Cause Of Liberty Research Articles

Liberty or protection? Making law for employment and social security

ABSTRACT Recent disruptions to the usual working conditions, such as the pandemic, highlight the insecurity of the minimum waged, casually employed working poor; they also point up the precarity of the heavily indebted, over-worked middle-class. Contrasting the cause of social protection with that of market liberty, this study examines the terms of the security debate to see how the cause of protection seeks to counter the cause of liberty. It reviews three recent regulatory events to see what success the cause of protection has had: the industrial relations reform process, the government response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the agenda setting for women’s economic security. It notes the reforms that the new Labor government proposes. The study recommends, if reforms are to be effective, the cause of protection must move beyond the particulars of the labour contract to address the structures of power in the political economy of law making.

NicholasMcDowellPoet of Revolution: The Making of John MiltonPrinceton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2020. xvi + 485pp. ISBN 13: 9780691154695. $35.00 (cloth).

NicholasMcDowellPoet of Revolution: The Making of John MiltonPrinceton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2020. xvi + 485pp. ISBN 13: 9780691154695. $35.00 (cloth).

The Journal of James A. Brush: The Expedition and Military Operations of General Don Francisco Xavier Mina in Mexico, 1816–1817 ed. by Karen Racine and Graham Lloyd

Reviewed by: The Journal of James A. Brush: The Expedition and Military Operations of General Don Francisco Xavier Mina in Mexico, 1816–1817 ed. by Karen Racine and Graham Lloyd Francis X. Galán The Journal of James A. Brush: The Expedition and Military Operations of General Don Francisco Xavier Mina in Mexico, 1816–1817. Edited by Karen Racine and Graham Lloyd. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2020. Pp. 265. Illustrations, appendices, notes, bibliography, index.) Historians of many stripes will be absolutely delighted with this hidden gem from the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. Latin American scholar Karen Racine and fellow editor Graham Lloyd transcribed and annotated this action-packed yet even-keeled memoir from the Scottish-born James A. Brush, a British military veteran of the Napoleonic wars who joined the expedition of Francisco Xavier Mina, which launched from Liverpool, England, on May 15, 1816, and landed in Norfolk, Virginia, the following month. Mina, a native of the Spanish kingdom of Navarre in the Basque region of northern Spain, fought against Napoleon’s occupation of the Iberian Peninsula. The editors explain that a Mexican priest encouraged Mina “to fight with the patriots of Mexico, arguing that any blow against Spanish tyranny in one place would advance the cause of liberty everywhere” (7). Although several other unpublished document-memoirs by foreign contemporaries describe the revolutionary events in Mexico that followed, the editors claim Brush’s account is not only the longest and most detailed but “the one written without an immediate personal or political motivation,” which includes many “crossover personnel” in Texas. (15). Racine and Lloyd deftly contextualize this journal with succinct biographies of both Mina and Brush in the introduction before picking up Brush’s insightful descriptions about the richness of the environment, minerals, and people of Mexico. His observations include sympathetic portrayals of ordinary folk such as Privateer Luis Aury’s Black Haitian troops, Indigenous Mexican rebels, and women. Brush unsurprisingly [End Page 205] reveals prejudice toward the Roman Catholic Church, especially the Inquisition, and comments on the general state of war between the viceroy of Mexico and independent Indians. Whereas priests offered civilization, which the Indians viewed “as a state of slavish subjection to the Spaniards,” Brush also notes the success of some missions in Upper California in converting a few natives. Yet he seemed bewildered at “those children of the forest, who disdain to barter their independence for what are called the conveniences of civilized life” (27–28). Paradoxically, Brush also observes syncretic practices of the Indians who carry images of the saints interspersed with representations of the moon and sun while “on solemn occasions they still use the ancient religious dances . . . performed in the churches after Mass is celebrated” (28–30). As for the peasants of Nuevo Santander, where Mina’s expedition landed on April 15, 1817, at the mouth of the Santander River in the Gulf of Mexico, Brush appeared to marvel at their cowboy skills and promise. He noted how these people of the country “are mostly rancheros and excellent horsemen,” whose “heels are equipped with huge iron spurs” and legs “eased in very strong boots,” adding they would “make excellent dragoons if properly disciplined” (53). Joining with their cause for liberty, Brush discusses the roles of various foreigners, such as American colonel Henry Perry and his fifty-man infantry, against Spanish royalists, as well as Commodore Aury, who then left Mina’s expedition to make an establishment at Matagorda in Texas, fearing that Soto la Marina, the small village inland base off the Santander River, was not a suitable port for their purpose. One of the first major engagements occurred at the three-hour Battle of Peotillos, where three hundred insurgents under Mina defeated two thousand royalists under Colonel Benito Armiñán. Brush added that, despite being surrounded by the royalists, rebel infantry under Colonel Guilford Dudley Young let out destructive firepower and then yelled “Hurrah!” (70), which panicked Spanish infantry and cavalry to flee. However, near the end of Mina’s successful expeditionary campaigns in Guanajuato, Brush saved perhaps his greatest disdain for a couple of jealous Mexican rebel officers (General Torres and Colonel Noboa), who withheld promised support...

