do with It? 3 On the Fault Line: Whiteness and Class in the New World Order 4 Out of the Rubble: A Brief History of the Patriot Movement 5 Kentucky Patriots 6 Hemp and Its Discontents 7 Biosphere-Not in My State! 8 On the Road (Again) 9 Looking Ahead 10 Epilogue: March 14, 2002-On the Lam 11 A Note on Method 12 Bibliography

MISSIO DEI–ITS DEVELOPMENT AND LIMITATIONS IN KOREA

International Review of MissionVolume 92, Issue 367 p. 538-549 MISSIO DEI–ITS DEVELOPMENT AND LIMITATIONS IN KOREA Chai Soo-il, Chai Soo-il Soo-Il Chai is professor for Mission and the Science of Religion at the Korea Theological Institute, Seoul, South Korea.Search for more papers by this author Chai Soo-il, Chai Soo-il Soo-Il Chai is professor for Mission and the Science of Religion at the Korea Theological Institute, Seoul, South Korea.Search for more papers by this author First published: 25 March 2009 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1758-6631.2003.tb00427.x AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Volume92, Issue367October 2003Pages 538-549 RelatedInformation

Patriot fires: forging a new American nationalism in the Civil War North

The Civil War is often credited with giving birth to the modern American state. The demands of warfare led to the centralization of business and industry and to an unprecedented expansion of federal power. But the Civil War did more than that: as Melinda Lawson shows, it brought about a change in American national identity, redefining the relationship between the individual and the government. Though much has been written about the Civil War and the making of the political and economic American nation, this is the first comprehensive study of the role that the war played in the shaping of the cultural and ideological nation-state. In Patriot Fires, Lawson explains how, when threatened by the rebellious South, the North came together as a nation and mobilized its populace for war. With no formal government office to rally citizens, the job of defining the war in patriotic terms fell largely to private individuals or association, each with their own motives and methods. Lawson explores how these interpreters of the war helped instill in Americans a new understanding of loyalty to country. Through efforts such as sanitary fairs to promote the welfare of soldiers, the war bond drives of Jay Cooke, and the establishment of Union Leagues, Northerners cultivated a new sense of patriotism rooted not just in the subjective American idea, but in existing religious, political, and cultural values. Moreover, Democrats and Republicans, Abolitionists, and Abraham Lincoln created their own understandings of American patriotism and national identity, raising debates over the meaning of the American idea to new heights. Examining speeches, pamphlets, pageants, sermons, and assemblies, Lawson shows how citizens and organizations constructed a new kind of nationalism based on a nation of Americans rather than a union of states - a European-styled nationalism grounded in history and tradition and celebrating the preeminence of the nation-state. Original in its insights and innovative in its approach, Patriot Fires is an impressive work of cultural and intellectual history.

