Brink Of Civil War Research Articles

From soldiers to vigilantes: the Catholic Ex-Servicemen’s Association in Northern Ireland on the brink of civil war

ABSTRACT This article assesses the importance of an often-ignored vigilante group; the Catholic Ex-Servicemen’s Association. 1969 saw the mobilisation of Irish Catholics in Northern Ireland who had served in the British Army as part of ad-hoc vigilante groups defending nationalist areas. These groups protected Catholic neighbourhoods from loyalist assault and from incursion by the security forces who were increasingly seen as a hostile force. In 1971, this ex-service personnel formed an all-Ireland organisation: the Catholic Ex-Servicemen’s Association. At their peak in the early 1970s, they claimed a membership of 17,000 and an ability to mobilise a further 20,000 in a ‘doomsday scenario’. CESA’s prominence waned by the late 1970s. CESA has received very little academic attention. This article aims to ameliorate that, supplementing the scant secondary literature with newspaper and archival material to account for the emergence of the Catholic Ex-Servicemen’s Association, analysing their importance in shaping the trajectory of the Troubles and saying something of the complexities of identity in the nationalist community in the early period of the conflict.

The VKP(b) and the Political Situation in China after the Dissolution of the Comintern

The article is devoted to the influence of the dissolution of the Comintern on the events in China, as well as to the activities of the Department of International Information (DII) formed instead of the Comintern under the Central Committee of the VKP(b). The self-dissolution of the Comintern was positively received by both political forces in China — the Communist Party of China and the Kuomintang. This decision of the ECCI (Executive Committee of the Communist International) allowed Mao Zedong to secure a leading position in the party and isolate the Comintern in the Politburo from the CPC Central Committee. Kuomintang leader Chiang Kai-shek took advantage of the disappearance of the "International Communist Headquarters" to discredit the CPC as a "foreign product" hostile to China. However, quite quickly, China found itself on the brink of civil war, threatening the collapse of the anti-Japanese national united front. Only the position of the USSR, the USA and the democratic forces in China did not allow Chiang Kai-shek to start a punitive campaign against the Special Region of China and the Communist Party. For more than two years, relations between the two parties remained extremely tense. G. Dimitrov, the actual head of the DII, had neither the authority nor the opportunity to somehow influence the political events in the neighboring country. The functions of his department were reduced mainly to the collection of information. Moreover, the main role in obtaining information was played by representatives of the Soviet special services located at the headquarters of the Central Committee of the CPC in Yan'an, as well as in Chongqing, the country's temporary capital, where the negotiations between the CPC and the Kuomintang took place. The defeat of Japan and the end of World War II changed the form and the possibilities of relations between the VKP(b) and the CPC.

Split Memory: World War I Memorialisation Practices in the Weimar Republic

The problem of historical memory and the politics of memory, the formation and evolution of memorial culture has become relevant in the context of the “mnemonic turn” in historiography, which began in the 1980s and continues until now. The events of World War I and its consequences in the interwar period occupied a central place in the communicative memory of the Germans and were the main object of historical politics in the Weimar Republic. For obvious reasons, there could be no place for triumphal memory in Germany. The memory of heroes acquired a special emotional meaning and pushed the grief memory version into the background, which was a natural compensation for the catastrophic defeat. Attempts by the official authorities and parties of the Weimar coalition to create a common memorial space of the last war for national consolidation and their own legitimisation ended in failure. In the conditions of a deep socio-political split in society on the brink of civil war, the opposing groups created and spread their own versions of the memory of war, not only competing, but also directly hostile to each other. At the same time, its main carriers were veteran organisations of various party affiliations. They were characterised by a specific memorial culture of admiration for the idealised image of the front-line soldier and disdain for the ones in the rear. As a result, the most significant places of memory, i.e. the Tannenberg Memorial in East Prussia and the Neue Wache building in Berlin never acquired national significance. In the confrontation between conflicting versions of memory, the advantage remained on the side of the conservative, nationalist, and anti-republican forces.

Twenty-fifth Anniversary of Church Unity between former DRMC and DRCA, 1994

T
 Church unity between the former Dutch Reformed Mission Church (DRMC) and the Dutch Reformed Church in Africa (DRCA) took place in 1994 under particularly difficult circumstances. South Africa was on the brink of civil war, as the oppressed majority of the country was pressurising the apartheid regime to surrender to their legitimate demands for a democratic dispensation. The regime was relentless and violently resisted any change that would franchise black people. The struggle involved political, social, economic and religious dimensions and many people lost their lives as a result. It was under these circumstances that the DRMC and the DRCA forged ahead with church unity. The most enabling means for survival in the struggle for unity of the two churches was their faith in God as expressed in the Belhar Confession. This article explores the circumstances under which church unification was forged between the two Reformed churches and their eventual unity in 1994, as well as the concrete steps they took in their ritual of unification.