Campaigns on the Home Front: Norwegian-American Farmers and Workers Mobilized for War

52 Campaigns on the Home Front N O RW EG I AN -­AMERICA N FA RMERS A ND WO R K ER S MOB ILIZED FOR WA R Ann Marie Legreid “ But there is one front and one battle where everyone in the United States, every man, woman, and child . . . is in action. That front is right here at home.”1 —­ president franklin d. roosevelt, 1942 Norwegians and Norwegian Americans were united as never before by the ideals of liberty in the wake of the Nazi invasion of Norway on April 9, 1940. The free world and its basic human freedoms were at stake. The citizens of Stoughton, Wisconsin, were “outraged” at the “ruthless invasion of Norway” which had “all the earmarks of piracy.”2 Sunday, April 21, 1940, was declared a day of prayer for the people of Norway and their royal family by Norwegian Lutheran congregations across America. Norwegian Americans incorporated American Relief for Norway within ten days of the Nazi invasion. The Nazi occupation (1940–­ 1945) generated 53 campaigns on the home front both sympathy and support for the Norwegian people among Norwegian Americans . Norwegian Americans were intimately and passionately involved in wartime efforts on the home front and on the frontlines, revealing strong and enduring ties to a beloved motherland. From confusion and despair, a united and determined people emerged with the common cause of liberty. King Haakon, speaking to the Norwegian people in 1940 via radio from Northern Norway on the Norwegian national holiday, the Seventeenth of May, said: “For more than a hundred years this day has united the people of Norway in the idea of liberty and the work of liberty accomplished at Eidsvold, where we all promised one another to defend this country.” The King’s monogram H7 became the symbol of liberty. C. J. Hambro, president of the Norwegian parliament , wrote in the wake of the invasion: “And so the Government urges the whole nation to safeguard the inheritance of freedom, faithful to the great ideas which have carried Norway through the centuries. Long live the fatherland! Long live a free Norway!”3 In 1940 Norwegians in America were heavily concentrated in urban areas and farming communities in the Upper Midwest. Minneapolis and Chicago were the undisputed centers for Norwegian-­ American organizational life. The earliest settlements were planted in northern Illinois and southern Wisconsin in the mid-­ nineteenth century. Eventually, colonies emerged across the United States and Canada, in Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Michigan, the Dakotas , the Canadian prairies, Texas, Washington, California, Vancouver, and New York. The great transatlantic migrations brought more than 900,000 Norwegians to the United States from 1825 to the present day, with 87 percent of them migrating between 1865 and 1930. Thus, connections to the motherland were vibrant and meaningful when war came to Norway in 1940.4 Wartime stresses and strains brought solidarity to Norwegian Americans from all walks of life, heightened their patriotic spirit as Americans, and provided new opportunities for them in areas such as business, industry, and agricultural production. Home-­front campaigns were organized across America by innumerable ethnic, charitable, and community groups. Norwegian Americans, like their ethnic neighbors, joined the home-­ front campaigns in very personal and generous ways. 54 articles Norwegian Americans served alongside their fellow Americans on the battlefield as well. In doing so, they brought heightened visibility in the United States to the plight of the people in occupied Norway.5 In September 1942 President Roosevelt noted the resilience and resistance of the Norwegian people in his famous words to the free world delivered in Washington, D.C., from his open car, with Princess Märtha at his side, “Look to Norway!”6 Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms speech posited moral obligations that transcended national and ethnic boundaries : freedom from fear, freedom from want, freedom of speech, and freedom of worship. The Four Freedoms were the subject of iconic paintings by Norman Rockwell replicated on calendars and posters and displayed ubiquitously in homes and public places across America. Throughout the war these hung as important visual reminders of the basic freedoms at stake.7 Americans engaged in the war effort fought for the universal values of life, liberty, and...