We All Lost the Iraq War

LIKE MANY CANADIANS, I tuned in on evening of 17 March 2003 to watch President George W. Bush deliver his much-anticipated ultimatum to Saddam Hussein. Unlike most Canadians, I watched speech in US itself--to be precise, from Harvard University. About midway through speech, I began to surf for some alternative, but encountered same face--serious, sombre and smirk-free--on channel after channel. Until, that is, I reached niche public affairs channel, C-SPAN2. Here, to my surprise, I encountered taped coverage of Prime Minister Jean Chretien announcing and defending Canada's decision not to join the coalition of willing.Tucked away on C-SPAN2, Canadian position on war in Iraq was largely invisible in US. So, too, was I. Almost no one I encountered knew anything about Canadian position, and those who did, more often than not, preferred it to their President's bellicosity anyway. William Buckley once famously quipped that he would rather be governed by first 100 names in Boston telephone directory than by 100 Harvard professors. Predictably enough, support for war was much weaker on campus than in American population as a whole. Indeed, at very moment President Bush was appearing on national television to issue his ultimatum to Saddam Hussein, Harvard's daily undergraduate newspaper, The Harvard Crimson, was polling students on their attitudes towards war. The irony is that, in this respect, Harvard students appeared more like Canadians than Americans. A solid majority of Harvard undergraduates (some 56 per cent) opposed war(1)--consistent with Anglophone opinion in Canada (including my own, I should add) and clearly out of step with broader, national sentiment in US.At one level, it was easy for me as a Canadian to watch war unfold: there were no anti-Canadian protests, no Canadian jokes, and no lectures about need to support our allies. Yet, for all this, I did feel like an outsider--even in cocoon that is the republic of Cambridge. This essay is a personal and somewhat desultory attempt to understand my unease about war.PEACE IS PATRIOTICLexington, Massachusetts is one of those lovely New England towns that has become a close suburb of Boston--not because urban sprawl created it, but because an expanding population met it. Like so many of Boston's suburbs, it retains its town centre, its common, and its array of white-steepled churches. Lexington (together with its neighbour Concord) stands out, however, for its mythological status as place where American Revolution is said to have begun. And, it stands out in my memory, as place where I first really felt a sort of disquiet about prospects of war in Iraq. Driving through Lexington one Saturday in late January with my family, I noticed a man standing at a major crossroads holding high a homemade placard for all to see, a revolutionary flag anchored in snowbank beside him. Judging from medals on his coat, he was a war veteran; sign read: Peace is Patriotic.The man on Lexington Common understood an important truth about current American foreign policy since 9/11: that it has wrapped itself tightly in fabric of patriotism. One need only think of legal centrepiece of homeland security--the Patriot Act--to see how powerful connection between security and patriotism have become. The slogan Peace is Patriotic was a kind of pre-emptive strike against argument that opposition to war was unpatriotic. But what of revolutionary flag? Presumably, man on Lexington Common wanted to make related point that patriotism is more than obedience to a President's orders as Commander in Chief. It is, rather, loyalty to a set of enduring, culturally entrenched principles that have a higher standing than pronouncements and orders of this or that Commander in Chief. For man on Lexington Common, ideals of Revolution, symbolized so powerfully by a flag, were true and original principles of American patriotism against which current foreign policy ought to be judged. …

Problematics of Transnational Feminism for Asian American Women

confirms my belief in the necessity of psychic transformation, especially after the U.S. declaration of a war on terrorism in response to 9/11. The intensification of U.S. imperialist efforts to eliminate any geopolitical influence that would get in the way of its campaign to achieve global dominance demonstrates the failure of military force to attain world peace. If we are to create international relations based on mutual cooperation, then Americans need to move beyond jingoism and self-serving protectionism and embrace a consciousness about global interconnections, between nations, within nations, and between people and the natural environment. The shock of 9/11 represented for so many Americans the bursting of their national security bubble, supported by a general ignorance of U.S. foreign policy, as well as providing a rationale for throwing uncritical support behind U.S. military aggression abroad in order to punish those foreign evil-doers. Moreover, many patriotic Americans turned a blind eye to the way the U.S. government eventually bullied its way into Iraq, in spite of a lack of United Nations (UN) support, in order to further its oil and other economic and

Civic Education and the New American Patriotism Post-9/11

This study analyzes the theoretical and practical political frameworks behind the two main approaches to civic education in America, 'civics' and 'service'. The first focuses on educating students about the formal political process. It is associated with liberal political theory and also with a justice-oriented, distributive politics that in practice has increasingly become consumer-oriented--fights over 'who gets what'. The second, 'service' (or community service or service learning) is associated with communitarian political theory and also with politics known internationally as neo-liberalism or the 'Third Way'. Neither liberalism nor communitarianism has been able to mount a significant alternative to what editors of a recent CJE issue call 'educational Darwinism' in education, in which less powerful groups are losers; to the spread generally of marketplace ways of thinking in every arena of society; or to the increasingly militarist and unilateralist foreign policy of the United States and the UK. Only the articulation of a different politics--best described as populist or civic populist in the United States, and 'popular democratic' in South Africa and elsewhere--can generate the power, political energy, and vision of a serious alternative. Populist politics has a different definition of politics itself, including productive as well as distributive dimensions. It has a different view of civic education, focused on the habits of public work, the skills of empowerment, and democratic organizing for cultural change in government, as well as educational and other mediating institutions. Finally, it has a different foreign policy, based on a patriotism that is internationally oriented and cognizant of global interdependence.

