Construction Of Group Identity Research Articles

Climate Imaginaries and the Linguistic Construction of Identities on Social Media

This article takes a linguistic approach to the construction of group identities in relation to climate imaginaries, which condition what climate futures are considered possible. It employs social identity theory along with methods from Sociolinguistics and Discourse Linguistics to analyse patterns of positioning and stance-taking in social media discourse (Twitter/X, Instagram). By identifying typical multimodal practices at a micro level, as well as introducing five functional meta categories (›awareness, advice, and agitation‹, ›ritualised appreciation‹, ›solidarity and allyship, ›voice and advocacy‹, and ›community demarcation‹), the research investigates how digital discourse reflects and shapes group identities related to climate change topics. It thereby offers insights into the role of language in co-producing climate imaginaries in digitally shared environments.

The Subject Vanishes: Jews, Heretics, and Martyrs after the Linguistic Turn

Abstract: The “linguistic turn” in early Christian studies, a signal contribution of the work of Elizabeth A. Clark, has raised scholarly awareness of the degree to which terms previously thought to describe social realia in fact function as discursive categories rhetorically deployed for various ends by ancient authors. With this new awareness, how then do we now move from—or work with—our texts’ rhetorical “Jews,” “heretics,” and “martyrs” to recover these ancient historical actors? How does thinking with ideas such as “religion” and “ethnicity,” or with terms such as “paganism,” “Judaism,” and “Christianity,” hinder or help our efforts? How do invocations of “persecution” throughout the first through fifth centuries serve as a dramatic medium for the internal construction of group identity? This essay explores these questions, while raising others about the lures of anachronism and the requirements of narrative for writing history—our own recreation of the past.

Public health messages during a global emergency through an online community: a discourse and sentiment analysis.

The growing popularity of social media and its ubiquitous presence in our lives brings associated risks such as the spread of mis- and disinformation, particularly when these may be unregulated in times of global crises. Online communities are able to provide support by enabling connection with others and also provide great potential for dynamic interaction and timely dissemination of information compared with more traditional methods. This study evaluates interactions within the Essex Coronavirus Action/Support Facebook private group, which set out to prevent the spread of COVID-19 infection by informing Essex residents of guidance and helping vulnerable individuals. At the outset, 18 community administrators oversaw the group, which attracted approximately 37,900 members. Longitudinal Facebook group interactions across five periods spanning the UK lockdowns 2020-2021 were analysed using psychological discourse analysis and supplementary computed-mediated analysis to further explore sentiment and linguistic features. The findings endorsed that the group provided a protected space for residents to express their feelings in times of crises and an opportunity to address confusion and concern. The effective communication of public health messages was facilitated by promoting desired interaction and the construction of group identities. Administrators worked with group members to achieve a shared understanding of others' perspectives and the COVID-19 evidence base, which led to a mobilisation of the provision of support in the community. This was accomplished through the application of rhetorical and interactional devices. This study demonstrates how online groups can employ discursive strategies to engage audiences, build cohesion, provide support, and encourage health protective behaviours. This has implications for public health teams in terms of designing, implementing, or evaluating such interventions.

Subculture wars: The struggle for the vape industry.

Drawing on a 2-year study, I argue that the UK vape industry is engaged in a classificatory struggle between a subcultural industry and its "other", the mainstream industry. I build on Thornton's analysis of club culture to characterize the subcultural vape industry as a community of taste built round a masculine aesthetic and a commitment to authenticity and DIY practice. Its attachment to complex systems and masculine spaces risked excluding customers without specialist knowledge or interest. The mainstream industry included tobacco companies which promoted vaping as a complementary category to smoking, linking their own vaping products to historic meanings of the cigarette as a lifestyle product. This task was hampered by the toxic legacy of combusted tobacco and its increasing reversion to a generic category rather than a branded product. Finally, the success of the price-focused vaping industry has been largely overlooked, but suggests that for most consumers, electronic cigarettes are still a contrasting category to combusted tobacco and are purchased largely on price. I conclude that the exclusion of a feminized, classed "other" is a defining element of subcultural formation, itself an overwhelmingly male mechanism of group identity construction.