“A Struggle Unparalleled in Human History”: Survivors Remember the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

“A Struggle Unparalleled in Human History”: Survivors Remember the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising David Slucki (bio) In Riverside Park in Manhattan, at 83rd Street, an unassuming stone in the ground, surrounded by a modest garden, reads: “This is the site of the American Memorial to the heroes of the Warsaw ghetto battle April-May 1943 and to the six million Jews of Europe martyred in the cause of liberty.” It’s a peaceful spot, with only the hum of the West Side Highway providing an atmospheric vibration, and runners silently jogging past, probably oblivious to the memorial stone. The text has a lot packed into a short sentence, a jumble of different aims, attaching two different readings not only of the ghetto fighters, but also of the victims: Jewish heroes, but also heroes of all humankind. It reflects the tension between particularist and universalist interpretations of European Jews’ experiences, and ascribes meaning to the utterly meaningless destruction of European Jewry. It turns all the victims into heroes, and aligns their struggle with the mythological American striving for freedom. This cornerstone, dedicated in 1947, became the site of decades of failed attempts by survivors to establish a permanent memorial to the Warsaw ghetto fighters, and to all Holocaust victims. Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 203] In the world of American Jewish Holocaust survivors in the postwar decades, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising came to be the central symbol around which remembrance of the Holocaust revolved. There were many dates that survivors marked to honor their destroyed civilization. They mourned on the anniversaries that their families were killed, and the dates ghettoes were liquidated, or that concentration and death camps were liberated. Landsmanshaftn (hometown associations) marked the dates on which their communities were deported, or slaughtered. Yet no event bound survivors across geographic, political, and religious lines quite like the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, a symbol of strength amid weakness, and a moment of defiance in the middle of years of victimhood. This article examines the ways that survivor organizations in New York City commemorated the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in the decades after World War II, placing it at the center of their memorial practices, and helping to ensure that the unlikely story of defiance received recognition within the Jewish world and beyond. Survivors conceptualized the uprising as the central symbol of Jewish suffering, resistance, and rebirth. They were, of course, not alone in these efforts, yet their collective contribution to the formulation of Holocaust memorial ideas and practices has so far been under-examined.1 These few decades, until the late 1970s, were years when a singular notion of the Holocaust had yet to crystallize, and these efforts by survivors helped to cement and popularize particular ways of thinking about European Jews’ wartime suffering. Indeed, survivors collectively began to grapple with the meaning of the [End Page 204] Holocaust even while the war was still continuing. New York City was, of course, not the only place where survivors gathered and negotiated their understandings of the Holocaust; nor was it the only place that they influenced the shape of Holocaust memory. Further study is certainly required to come to terms with how this question played out in other urban settings, large and small, where survivors found themselves after the war. Nevertheless, a focus on New York City from 1946 through the late 1960s helps to draw conclusions concerning the links between survivors’ internal conceptions of the Holocaust and ideas that ultimately took shape beyond the survivor and even Jewish communities. For many survivors, placing the resistance narrative at the center of their memorial life was not only cathartic, but ideological, even spiritual or religious.2 For others, the Uprising was momentous, but remembering it served a broader purpose, a way to popularize stories of the Holocaust. For the latter, elevating the uprising was not ideological, but instrumental. A focus on the uprising served to emphasize symbolically that the fighters were “martyred in the cause of liberty,” thus providing a pathway through which all survivors, whether or not they were veterans of a partisan movement or Warsaw inhabitants, could find some solace in the utter meaninglessness of their suffering. Emphasizing the...

Charlie Hebdo’s controversial cartoons in question: stances, translational narratives and identity construction from a cross-linguistic perspective

ABSTRACTCharlie Hebdo, a synonym for the universal cause of liberty and freedom of the Press, gained international attention after the terrorist attack of January 2015. However, Charlie Hebdo through its particular humour, which is both culture-bound and ideology-oriented, triggered anger and indignation, mainly after the publication of cartoons portraying little Aylan, the symbol of refugees’ tragedy, and in particular, the one which depicted him as “an ass groper”. This article sets out to investigate from a cross-linguistic and cross-cultural viewpoint reactions that the most controversial cartoon triggered, while considering both the socio-political context of the event and examining the crisscrossing and competing narratives it gave rise to. In doing so, the study draws heavily on the narrative theory of translation [Baker, Mona. 2006. Translation and Conflict: A Narrative Account. London: Routledge, Baker, Mona. 2007. “Reframing Conflict in Translation.” Social Semiotics 17 (2): 151–169, Baker, Mona. 2010. “Narratives of Terrorism and Security: ‘Accurate’ Translations, Suspicious Frames’.” Critical Studies on Terrorism 3 (3): 347–364] and uses concepts and methods from Critical Discourse Analysis, and semiotic approaches to cartoon translation. Working with a trilingual corpus composed of articles from various French, English and Greek online newspapers and blogs, it first delineates the theoretical framework, the methodological approach applied and then it proceeds with the analysis of stancetaking as deployed in headlines and examines from a contrastive viewpoint the competing translational narratives in English and Greek data.