Foreign Relations of the United States, 1977–1980. Volume XV: Central America, 1977–1980. Editor: Nathaniel L. Smith.

“Central America is a real volcano,” remarked William Bowdler, the Carter administration’s director of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, in October 1979. With the Sandinista Revolution triumphant in Nicaragua, Guatemala’s hardline military regime assassinating dissidents with impunity, and El Salvador teetering on the brink of civil war, Bowdler was right. Noting the region’s deep socioeconomic inequality and history of dictatorial rule, he observed that “the surprising thing is that it has not erupted before now.”1 The extent to which prior U.S. policy helped produce that eruption, and how exactly Carter’s team might mitigate its effects, are much discussed in volume XV of the 1977–1980 Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series [hereafter FRUS XV]. The volume covers the United States’ relationship to the troubled isthmus (minus Panamá, which, owing to the complex politics of the 1977 Torrijos–Carter Treaties, receives a separate anthology) during the Jimmy Carter years. During that time, U.S. officials struggled to balance Carter’s stated goal of promoting human rights, democracy, and non-intervention with perceived Cold War security imperatives on the ground, a losing battle waged throughout the volume’s roughly 1,300 pages. As such, FRUS XV will be of interest not only to historians of Central America, but to scholars of empire, human rights, decolonization, revolutions, counterrevolutions, and U.S. foreign policy more broadly.

The role of the leadership of the Dutch Reformed Church en route to the first democratic election in South Africa: 1990-1994

The role of the leadership of the Dutch Reformed Church en route to the first democratic election in South Africa : 1990-1994Piet Strauss played an important part in the leadership of the Dutch Reformed Church from 1994 to 2011. This article focuses on important events and the role of the leadership of the Dutch Reformed Church which prepared the way for Strauss and his generation of leaders. It takes the acceptance of the important policy document Church and Society by the General Synod of 1986 and the Rustenburg Consultation of 1990 as points of departure. It then describes how the leadership of the church engaged with different political leaders between 1990 and 1994. By doing so, the leadership of the church, which became known for the Biblical foundation of the notorious policy of apartheid, played an important role while South Africa was on the brink of civil war. Their efforts contributed to a peaceful first democratic election in 1994.

Blasphemy, Holocaust Denial, and the Control of Profoundly Unacceptable Speech

Many new democracies exhibit a disturbing lack of electoral competition. All too often, the first party to hold office creates a network of power and patronage that chokes off meaningful political challenge. These strong party democracies, with power often being held by the inheritors of the political mantle of those that led the opposition to prior authoritarian rule, exhibit a tendency toward the three “C's” of associated with the lack of accountability: clientelism, cronyism, and corruption. Such strong-party regimes and their associated pathologies present relatively new constitutional courts with a distinct set of controversies that necessarily bring the judiciary into conflict with consolidating political power. This article explores the form that judicial responses to the excesses of political dominance might take. Three courts are selected as exemplars of such responses. In the first instance, the Colombian Constitutional Court repudiated the attempt of President Uribe to amend the constitution to permit a third term in office, despite the lack of reasoning to support the rejection of a largely procedurally proper constitutional amendment. In the second, the South African Constitutional Court has scrupulously avoided any frontal confrontation with the current African National Congress government, instead casting its repeated rejection of government efforts to insulate itself from accountability in narrow procedural rulings or in rulings based on other, non-politically charged sources of law. Finally, there is the Thai Constitutional Court which, while providing the strongest jurisprudential defense of its intervention, appears an active ally of one partisan camp as the country hovers on the brink of civil war. Rather than offer any off-the-rack solution for the difficult realm of constitutional courts as democracy falters, this Article examines the relation between the issues presented to such courts and the fundamental absence of electoral challenge and accountability. To the extent these courts navigate this difficult terrain, the Article concludes, the decisive feature will likely be the ability to contribute to the establishment of a competitive electoral system able to constrain single-party dominance.