Exploring the Motivations for Youth Group Membership and Identity Construction in the Tamale Metropolis, Ghana

Globally, cities are relevant centres for peace and security studies; however, evidence abounds that many states are incapable of providing adequate social services, including policing the urban space. In sub-Sahara Africa (SSA), rapid urbanisation is synonymous with a rising youthful population, limited youth employment opportunities and emerging youth groups in the streets. Notwithstanding the role of cities as economic hubs, the rise in the unemployed youthful population and the limited urban space governmentality by states, youth group formation to effect collective effort as a survivalist strategy is not uncommon. While some scholars in SSA have largely focused on the initiation processes, consequences, shapes and forms of youth group formation and associated violence within cities, an overarching exposure on youth group identity construction and motivation for youth group membership despite the inherent risk in emerging secondary cities, is limited. Critical discourse analysis of media reports, relevant literature, data from key informant interviews and focus group discussions (FGD) was instrumental in giving a historical perspective of youth group identity construction and young peoples’ motivation for youth group membership in the Tamale metropolis, Ghana. Drawing on the General Strain Theoretical framework, this study aims to foreground how the intersection of politics, economic, cultural, ecological and social marginalities induces young peoples’ desire for youth group membership and defines youth group identity. The study unravels that poverty and economic marginalities, political party-driven interest, religious dogmatism, and ethnic orientation posit strong motivation for youth group membership and defining identity.

Delighting and Detesting Engagement: Emotional Politics of Junk News

How do audiences make sense of and interact with political junk news on Facebook? How does the platform’s “emotional architecture” intervene in these sense-making, interactive processes? What kinds of mediated publics emerge on and through Facebook as a result? We study these questions through topic modeling 40,500 junk news articles, quantitatively analyzing their engagement metrics, and a qualitative comment analysis. This exploratory research design allows us to move between levels of public discourse, zooming in from cross-outlet talking points to microsociological processes of meaning-making, interaction, and emotional entrainment taking place within the comment boxes themselves. We propose the concepts of delighting and detesting engagement to illustrate how the interplay between audiences, platform architecture, and political junk news generates a bivalent emotional dynamic that routinely divides posts into highly “loved” and highly “angering.” We argue that high-performing (or in everyday parlance, viral) junk news bring otherwise disparate audience members together and orient their dramatic focus toward objects of collective joy, anger, or concern. In this context, the nature of political junk news is performative as they become resources for emotional signaling and the construction of group identity and shared feeling on social media. The emotions that animate junk news audiences typically refer back to a transpiring social relationship between two political sides. This affectively loaded “us” versus “them” dynamic is both enforced by Facebook’s emotional architecture and made use of by junk news publishers.

Separatists or terrorists? Jews or Nigerians?

AbstractThis study adopts a discourse analytical approach to examine the contested identity of the Igbos of the southeast of Nigeria. It analyses the significance of the social and political discourses in the media and the Internet about their claim to the Jewish ancestry and as “Biafrans” rather than Nigerians. The study highlights the implications of these claims and their larger political implications for Nigeria. The study also shows that ideological construction of group identity by IPOB consistently portrays them as the victim and the marginalized. And their claim to Jewish ancestry is possibly a way of seeking foreign support.

Creating Memory in Vandal Period Africa

The Vandals left no origo gentis even though history is an essential factor for the construction of group identity. But the creation of memory in the Vandal kingdom in North Africa can be reconstructed with archaeological sources. For this an attempt by looking for visualisations in the form of images and inscriptions in Vandal Period Africa is made and interpreted against the background of “creating memory”. These observations are based on “official” visualisations. They are a sort of propaganda and because of this are contained within the content of the ideological superstructure. The created memory is addressed to the various groups living under Vandal rule. It is addressed to the former Roman administration, to the inhabitants of Carthage and Christianity as a whole. Only in the private sphere could the tradition of a family genealogy be seen, most probably needed for legitimation – and, if there was a need for this, it points to internal conflicts.