L for Liberty

The paper briefly surveys the contributions made by mathematicians to the cause of liberty. In particular, we describe the figure of Eamon de Valera, mathematician, teacher, revolutionary and politician, who traversed the history of Ireland in the twentieth century, from the 1916 Easter Rising to the 1960s, becoming one of the most prominent and long-serving political figures in the international landscape.

The Mainstreaming of Visual Culture in U. S. History

Steadily the study of visual culture has moved into the mainstream of U. S. historiography. More and more scholars have realized that the pictures they long used to illustrate their books and lectures possess a history of their own, as material objects and as ways of seeing. Decades ago Michel Foucault and an assortment of linguistic “turners” alerted historians to textuality—the constant play of language-forms within structures of power and consciousness—and now we see that cultural discourses comprise the visual as much as the verbal. Images and words intertwine as people refashion their rituals and conventions. Two recent studies of celebrated ex-slaves and abolitionists Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass--Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby's Enduring Truths and John Stauffer, Zoe Trodd, and Celeste-Marie Bernier's Picturing Frederick Douglass--show how far we have come in granting the pictorial its proper place alongside the spoken, the written, and the read. Among the most charismatic wordsmiths of their day, Truth and Douglass excelled as orators and authors (the illiterate Truth dictated her published Narrative of 1850 to reformer Olive Gilbert). They knew that distributing their likenesses would promote the cause of liberty. And they learned that politicizing their appearance did more than contribute to the battle for freedom. It gave them experience in living as free people in a modern commercial world. While some militant abolitionists followed Thoreau in affirming the old republican dichotomy between commerce and virtue, Douglass and Truth in effect celebrated the virtue of commerce.

Lynne Cheney. James Madison: A Life Reconsidered. New York: Viking, 2014. Pp. x+563. $36.00.David O. Stewart. Madison’s Gift: Five Partnerships That Built America. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015. Pp. vii+419. $28.00.Joseph J. Ellis. The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution, 1783–1789. New York: Knopf, 2015. Pp. xx+290. $27.95.

Lynne Cheney. James Madison: A Life Reconsidered. New York: Viking, 2014. Pp. x+563. $36.00.David O. Stewart. Madison’s Gift: Five Partnerships That Built America. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015. Pp. vii+419. $28.00.Joseph J. Ellis. The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution, 1783–1789. New York: Knopf, 2015. Pp. xx+290. $27.95.

Murray N. Rothbard’s Paleolibertarianism. In Search for a Political Success during the Republican Party Presidential Primaries 1992

Any evaluation of paleolibertarianism must be twofold. As it has been touched upon at the beginning of this article, it would be a good idea to view paleolibertarianism from two angles. As a political proposition, related to the “here and now” in which it came to be, as well as a theory of its own, the way it was expressed by Rothbard and Rockwell, it contributed something new to the already diverse tree of libertarianism. The first assessment must be mixed, partly negative. It is not so straightforward to assess paleolibertarianism as an idea. Its this potential was never squandered, thanks to the continued activities of the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama. Rothbard’s work is being continued. And for the libertarian movement as a whole, it is advantageous that its individual parts clearly indicate the similarities and difference between them. Libertarianism is a young ideology, and an internal debate, and Rothbard’s legacy invites one, can only serve to further the cause of liberty.

Review: <i>The South African Letters of Thomas Pringle</i>

Randolph Vigne has assembled these 223 South African letters of Thomas Pringle from archives, libraries and private collections in South Africa, Great Britain and Canada. The first few letters were written from Edinburgh, where Pringle was preparing to leave for Cape, last few from London, where, after passage of Emancipation Act, Pringle was expecting to return to South Africa. The last letter is dated 17th November 1834. Pringle died on 5th December and collection closes with his Last Will and Testament. The poet and abolitionist was an active correspondent: he writes from Deptford, Cape Town, Bavians River (Pringle's spelling, later Teviotdale), Graaff-Reinet, Grahamstown, Theopolis, Uitenhage and many other places visited in his criss-crossing of Cape. The sequencing and division of letters follow Pringle's career: from settlement of his family on frontier, through success and disappointment of Cape Town and clash with Somerset, to turning-point, probably a meeting with Andries Stockenstrom and Dr. John Phillip, which led Pringle to final calling with which he would leave colony: the general cause of liberty, and last years of abolitionist activity in London. Randolph Vigne, who has done Pringle proud - transcriptions, notes and introduction are excellent - is, I understand, working on a biography of Pringle, which we can now look forward to as a fitting culmination of work begun by Patricia Morris's account of life. In his work on these letters Randolph Vigne has already brought readers closer to distinctive personality of Pringle and to complex ways in which he was implicated in history and politics of his time. Liberalism is a contested order in South Africa today but Pringle's struggle for press freedom has a continuing relevance.