International Military and Police Missions to the Republic of Macedonia and Their Role in Stabilizing Macedonian‑Albanian Relations

After the breakup of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and the outbreak of conflicts related to that process the international diplomacy decided to introduce military missions, of various nature, in Croatia and Bosnia and Hercegovina, that is former Yugoslavian republics, where a war was waged in the first half of the 1990s. The Republic of Macedonia declared independence already in 1991, but it became independent peacefully; it did not mean, however, that the country was free from internal problems, for instance of ethnic nature, which escalated before the end of the twentieth century putting the Macedonian state on the brink of civil war on the eve of the new century. The escalation necessitated the invitation by the state authorities of international military missions to assist in stabilising the country’s internal situation.

Porządek konstytucyjny a etnokratyzm elit politycznych w Karaczajo-Czerkiesji

One of the main causes of the anarchy in the political life of Karachay-Cherkessia is the lack of a genuine compromise between the ethnic communities concerning the questions of the political system of the republic. An attempt to develop such a compromise took place in June 1996 and ended by reaching a specific ‘constitutional pact.’ However, this compromise did not start a consolidation process among the elites on the basis of the constitution. On the contrary, it turned out to be short-lived and even expanded the field of conflicts. The republic was on the brink of civil war as early as in 1999. In the following decade, a state of permanent tensions continued. It resulted with alternating crises of power and an attempt to take over the parliament and government buildings by national minorities with the use of force. The author of this article tries to explain the causes of the political instability in Karachay-Cherkessia. He mainly focuses on the study of the constitutional fundaments of the legal and political order and its confrontation with the reality of political life in the republic. Out of this confrontation there emerges a ‘loop transformation’ syndrome, which poses a threat to the security and territorial integrity of Karachay-Cherkessia.

Political Change and the Outbreak of Civil War: The Case of Lebanon

Although the Lebanon of post 2005 is similar in many respects to the Lebanon of the 1950s and 1970s, this article demonstrates that between 2005 and 2011 the country was in less danger of the outbreak of civil war than in 1958 or in 1975. The political circumstances that prevailed in 1958 and in 1975 had made the outbreak of a civil war in the interest of political actors. The introduction of some of the reforms introduced by the Taif Accord since 2005 made many actors more likely to use constitutional methods to resolve conflicts. When these methods failed, the protests were either peaceful or violent, but over short periods of time. On many occasions these protests brought the country to the brink of civil war. Nevertheless, these protests did not escalate into large-scale or long-term communal militant violence. This was not because of a sense of war weariness but because of the influence of the prevailing political circumstances that made the outbreak a civil war appear to be a strategic error.

Yemen Fractures on the Brink of Civil War as Al-Qaeda Gains Ground

ABSTRACT Since the Arab Spring sprung in Yemen, hopes mushroomed that President Saleh would step down and allow for a democratic reform after 33 years of autocratic rule. But despite promises to do so, Saleh balked. As the six-month uprising continues, the country is stuck in a political stalemate, fracturing on the brink of civil war as militant groups like Al Qaeda gain ground. Fears are now growing that the country could turn into the next Somalia—right at the tip of the oil-rich Arabian Peninsula.

Civic Education and Democratic Backsliding in the Wake of Kenya's Post-2007 Election Violence

This paper examines two previously unexplored questions related to the impact of civic education programs in emerging democracies: 1) whether such programs have longer-terms effects, and 2) whether civic education can be effective in the context of democratic “backsliding.” We investigate these questions in the context of a large-scale civic education program implemented in Kenya between 2006 and 2007. The program ended just before the disputed 2007 election that sparked a wave of ethnic clashes that killed more than 1,000 people, displaced at least 350,000 from their homes, and brought the country to the brink of civil war. Data come from a survey of 3,600 respondents conducted in late-2008, about nine months after the violence. We test for program effects across a range of dependent variables, and find that the program did have longer-term effects, particularly on variables related to civic competence and engagement. It had less consistent effects, however, on core democratic values and orientations. These findings are consistent with previous studies of the short-term effects of civic education. Intriguingly, we also find that the program had positive effects related to Kenya’s post-election violence. Participants in the program who subsequently were affected by the violence were less likely (relative to non-participants who were later affected by the violence) to adopt negative beliefs about Kenya’s political system, less likely to support the use of ethnic or political violence, and more likely to forgive those responsible for the post-election violence.

Introduction: The Institutions of the French Republic at 50

The creation of France's Fifth Republic in 1958 was certainly an extraordinary event. It was the last time that a Western European state was at the brink of civil war. From an institutional point o...