Culture by Nature. Familial roots of ambivalent human social behavior and its cultural extensions in large-scale societies. A contribution of Human and Cultural Ethology

Since Hobbes' dictum of "homo homini lupus" in 17th century the tenor in European philosophy was the one of human nature in need of strong external rules to restrain from mutual aggression, inter-personal and inter-group. Behavioral measures and rules limiting a presumably aggressive human nature were perceived as purely moral and cultural. Evolutionary theory in the 19th century seemed to confirm the notion of a self-interested individual, at least in parts. By contrast, new models of cooperation later on modified the concept of a selfish human nature. Under conditions of reciprocity, immediate or delayed, cooperative behaviors tend to function better than egoistic ones. According to Human Ethology, comparable conditions are found in the first nuclear small group that is the extended family. Kin-based societies hence shape the original form of sociability. The key for understanding the ambivalence of pro-social and asocial behaviors, trust and mistrust, is the evolution of parental care and individual bonding. With parental care friendly dispositions and signals came into being, already in vertebrate sociability, but the differentiation of "we and the others" as well. The appetence to bond is opposed by dispositions of mistrust that tend to keep a distance and defend primary resources. Hence, small-group sociability could be handled quite well. Rituals of appeasement and the leveling of dominance were cultural means that evolved to nurture group cohesion. As for the rise of Neolithic larger groups of heterogeneous populations living together, new cultural rules had to arise. This process includes forms of customs, of religion, monuments and sacred objects. We may observe comparable phenomena in traditional cultures that exist today. The construction of group identity depends on myths that explain the group's identity by means of the cultural creation of common ancestors. The earlier kinship-relations of group members are extended to become culturally co-defined relations. Materially, these myths are made manifest by sacred objects. Through such symbols, the group communicates its "identity". The small-group ethos is thereby transferred to a larger group. On another level, artifacts and monuments that derive their expression from the repertoire of ritual "hostility displays" are used to secure the group's territory. Both forms of symbolic practice serve to maintain group identity internally by binding through common descent and externally by territorial demarcation through agonistic symbols.

Диалог в сюрреализме и конструирование групповой идентичности («Процесс над Барресом», 1921)

Диалог в сюрреализме и конструирование групповой идентичности («Процесс над Барресом», 1921)

Discursive Boundaries: Code-Switching as Representative of Gibraltarian Identity Construction in M.G. Sanchez’ Rock Black

The British overseas territory of Gibraltar situated on the southern tip of the Iberian Peninsula has a population of 30 000 people with a variety of ethnic origins, languages, history, and political affiliations. The recent upsurge in Gibraltarian literature has served not only to draw attention to the dynamic and multifaceted nature of their identity but also to help in the task of identity construction on the part of the Gibraltarians themselves; there is an observable push and pull of affiliation not only in Gibraltar’s cultural artifacts, but also in its language. This article identifies the ways in which code-switching in M.G. Sanchez’ Rock Black represents the Spanish-British conflict, and views language choice as a tool in the construction of group-identity among contemporary Gibraltarians.

Linguistic and ethnic media stereotypes in everyday talk: Humor and identity construction among friends

This study explores humorous intertextual media references in the audio-recorded everyday talk of a European American friend group. Focusing on stereotypes of ethnically-marked varieties of American English in media references, I analyze talk where white speakers perform African American English appropriated from an Internet meme and “Hollywood Injun English” as portrayed in TV tropes. I also examine post-recording playback interviews in which speakers acknowledge and comment on the problematic source texts and their performances. I illustrate how speakers construct their individual humorous identities and their shared cultural and ethnic identities through the “others” they voice, while simultaneously activating and reinforcing the social stereotypes represented in the media they reference. While these speakers do not immediately critique these stereotypes, in playback interviews they resist the identities formerly performed, with their statements ranging from ambiguous evaluation to deconstruction of the media and the references. This study contributes to understanding how and why speakers invoke media-embedded linguistic and cultural stereotypes for humorous individual and group identity construction, and how humorous media references serve as a site for activating, reinforcing, and deconstructing media stereotypes about linguistic and cultural identities in everyday interaction.

The Polemic of Individualized Appellation in Late Antiquity

This article describes rhetorical innovations in late antique Christian polemic around the construction of orthodoxy/heresy and Christianity more broadly. Late antique Christian polemicists label groups as heretical by using their founders' names as eponymous proxies for an entire group and set of ideas: Marcionism/ites, Valentinianism/ites, and so forth. This type of group construction, which I term the polemic of individualized appellation due to the pejorative labeling of a group after an individual founder, is an intentional and often artificial type of elite, literary polemic put to service in the wider creative mythmaking and boundary/identity construction by heresiologists such as Justin, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Eusebius, and Epiphanius. In identifying both precursor ingredients in various ancient Mediterranean comparanda and novel developments in the Christian heresiologists' discourse, I also engage with recent scholarship on heresy, orthodoxy, and identity constructions in Late Antiquity. I explain why the polemic of individualized appellation was especially effective in constructing difference, its role in this particular late antique context, and its function in effacing apparent similarities in widespread practices and beliefs. I conclude with a methodological discussion, arguing that scholars in religion and history should reject their sources' categories of group identity construction due to their inherent bias.