<em>Liberal Epic: The Victorian Practice of History from Gibbon to Churchill</em>, by Edward Adams

Reviewed by: Liberal Epic: The Victorian Practice of History from Gibbon to Churchill by Edward Adams Nathan K. Hensley (bio) Liberal Epic: The Victorian Practice of History from Gibbon to Churchill, by Edward Adams; pp. x + 322. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011, $39.50, $29.50 paper. Near the end of Stephen Gaghan’s Syriana (2005), we watch the assassination of an Arab prince through drone eyes: inside a CIA control room, on a video screen. As functionaries in Virginia count down to impact, our point of view shifts to the desert, where George Clooney confronts the man he’s been trying to warn of the attack. Just as the [End Page 746] two make eye contact, everything explodes. Instantly the film cuts back to the control room, where the roaring fireball has become a silent white puff on a monitor, only pixels. Somebody says, “Target destroyed.” Liberal Epic: The Victorian Practice of History from Gibbon to Churchill examines self-consciously modern representations of war from the eighteenth century to the present, so it’s no surprise that this important book—awarded the 2013 Barbara Perkins and George Perkins Award by the International Society for the Study of Narrative—would help us understand Gaghan’s seemingly ultra-contemporary shift between scales. Syriana splits two perspectives with a jumpcut: on the one hand, we have satellite optics and the euphemized violence of military bureaucracy; on the other, individual heroes who experience the face-to-face connections that go by the name “human.” The film’s suggestion is that institutional doublespeak is subsuming authentic human life. For the more analytically precise Edward Adams, the cynical drive to euphemize violence (“target destroyed”) and the fetishization of agency in the form of individual heroes (or Hollywood stars) are two sides of the same coin: both are constitutive features of modernity. Liberal Epic’s central claim, a persuasive one, is that modernity loves heroes just as much as it pretends to hate violence. That is why the genre of epic, focused as it is on single combatants in martial struggles, so vividly illuminates the tensions at the heart of post-Enlightenment thought. For Adams, epic in its original Homeric and Vergilian form shows brute terror and physical harm without recuperating that violence into any universalist system of ethics. By contrast, modern epics tend to “glorif[y] war and violence in the cause of liberty,” working hard to depict warfare in service of humanity (22). We see two results: poetically sanitized violence and a lingering belief that heroic individuals push history forward. “Liberal epic’s basic paradox,” then, consists in its emphasis on single (male) actors who kill, but only to bring peace and justice into the world (235). Contra György Lukács in The Theory of the Novel (1920), therefore, Adams follows Herbert Tucker’s recent Epic: Britain’s Heroic Muse 1790–1910 (2008) to show that the rumors of epic’s demise in modernity have been greatly exaggerated. Adams’s big book shares with Tucker’s even bigger one both encyclopedic ambition and what we might be tempted to call heroic erudition. With impressive agility, Adams reads Greek and Latin originals against their French and English translations, which are themselves reworked through the centuries. In fact, Adams’s subtitle “The Victorian Practice of History” shortchanges his book’s scope, which extends beyond both the Victorian era and historical writing as such. Phonebook-thick histories like Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–89) and William Francis Napier’s History of the War in the Peninsula (1828–40) share space with works in other forms, from other historical and national situations—Alexander Pope’s Iliad (1715–20), Walter Scott’s romantic fictions, Thomas Hardy’s long verse drama The Dynasts (1904–08), Gustave Flaubert’s Salammbô (1862), and (in the prologue and epilogue) contemporary video games like Halo. All are grouped into the capacious genre Adams names liberal epic, a “coherent, self-conscious, but acknowledged tradition of epic literature” that is simultaneously fascinated with violence and committed to the idea that it might someday become obsolete (2). To trace this internally conflicted genre Adams works genealogically, showing the ways...