On the Brink of Civil War: The Canadian Government and the Suppression of the 1918 Quebec Easter Riots

This article analyzes the Canadian government's use of military force to suppress the anti-conscription Easter Riots that occurred in Quebec City between 28 March and 1 April 1918. The riots demonstrated French-Canadian dissatisfaction with the national war effort and the introduction of conscription, and exacerbated nationwide fears that a state of rebellion existed in the French-speaking province of Quebec. The Canadian government's reaction was immediate and firm; martial law was proclaimed, habeas corpus was suspended, and over six thousand English-speaking soldiers were deployed to Quebec during and after the riots to maintain order and enforce conscription, the last of these troops leaving the province in early 1919. The Easter Riots were extremely violent, causing important destruction of property and over 150 civilian and military casualties, including at least four dead when soldiers opened fire on rioters. This article will demonstrate the extent to which the Canadian government apprehended insurrection in Quebec during the First World War and how determined it was under difficult wartime conditions to prevent the rise of a major national crisis.

A Common Hunger: Land Rights in Canada and South Africa (review)

Reviewed by: A Common Hunger: Land Rights in Canada and South Africa Janet E. Chute A Common Hunger: Land Rights in Canada and South Africa. By Joan G. Fairweather. (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2006). Africa: Missing Voices Series, No. 3. In this well-researched work Joan Fairweather compares legacies of dispossession in South Africa and Canada by focusing on longings felt by indigenous peoples for lands and critical resources, as well as to human dignity. In 1994 South Africa’s indigenous majority defeated apartheid and, in the nick of time, pulled their country back from the brink of civil war. Canadian aboriginal leaders represent a miniscule minority whose political agenda focuses on making Canada’s system more responsive to its needs than on bringing the government down. Despite these differences, however, both are participating in a modern struggle that addresses commonalities of indigenous interest in land and resources on the world stage. The book is divided into three sections. The first focuses on dispossession. Except for the hunting and gathering San, South Africa’s original inhabitants were pastoralists and farmers. Territorial competition between the Dutch and Khoikhoi arose in the mid seventeenth century. Since the Khoikhoi could locate fertile tracts, Voortrekkers, many of them slaveholders, stalked the Khoikhoi like bloodhounds. They then justified their dispossession of Khoikhoi lands by referring to African territory as terra nullius (without an owner) unless occupied by whites. Similar intruders drove San into the Drakensburg Mountains, where San artists painted melancholy depictions of agents of their oppression on cave walls. Many North American indigenous groups traded with the incomers, and dispossession occurred gradually. While panis, or aboriginal slaves, were part of colonial French society, indigenous people on the whole were not viewed as sources of menial labour. The vast landscape precluded subjection of its original inhabitants, whose knowledge of local geography and resources outdistanced anything colonial incomers could muster. Groups retained considerable autonomy until after the Seven Years War. In 1763 the British Crown issued a Royal Proclamation stating that transactions must include consultation with aboriginal representatives and provide compensation for relinquishment of territory. Such pacts led to alienation of aboriginal land, but also involved aboriginal negotiators and provided for creation of reserves. Treaty making in North America spanned three centuries. Fairweather discusses Canada’s numbered treaties, although on page 46 she states that William B. Robinson entered “into the first… of [the] numbered treaties”, which is incorrect. Robinson negotiated the Robinson Treaties in1850. Treaty Number One was signed west of Lake Superior in 1871. Another failing is her insistence that holding reserves automatically includes rights to reserve resources. For years resource revenues went into band funds administered by Ottawa. They were used for mining surveys and opening colonization roads, of little benefit to aboriginal communities. And though self government depends on monies from resource rights, most band governments lack mechanisms for administering resource revenues. South Africa experienced a short-lived treaty making era. When the Dutch encountered the Xhosa and Zulu, a few treaties were signed with tribal leaders. Warfare nevertheless continued for years with Bantu-speaking interior tribes, eventually bludgeoned into submission by European military might. High indigenous casualty rates led to depopulation of fertile tracts in Transvaal and Orange Free States which were snapped up by settlers. By 1848 Cape Colony’s administrators swept away the standing agreements and used intimidation to maintain sway over the interior. South Africa’s industrialization gave rise to a demand for cheap labour. The Schedule of Native Areas, as set out by the Native Land Act of 1905, led to apartheid’s Bantustans. Although it placated Dutch and British interests in the years leading up to union in 1910, it drew lines upon the ground that rarely coincided with traditional group boundaries, set out reserves too small for the size of populations, and allotted lands too marginal for traditional pursuits. Chiefs became government puppets, while reserves developed into isolated enclaves of indigenous migrant workers. Segregated “homelands” became dumping grounds for surplus black labour. Communities near towns – derogatorily dubbed “black spots” – were uprooted after 1913 and moved to the reserves. When apartheid absorbed ideas on race from the German Nazi regime, social segmentation and oppression became...