Variability in group identity construction: A case study of the Australian and British Big Brother houses

This paper explores how social identity is constructed and manifests itself in interaction in reality television discourse, two national versions of the gameshow Big Brother – Australia 2012 and UK 2012. The analysis concentrates on two forms of group formation, spontaneous and imposed, and how different attitudes towards group formation are revealed in interactional practices. The findings show that in both types of group formation, the prevailing tendency among the Australian housemates is the avoidance of public group discourse, especially when it might suggest the superiority/inferiority dichotomy. In the British house, on the other hand, groups are frequently referred to in terms of them being popular/unpopular, with the unpopular group striving to reach popularity. Furthermore, unlike in the case of spontaneous groups, unwillingly becoming a group member does not trigger group identity construction and explicit membership claims. In both houses, a strong link to the original group identity seems to be preserved.

Linking parental socialization about discrimination to intergroup attitudes: The role of social dominance orientation and cultural identification.

This study investigated the interaction of parental socialization about discrimination and social dominance orientation (SDO) in predicting the cultural identity and intergroup attitudes of the Minnanese, an ethnic group in Taiwan that faced systematic discrimination during the early decades of Chinese Nationalist rule. Because high SDO individuals tend to support group-based dominance, we hypothesized that under high preparation for bias, which may reinforce narratives that place the historically disadvantaged Taiwanese in a subordinate position, Minnanese high in SDO would identify less with Taiwanese and more with Chinese (the historically high-status outgroup) compared with their low SDO counterparts. We examined our hypotheses using a sample of Minnanese (N = 365; 183 women, 182 men; average age = 44.35) who participated in a nationally representative survey of Taiwanese adults. As predicted, among Minnanese exposed to high levels of preparation for bias, those with high SDO expressed greater levels of Chinese identification and more favorable attitudes toward Chinese than their low SDO counterparts (no difference was found in attitudes toward Taiwanese). Among Minnanese exposed to low levels of preparation for bias, SDO predicted neither Chinese nor Taiwanese identity. Moreover, the interaction effect of preparation for bias and SDO on attitudes toward Chinese was mediated by Chinese identity. Using a unique, non-Western sample, this study demonstrated the role that parental socialization about past discrimination, in combination with belief in group-based dominance, plays in the construction of group identity and intergroup attitudes among members of historically disadvantaged ethnic groups. (PsycINFO Database Record

The discursive construction of identity through interaction on social media in a Chinese NGO

This article investigates the discursive construction of social identity in a Chinese NGO involved in ongoing online discussions on WeChat, China’s fastest growing social networking site. While there is extensive literature on various aspects of online interaction, the analysis of identity construction through online discussions and the extent to which such discussions affect the collective identity of a group, especially an NGO, constitute a gap in the existing literature. Through the analysis of ongoing interactions in a group on WeChat over a period of eight months, and within the framework of social constructionist organization theory, this article adds to the existing academic discussion by revealing the way in which key members of a Chinese NGO are engaged in a process of group identity construction.

Playing out loud: Videogame references as resources in friend interaction for managing frames, epistemics, and group identity

AbstractThis study examines how friends in their mid-twenties appropriate texts from videogames they have played to serve particular functions in their everyday face-to-face conversations. Speakers use references to the videogames Papers, Please and The Oregon Trail to shift the epistemic territories of conversations when they encounter interactional dilemmas. These epistemic shifts simultaneously rekey formerly problematic talk (on topics like rent, money, and injuries) to lighter, humorous talk, reframing these issues as being part of a lived videogame experience. Overlapping game frames are laminated upon real-life frames, and are strengthened by embedded frames containing constructed dialogue. This study contributes to understanding how epistemic shifts relying on intertextual ties can shift frames during interactional dilemmas in everyday conversation, which is ultimately conducive to group identity construction. (Intertextuality, framing, epistemics, identity, interactional sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, humor, videogames)*

Land Grab: Green Neoliberalism, Gender, and Garifuna Resistance in Honduras - by Brondo, Keri V.