“Free at Last”: Kennedy, King, and the Meaning of Liberty in the Disability Rights Movement

There is a direct link connecting President Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., to the causes of liberty, consent, choice, the least restrictive environment, and genuine community presence for people with intellectual and related developmental disabilities. This article connects the meaning of liberty in those civil rights movements to the disability rights movement, identifies some of the factors that still inhibit liberty for those with disabilities, and describes the responsibilities and opportunities that professionals have to advance the cause of liberty for those with disabilities.

Liberty or Death: The Surprising Story of Runaway Slaves Who Sided with the British during the American Revolution (review)

Reviewed by: Liberty or Death: The Surprising Story of Runaway Slaves Who Sided with the British during the American Revolution Elizabeth Bush Blair, Margaret Whitman. Liberty or Death: The Surprising Story of Runaway Slaves Who Sided with the British during the American Revolution. National Geographic, 2010 64p. illus. with photographs Library ed. ISBN 978-1-4263-0591-7 $27.90 Trade ed. ISBN 978-1-4263-0590-0 $18.95 R Gr. 4-7 Most students who are alert in their history class realize that, while the Patriots took up arms amid cries for freedom from tyranny, they only envisioned that freedom extending to a narrowly defined group of peers—white men of means. Slaves who embraced the cause of Liberty begged to differ, and when Virginia governor Lord Dunmore took punitive measures against rebel citizens by proclaiming freedom for their slaves, hundreds of black men, women, and children flocked to join forces with the Loyalists. Though Blair acknowledges that Patriots also eventually offered limited terms of freedom for blacks who would enlist on the rebel side, she confines most of her discussion to those who supported Dunmore and other British leaders throughout the Colonies. Their valor on the battlefield and suffering throughout a smallpox epidemic are important parts of the story of the war, yet of equal interest is the aftermath that saw the freedmen cheated out of their promised land, treated as second-class citizens in Nova Scotia, or even captured and returned to slavery. The final chapters focus on efforts to establish a free black settlement in Sierra Leone. The text moves briskly, and historical paintings, document excerpts, and sidebar information complement the narrative. End matter includes a timeline, index, source notes, and a resource guide (which surprisingly omits some key recent books). This title will be an important supplement to Revolutionary War collections. [End Page 324] Copyright © 2010 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

A Tumultuous People: The Rage for Liberty and the Ambiance of Violence in the Middle Colonies in the Years Preceding the American Revolution

A Tumultuous People:The Rage for Liberty and the Ambiance of Violence in the Middle Colonies in the Years Preceding the American Revolution1 Joseph S. Tiedemann (bio) It is a daunting task to make sense of the Middle Colonies-Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, and Delaware-in the period before the American Revolution.2 More than elsewhere in British North America, these four colonies were a discordant medley of peoples of different ethnicities, religions, values, and economic interests, who often viewed government, whether local or imperial, as an intrusive force.3 They were a region with two competing, contrasting focal points: New York City and Philadelphia. They were a land where Quaker pacifists crossed paths with the combative Scots Irish; where large, wealthy landowners, who craved tenants, fought against poorer people, who yearned to own their own small farms; and where colonial governors and provincial assemblies repeatedly vied for power.4 Although it sometimes appeared as if all that united the region's peoples was that they inhabited a territory that bisected New England and the South, the reality was much more complicated. If scholars heed Wayne Bodle and view the Middle Colonies as [End Page 387] "locuses of interactive behavior," they become more intelligible.5 The four colonies were a gaggle of tumultuous individuals, groups, and communities, who cherished liberty, but who had with remarkable frequency employed force to settle disputes and to advance their own self-interest. It was, in fact, their rage for liberty and the ambiance of violence that provide a true picture of who they were and why they responded as they did to the Revolution.6 Violence and the rage for liberty were obviously present in the other nine colonies, but the way these two forces interacted with the polyglot population of the Middle Colonies demands closer scrutiny. A brief comparison with the more culturally and ethnically homogenous New England will underscore that reality. This essay will consequently examine the rage for liberty and the ambiance of violence. It will argue that what unified the four colonies was, paradoxically, their diversity. The four were not a cohesive community shaped by a common identity; they were instead a cluster of turbulent, diverse peoples united by a common interest: asserting, protecting, and experiencing liberty, or rather their own varied interpretations of what they thought liberty meant. Part of the period's excitement was that Middle Colonists were battling to define that term. Despite the wrangling, the absence of a single overarching theology and an abundance of economic opportunity had created an environment where they could realistically yearn for liberty. A Middle Colonist aptly explained in a local newspaper how many ordinary people in the region understood the concept: "Every man has a right to do what he pleased, provided he did not injure others who had the same Rights as himself."7 Although American writers in this period invariably argued that right and duty went hand and hand, the second half of that sentence was often ignored in practice, for violence was a potent tool for securing and enhancing their own or their own group's notion of liberty at the expense of others. Were these people ever moved by idealism? Yes, but it was typically colored by their own needs and interests.8 1. The Rage for Liberty It was not merely that Middle Colonists honored liberty, but rather that so many revered it, were energized by it, and contoured it to satisfy their own needs, values, and interests.9 It was a passion as much as a rational construct. The talking and writing about it could be as overwhelming as a tidal wave. In October 1765 "Publicus" declined to discuss the subject, for so much had already been published about it.10 "B.A." avowed that a true patriot [End Page 388] would sacrifice "his life in the cause of Liberty."11 A Philadelphia essayist asserted that "A day, an hour of virtuous liberty/Is worth a whole eternity of bondage."12 "Sentinel" insisted that "no rational creature would choose to have his life and property absolutely subject to the arbitrary will of another, one of his own kind, frail and fallible like...