The Ohrid Agreement: The Travails of Inter-ethnic Relations in Macedonia

This article provides an overview of some of the key changes brought about by the groundbreaking Framework Agreement (known as the Ohrid Agreement) in Macedonia since its signing in 2001. A power-sharing arrangement, it saved Macedonia from the brink of civil war. This article describes how the Ohrid Agreement restored peace by addressing the constitutional status of minorities, their equitable representation in the public sector and issues connected with higher education in the 2002–2006 period. It further assesses the merits of decentralization as a remedy for safeguarding a unitary state in a multi-ethnic environment. It consequently argues that the Ohrid Agreement and the ensuing reforms have been important steps in the right direction revitalizing Macedonia by empowering not only the sizeable Albanian population but other less numerous communities as well. However, daunting challenges remain ahead. The perception and language gap between the two main ethnic communities hinder efforts for a truly functioning multi-ethnic state. Moreover, the new government formed after the July 2006 general elections has stirred controversy and caused tensions affecting its Euro-Atlantic perspective. To what extent this will affect Macedonia’s multi-ethnic democracy remains to be seen.

On the Brink of Civil War: The Canadian Government and the Suppression of the 1918 Quebec Easter Riots

Abstract

Banners, batons and barbed wire: Anti-apartheid images of the Springbok rugby tour protests in New Zealand

Anti-apartheid campaigns dated back to at least the 1960s in New Zealand, when Maori players in early All Black teams were prohibited from playing rugby in South Africa. Protests peaked in 1981 when the Springbok—All Black rugby tour was played in New Zealand; it divided the country and brought it to the brink of civil war. Like so many others, artists participated in the public demonstrations and campaigns, but they also sought ways to use their creative skills in innovative strategies, using media beyond their customary ‘gallery art’—banners, balloons, prints, posters and street theatre. This paper draws on material uncovered in archives in Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin, as well as private collections, to investigate this rather neglected form of New Zealand visual culture—the choice of images for posters, for example, and their deployment in relation to verbal messages in the context of popular propaganda. It also considers interactions between artists' studio practice and their political works.

Factional Terror, Paramilitarism and Civil War in Haiti: The View from Port-au-Prince, 1994-2004

When I arrived on the street in Port-au-Prince in early March of 2004, most of the city was still largely outside the control of the government. A rebel insurgency movement made up of former members of the now-disbanded Haitian army (Forces Armees d'Haiti, FADH) had successfully unseated President Jean-Bertrand Aristide who won re-election to office in 2000 amid opposition electoral boycotts, disputed results and accusations of fraud. With Aristide's resignation and exile to the Central African Republic and later South Africa, state paramilitary police forces have fanned out into the capital to hunt down armed supporters of Aristide's Fanmi Lavalas party. A concentrated rebel effort is now underway to reinstitute the FADH, with recruitment of new soldiers and their outfitting with new uniforms financed by wealthy families with an interest in restoring the preAristide status quo. Factions of heavily-armed Aristide loyalists calling themselves chimere1 are also on the offensive, and the city has descended into violent anarchy. The Haitian National Police (Police Nationale d'Haiti, PNH), routed by the rebels just about everywhere in the northern two thirds of the country, fire their weapons indiscriminately into civilian crowds, often in the most destitute of the capital's slum districts.2 Arson, riot, looting and summary execution have once again formed the lexicon of political conflict on the street. Vigilante bands and entrepreneur assassins roam the Port-au-Prince slums of Bel Air, Cite Soleil and La Saline with Uzis, semiautomatic handguns, combat-grade shotguns, assault rifles, bayonets, whips and machetes. Amid the chaos and a state of siege on the streets, and in the complete absence of legal authority, political scores are being settled alongside of personal animosities being avenged. Summary executions are being carried out on roadsides, the bodies littering the streets with single bullet holes through their foreheads. Dozens of others are being killed in less formal ways, their bodies machine-gunned, hacked to death, decapitated, mutilated and burned alive. Some victims of the conflict have been disembowelled, some strangled with their own underwear. There are rumours of a young girl from the militantly pro-Aristide Cite Soleil slum having been raped to death by rebels after the departure of Aristide. By October of 2004, pro-Aristide gangs had begun the systematic beheading of PNH officers killed in factional clashes under the rubric of Operation Baghdad (though unlike similar beheadings in Iraq, the decapitations are typically post-mortem and are not filmed). Haiti is not teetering on the brink of civil war, it is in the full throes of civil war. What else to call this protracted armed conflict among competing factions for control of state power? Many Haitians refer to it as loge (war) as often as they refer to it as la violenz (the violence). Much of the war is now being waged in Port-au-Prince, and it is not being fought around the civil society as much as it is being fought directly through it. At the time of this writing, there have been over 500 Haitians killed in factional clashes since the fighting began in earnest in late February 2004.While the government has periodically imposed curfews and urges residents of the capital to seek shelter indoors when shooting is heard, the truth of the matter is that when a bullet is fired in Port-au-Prince there is little difference between inside and outside; here, in the most volatile slums, most homes are made of cardboard and tin. Haiti's violent history of successive coups d'etat has shown how political conflict can become a civilian bloodbath when the fighting reaches the capital, even when people do stay indoors. There appears to be no end to the violence in sight. Though the rebel army had pledged to lay down their arms now that a Brazilian-led UN peacekeeping force has arrived to re-establish order, they have shown little real interest in doing so, even as the foreign troops conduct disarmament and policing operations throughout the country. …