Young Patriots or Junior Historians? An Epistemological Defense of Critical Patriotic Education

The example of Rorty is notable here because it emerges from a position on the political left, but the claim that American patriotism is embattled is a familiar one. Likewise, we are familiar with the claim that American education is somehow to blame for this situation or at the very least has not done enough to ameliorate it. On the other hand, we are equally familiar with contrary claims: that American patriotism — or jingoism, or unilateralism, or some other related political phenomenon — is too prominent in the cultural landscape, and that education ought to moderate if not indeed undermine patriotic sentiments, in favor of cosmopolitanism or at least a more rational and principled liberalism. What are we to make of this debate? More specifically, in the field of history — where much of the debate is waged — is it reasonable to uphold patriotism as an educational goal?

Charles James Fox and Ireland

In 1783 Henry Grattan complimented Charles James Fox by describing his views as ‘liberal to Ireland and just to those lately concerned in her redemption’. He also claimed that ‘Fox wished sincerely for the liberty of Ireland without reserve.’ Sir James Mackintosh’s draft inscription for Westmacott’s statue of Fox in Westminster Abbey stated that he had ‘contended for the rights of the people of America and Ireland’. Whiggish historians subsequently built upon this notion of Fox and his followers as great friends of Ireland. For the most part, modern scholars have avoided passing judgement on Fox’s views on Ireland, but a few authors have challenged early assumptions, depicting Fox as unprincipled in his use of Irish politics as a stick to beat the North and Pitt ministries. Christopher Hobhouse, commenting on Fox’s commitment to Catholic relief, claims that he ‘gave himself away’ and that ‘the House could distinguish by this time between Fox the religious liberator and Fox the artful dodger’. John Derry asserts that Fox ‘ruthlessly and irresponsibly exploited anti-Irish prejudice in England’ during the controversy over Pitt’s trade proposals of 1785. L.G. Mitchell notes that ‘his sympathy for American patriots had had real limits, and so had his concern for Ireland’, and that ‘Irish patriots were never sure of Fox, and their doubt was entirely justified.’ There is a good deal of substance in these comments, and in this article I also intend to argue that Fox was first and foremost a British parliamentarian. However, his conduct towards Ireland was not solely ruled by this stance. Free from the shackles of government, Fox was disposed to be generous to Irish patriotism and his friends and relatives in the Irish opposition.

Arab Americans in a Nation's Imagined Community: How News Constructed Arab American Reactions to the Gulf War

An analysis of news stories about Arab American reactions to the Gulf War shows how the news media represented and reinforced a hegemonic construction of America as a unified, inclusive imagined community through ethnic differences. The stories accomplished this through sympathetic portrayals of the heartfelt struggles faced by Arab Americans as they feared the loss of Arab lives and the threat of racism duringthis time while simultaneously reiteratingtheir steadfast loyalty to America. Paradoxically, Arab Americans' ethnic position and wartime struggles became a powerful representation of what it means to be an exemplary, patriotic American.

Christopher Gadsden and Henry Laurens: The Parallel Lives of Two American Patriots

Christopher Gadsden and Henry Laurens: The Parallel Lives of Two American Patriots

To Die For: The Paradox of American Patriotism (review)

To Die For: The Paradox of American Patriotism (review)

Christopher Gadsden and Henry Laurens: The Parallel Lives of Two American Patriots

Christopher Gadsden and Henry Laurens: The Parallel Lives of Two American Patriots

To Die For: The Paradox of American Patriotism

To Die For: The Paradox of American Patriotism

To Die for: The Paradox of American Patriotism

To Die for: The Paradox of American Patriotism