MILTON, LOCKE AND THE NEW HISTORY OF TOLERATION

For three centuries now, John Milton and John Locke have been hailed as heroic advocates of religious freedom. Securely ensconced in the pantheon of liberal icons, they continue to be enlisted in the cause of liberty. In the wake of 9/11, a number of writers have retold the tale of how enlightened progressives rescued the West from the forces of theocratic repression. Milton and Locke loom large in that story. They have starring roles in Perez Zagorin's study ofHow the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West(2003), and they feature prominently as “two champions of liberty” in the philosopher A. C. Grayling's bookTowards the Light: The Story of the Struggles for Liberty and Rights that Made the Modern West(2007). Whig history is not dead yet. Indeed, Grayling is refreshingly honest about his old-fashioned liberalism—in the British edition, his book's dust jacket is laid out like the title page of a nineteenth-century pamphlet: “By Mr. A. C. Grayling. London. Printed in the Year 2007”.

The Price of Authenticity: Modernism and Suicide in Baudelaire's "La Corde"

The Price of Authenticity:Modernism and Suicide in Baudelaire’s “La Corde” Jared Stark (bio) Because the work of art can never coincide with its subject, because it is always belated with respect to what it represents, any attempt to determine its authenticity as a function of its adequacy to its subject will fail. As several of the papers in this cluster of essays suggest, the question of authenticity must therefore be addressed on different grounds—variously described here in terms of "a kind of authenticity grounded in the fake" (Lynes), of a claim that it is "only within the realm of the artificial that the category of the authentic has any meaning" (Shumway), of paintings whose meaning resides in their non-referentiality (Rothman), of what Wilde calls "the truth of masks" (Riquelme). The poem, painting, or musical performance becomes authentic at the moment that it is adequate to its own nonmimetic nature, at the moment it owns up to its inauthenticity. But what does it mean to be authentically inauthentic, to be a real counterfeit? If modernism entails the imperative to convey something whose significance lies in what Baudelaire calls "sa qualité essentielle de présent," then modernism confronts the question of authenticity with particular clarity. The modern is defined fundamentally in opposition to the past, that is, as that which distinguishes what is modern from what precedes it.1 The attempt to convey the particularity of the modern, its very presentness, is then bound to fail, for the act of representation itself relegates the present to the past and can at best appear as a repetition of a lost present.2 Modernism thus emerges, as Vincent Sherry reminds us in his seminar contribution, as a series of radical Nows, a tradition of the new, in which authenticity is [End Page 499] associated not with efforts to keep the present present, but rather with transience itself. The authentic is defined by its own destruction. * * * It is perhaps not surprising, then, that Walter Benjamin finds one of the earliest theorizations of modernist aesthetics in images of suicide in Baudelaire's writing, namely in the essay "On the Heroism of Modern Life" from the Salon of 1846. Baudelaire's references to suicide follow a series of claims that announce the advent of modernism. "It is true that the great tradition is lost, and the new tradition has not yet been created . . . . Absolute eternal beauty does not exist, or at best is a mere abstraction drawn superficially from the surface of several kinds of beauty. The element of particularity of each form of beauty comes from the passions, and just as we have our particular passions, so we have our beauty."3 Modernity, then, spells the end of an ideal of timelessness. Modern beauty, the beauty that modernist art seeks to convey, inheres in the particularity of the moment; whatever seems to transcend or survive the moment is nothing but an illusion, an abstraction. To illustrate his argument, Baudelaire turns to images of suicide: Except for Hercules on Mount Oeta, Cato of Utica, and Cleopatra, whose suicides are not modern suicides, what other suicides do you see in classical painting? In all the lives of antiquity . . . you will not find the suicide of Jean-Jacques, or even the strange and marvelous suicide of Raphaël de Valentin [the protagonist of Balzac's La peau de chagrin]. [OC, 2:494] In a footnote, Baudelaire explains these examples: "The first kills himself because the burning of his robe becomes intolerable; the second because he can no longer aid the cause of liberty; and that voluptuous queen because she has lost her throne and her lover; but none of them destroys themselves in order to change their skin in view of metempsychosis" (OC, 2:494). Hercules, Cato, and Cleopatra die, that is, in order to preserve and perpetuate their own self-images. In these deaths, self-determination and fate, action and reaction, converge such that how they are interpreted cannot but coincide with their intentions. Thus while particular renderings of the deaths of these ancient heroes may appear superficially different, every image of the classical suicide demonstrates the perfect correspondence of image and manner of...