Brondo, Keri V. (2013) Land Grab: Green Neoliberalism, Gender, and Garifuna Resistance in Honduras, The University of Arizona Press (Tucson, AZ), ix + 240 pp. £46.50 hbk. Land Grab, by Keri Brondo, is an ethnography of Garifuna resistance to neoliberal development policies and diminishing rights to resource management on the North Coast of Honduras. Garifuna are one of nine officially recognised ‘ethnic groups’ in Honduras and as such they are entitled to special rights and protections under the constitution. Nonetheless, their rights have been continuously encroached upon by the state and environmental NGOs. In this timely work, Brondo makes several key contributions to the ethnographic study of Garifuna land politics in Honduras. First, by centring gender as an analytical category, Land Grab reveals the gendered dimensions of land struggle and sheds light on the prominent roles played by women in the defence of Garifuna territorial rights. Second, she draws on feminist political ecology to highlight the effects of land privatisation and neoliberal conservation, which have disproportionately impacted the rights of women. Finally, she interrogates how development, in particular tourism development, produces structural inequalities that have impinged on Garifuna resource management in their territories. In the 1980s Garifuna began to identify as an autochthonous people. This shift, which was previously analysed by Mark Anderson (2009), is important if we want to understand the ways in which Garifuna blackness is articulated with notions of indigeneity and concepts of territorial rootedness. By focusing on how these conceptualisations of self and belonging play out in relation to development policies, Brondo highlights the contingent, yet deeply rooted nature of Afro-indigeneity as an identificatory category. Furthermore, Brondo makes key interventions with reference to gendered rights and activism. Ethnographic representations of Garifuna point to the centrality of gender difference in all aspects of social life (Gonzalez, 1988), especially as it relates to the construction of group identity, but Land Grab is the first study to analyse the gendered impacts of development policies. These policies have impelled greater outmigration from coastal Garifuna communities to Tegucigalpa, San Pedro Sula and to the United States. Since the majority of migrants are young men, women are left to carry on the defence of their communities against incursions from the state, environmental NGOs and tourism investors. She states, ‘Women's environmental activism thus emerges not out of a “natural” connection to the earth but because women experience more negative fallout from environmental destruction or, in this case, regulatory measures’ (p. 109). Through her engagement with feminist political ecology, Brondo furthers anthropological debates on Garifuna matrifocality and women-led land-rights activism in Latin America. Brondo's study is based in Sambo Creek, an ethnically diverse Garifuna community characterised by longstanding conflicts over land and resources, and the Cayos Cochinos, an archipelago just north of Sambo Creek which is an increasingly popular ecotourism destination, and which was designated a Marine Protected Area (MPA) in 2003. Land Grab analyses the negotiation of land rights from the perspective of foreign expats, mestizos and tourism workers. Mestizo landowners, she argues, contest the autochthonous claims to place made by Garifuna activists through the assertion of an indio identity. Hence, mestizos symbolically link their contemporary land claims within Garifuna territory to a mythical indigenous past (pp. 120–122). They use this strategy to deny Garifuna rights as Hondurans, and to claim ownership over Garifuna lands they have acquired through legal and illegal channels. Brondo also underscores the importance of conservation to regional tourism development plans. She brings needed attention to the rights violations suffered by Garifuna in the Cayos Cochinos Marine Protected Area (MPA). These violations have escalated since the approval of the 2004 park management plan developed by the Honduran Coral Reef Foundation and the World Wildlife Fund (p. 139). Conservation policies in the Cayos Cochinos MPA have placed extensive restrictions on the extraction of marine life, significantly curtailing the subsistence practices of Garifuna living within the protected area. Additionally, naval operations are now common in the region, as are escalating clashes between Garifuna and state security forces over the management and use of natural resources. In Land Grab, Brondo skillfully addresses the topic of gender identity as it relates to land struggle and development; her work on gender in combination with her focus on ‘green neoliberalism’ serves to reframe prevailing debates on Garifuna activism in Honduras.