American Renaissance Poetry and the Topos of Positionality: Genius Mundi and Genius Loci in Walt Whitman and William Gilmore Simms

If the modernist intellectual, fundamentally a deraciné, saw literature as a "strategy of permanent exile" and fundamental displacement . . . the new intellectual rather likes to pose as a topologist: S/he speaks from one specific place of cultural production. . . . "Positionality"—you might have heard of it—is the magic word, and you'd better take it literally. —Roberto Maria Dainotto, Place in Literature1 Ever Since F. O. Matthiessen Published American Renaissance: Art And Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (1941), the phrase "American Renaissance" has provided both an organizing principle for the study of nineteenth-century American literature and a lightning-rod for that study's critique.2 These critiques have challenged Matthiessen's focus on just five authors (Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman), a canonizing gesture that excludes other prominent writers of the "renaissance" period (1850-1855) he addresses. In addition to challenging the exclusion of this period's women writers like Harriet Beecher Stowe and African American writers like Frederick Douglass, critics have more recently questioned the northern bias of Matthiessen's canon, and the author consistently invoked in order to redress this sectional imbalance is the southern writer William Gilmore Simms. In a recent issue of Southern Quarterly, a special issue devoted to Simms, David W. Newton observes that "the construction by Matthiessen and later scholars of the American Renaissance as a critical concept has contributed to the diminishment of Simms's literary reputation," a consequence [End Page 223] that "is particularly ironic since the height of Simms's own literary career corresponds precisely with that crucial moment in American letters between 1850-55 which Matthiessen defines as the American Renaissance."3 Newton's proposed correction, his assertion that "by any measure of literary achievement, [Simms's] poems clearly belong as an important part of the American poetic tradition" (p. 24), underscores the larger point made in the introduction to this issue of Southern Quarterly, where Peter L. Shillingsburg presents Simms as "a literary giant of proportions unacknowledged by—indeed, unknown to—the bulk of Americanist scholars."4 For my purposes here, this effort to renew critical attention to Simms is of interest not for the institutional circumstance it seeks to effect—the delayed justice of Simms's literary canonization—but for the historical circumstance it registers: Simms's Poems: Descriptive, Dramatic, Legendary, and Contemplative was published in 1853, a date significant less for its coincidence with Matthiessen's "American Renaissance" than for its proximity to the 1855 publication date of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. Simms, these dates show, was an established figure in belles lettres and a prominent member of the nativist Young America group well before Whitman gave that literary nationalist stance its currently most celebrated articulations.5 The eclipse of Simms by Whitman might call for more nuanced explanations than Whitman's own populist declaration, in the closing line of his 1855 "Preface," that "the proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it."6 Yet Whitman's affectionate absorption of his country made his work particularly relevant, as Allen Grossman has demonstrated, for a nation on the brink of civil war. Grossman presents Whitman's poetry as a kind of "policy" for preserving union, characterizing the formal innovation of Whitman's line as "an unprecedented trope of inclusion": "Whitman has devised a universal 'conjunctive principle' whose manifest structure is the sequence of end-stopped, nonequivalent, but equipollent lines."7 At a time of national crisis, the reason a country absorbs a given poet—in this case, the reason the United States absorbs Whitman rather than Simms—has more to do with that poetry's social policy than its literary quality. Compelling as Grossman's analysis continues to be, the question it raises is why—apart, perhaps, from...