Rebellion at Riohacha, 1820: Local and International Networks of Revolution, Cowardice and Masculinity

This article looks at the rebellion of the Irish Legion at Riohacha, New Granada (Colombia), in 1820. It highlights the Atlantic networks of politics, commerce, and migration upon which Colombia's independence from Spain took place. These networks catalysed thinking about changing notions of masculinities and collective identities in this period. The sources for the article are archival documents in Dublin and Bogota, and newspaper reports and private correspondence that reflected on the events in question. The Irish Legion served the cause of Independence in Colombia under the command of Simon Bolivar, and it was largely envisaged as a brave and generous Irish contribution to the cause of liberty. The Legion's rebellion thus caused numerous reinterpretations of their motives, both at home in Ireland and amongst Hispanic Americans. The article provides a brief narrative of events and traces the ripples of their consequences in Riohacha itself and away in Bogota. The study emphasises how identity formation in early nineteenth-century Hispanic America (including local, regional, national, colonial, and imperial identities) was a flexible and contested process based on understandings of masculinity and race, and influenced by often unexpected events such as hunger, looting, ambush, and desertion.

William E. Simon's capacities' approach to liberty: An essay in economic citizenship

This paper discusses the philosophical underpinnings of William E. Simon's productive public service and his championing of liberty in economic citizenship and the furtherance of entrepreneurial capitalism in America. The discussion suggests that his understanding and advocacy of the instrumental role of liberty made him distinctive among policymakers and unique among political and social conservatives. Two central themes are highlighted: the principle of liberty and private initiatives to further the cause of liberty. Secretary Simon was a passionate advocate for individual liberty being ascribed the highest value in American political life and called for vigilance against the unnecessary intervention of the state in people's lives. He committed his intellectual and financial resources to the promotion of these ideals through significant initiatives in support of institutions including universities and colleges, foundations and community organizations, and groups that exhibited a strong belief in, and support of, the cause of liberty. This, Secretary Simon believed, would “strengthen the free enterprise system and the spiritual values on which it rests.”

While God Is Marching on: The Religious World of Civil War Soldiers

They read the same Bible and prayed to the same God, but they faced each other in battle with rage in their hearts. The Civil War not only pitted brother against brother but also Christian against Christian, with soldiers from North and South alike devoutly believing that God was on their side.Steven Woodworth, one of most prominent and provocative Civil War historians, presents the first detailed study of soldiers' religious beliefs and how they influenced the course of that tragic conflict. He shows how Christian teaching and practice shaped the worldview of soldiers on both sides: how it motivated them for the struggle, how it influenced the way they fought, and how it shaped national life after the war ended.Through the diaries, letters, and reminiscences of common soldiers, Woodworth illuminates religious belief from the home front to the battlefield, where thoughts of death and the afterlife were always close at hand. Woodworth reveals what these men thought about God and what they believed God thought about the war.Wrote one Unionist, believe cause to be the cause of liberty and light . . . the cause of God, and holy and justifiable in His sight, and for this reason, I fear not to die in it if need be. With a familiar echo, his Confederate counterpart declared that our Cause is Just and God is Just and we shall finally be successful whether I live to see the time or not.Woodworth focuses on mainstream Protestant beliefs and practices shared by the majority of combatants in order to help us better understand soldiers' motivations and to realize what a strong role religion played in American life throughout the conflict. In addition, he provides sharpinsights into the relationship between Christianity and both the abolition movement in the North and the institution of slavery in the South.Ultimately, Woodworth shows us how opposing armies could put their trust in the same God while engaging in four years of organized slaughter and destruction. His compelling work provides a rich new perspective on religion in American life and will forever change the way we look at the Civil War.