Accent Policy and Accent Modification Enterprises as Potential Indicators of Intercultural Power Relations: A Call for an Updated Research Agenda

This article has two purposes: (a) to examine the relationship between intercultural power relations and the widespread practice of accent discrimination and (b) to underscore the ramifications of accent discrimination both for the individual and for global society as a whole. First, authors review social theory regarding language and group identity construction, and then go on to integrate more current studies linking accent bias to sociocultural variables. Authors discuss three examples of intercultural accent discrimination in order to illustrate how this link manifests itself in the broader context of international relations (i.e., how accent discrimination is generated in situations of unequal power) and, using a review of current research, assess the consequences of accent discrimination for the individual. Finally, the article highlights the impact that linguistic discrimination is having on linguistic diversity globally, partially using data from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and partially by offering a potential context for interpreting the emergence of practices that seek to reduce or modify speaker accents.

Rebels on the Border: Civil War, Emancipation, and the Reconstruction of Kentucky and Missouri (review)

Reviewed by: Rebels on the Border: Civil War, Emancipation, and the Reconstruction of Kentucky and Missouri Alison Clark Efford (bio) Rebels on the Border: Civil War, Emancipation, and the Reconstruction of Kentucky and Missouri. By Aaron Astor. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2012. Pp. viii, 332. $47.50 hardcover; $38.00 ebook) The rebels of Aaron Astor's title are not, in the first instance, Confederates. Secessionists do make an appearance in his important book on Civil War Kentucky and Missouri, but proslavery Unionists claim center stage. Astor maintains that the Americans who tried to preserve slavery and the Union rebelled against Abraham Lincoln's dictum that the United States could not survive half-slave and half-free. These Conservative Unionists, who initially constituted majorities in both border states, became the targets of other "rebels," Confederates, but also African Americans. [End Page 607] Rebels on the Border is as intricate and fine-grained as the explication of its title suggests. Astor astutely dissects the politics of Missouri, and especially Kentucky, between the election of Lincoln in 1860 and the implementation of black suffrage in 1870. For him, "politics" includes the construction of group identities, the "articulation" of group interests, and the promotion of group objectives (p. 9). Conceiving of his subject broadly, Astor examined a range of source material, from the records of army units and the Freedmen's Bureau to newspapers, personal letters, and memoirs. To limit his purview, he trained his eye on fifteen heavily slaveholding counties located in the Little Dixie region of central Missouri and the corresponding Bluegrass region of Kentucky. Astor's narrative traces the Conservative Unionist response to African American assertions of citizenship during and after the war. Rebels on the Border argues that most white Kentuckians and Missourians supported the North because they hoped to safeguard the white-supremacist status quo from extremists on either side. Their loyalty to the United States was rooted in their attraction to "stability, pragmatism, compromise, and tradition" (p. 15). Astor carefully explains how the same social and economic realities that underpinned white conservatism shaped how African Americans fought for change. In areas where slaveholdings were small, hiring-out was common, and agriculture was diversified; enslaved people established the networks and gained the local experience to take on their masters. Although African American agitation began long before black men joined Union ranks, Astor points out that enlistment firmly "recast the Union cause as a struggle for liberation" (p. 129). The transformation left Conservatives Unionists feeling "humiliation," "shame," and "betrayal" (p. 200). Astor cites the case of a Kentucky Unionist who fired on troops from Michigan because he saw a mulatto soldier. The mere presence of armed black men triggered violence, particularly in Kentucky. As the war was ending, many white residents in both states came to identify with the secessionists, becoming what Astor terms "belated Confederates" (p. 145). Black suffrage brought African [End Page 608] Americans only limited power, but it assured the ascendancy of reaction. Astor illuminates the experiences of black Kentuckians and Missourians, but the main contribution of Rebels on the Border centers on the white Unionists who eventually adopted aspects of Confederate identity. In his conclusion, Astor proposes that the areas under examination stand as a "microcosm" of the "nation as a whole," which "thoroughly accepted slavery in 1860" (pp. 243, 247). However insightful, this synecdoche sidelines the white opponents of slavery. Radical Unionists who lived outside the Little Dixie and Bluegrass counties do make cameos and populate the footnotes, but Astor's interpretation elides their role. This marginalization makes sense in Kentucky, but the white opponents of slavery cannot be so casually written out of the history of Missouri and the nation at large. It is difficult to argue that Radicals deserve yet more scholarly attention, but a discussion of their politics in the border states would have extended the significance of Astor's study. After all, white radicals were rebels too. Alison Clark Efford Alison Clark Efford is an assistant professor of history at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The Cambridge University Press will publish her first book, German Immigrants, Race, and Citizenship in the Civil War Era, in 2013. Copyright © 2011...