Nation In Nineteenth-Century America Research Articles

The Garden Politic: Global Plants and Botanical Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century America by Mary Kuhn (review)

The Garden Politic: Global Plants and Botanical Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century America by Mary Kuhn (review)

Confederate visions: nationalism, symbolism, and the imagined South in the Civil War

Nationalism in nineteenth-century America operated through a collection of symbols, signifiers citizens could invest with meaning and understanding. In Confederate Visions, Ian Binnington examines the roots of Confederate nationalism by analysing some of its most important symbols: Confederate constitutions, treasury notes, wartime literature, and the role of the military in symbolising the Confederate nation. Nationalisms tend to construct a glorified past, an idyllic picture of national strength, honor, and unity, with a past often based on a vision of what should be true rather than what actually was. Binnington considers here the ways in which the Confederacy was imagined by antebellum Southerners through a group of intertwined mythic concepts--the the Yankee, the and a sense of shared history deemed Confederate Americanism. These symbols were repeatedly invoked and entwined by the producers of Confederate nationalism. The Worthy Southron, the constructed Confederate self, was imagined as a champion of liberty, counterposed to the Demon Yankee other, a fanatical abolitionist and enemy of Liberty. The Silent Slave, meanwhile, was a companion to the vocal Confederate self, loyal and trusting, reliable and honest. The road to the creation of an American identity was fraught with struggle, political conflict, and ultimately bloody Civil War. Confederate Visions examines literature, newspapers and periodicals, visual imagery, and formal state documents to explore the origins and development of these symbols of wartime Confederate nationalism.

"America for the Americans": Revisiting Monroe's Message

"America for the Americans":Revisiting Monroe's Message Monica Henry (bio) Jay Sexton . The Monroe Doctrine: Empire and Nation in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Hill and Wang, 2011. 290 pp. Map, notes, suggestions for further reading, and index. $27.00. Since George F. Tucker's full account of the Monroe Doctrine in 1885, U.S. historians have provided, on a fairly regular basis, varying interpretations of President James Monroe's 1823 message to Congress. Between 1900 and 1930, as the United States intervened repeatedly in the Caribbean and Central America, most of them agreed that the drafters of the message had meant an active U.S. policy to drive European powers away from meddling in the Western Hemisphere. Hiram Bingham, however, in his provocative book The Monroe Doctrine: An Obsolete Shibboleth (1913), cared to differ, as he claimed that the United States had outgrown the Doctrine and thus should refrain from intervention. In the 1930s, Dexter Perkins, the founding scholar—and still the leading authority for some—of the history of the Monroe Doctrine, also believed that U.S. imperial thrust in Latin America had not been a motivation for the originators of the Doctrine. Upsetting the status quo in Cuba, a Spanish colony and major U.S. trading partner, would have been detrimental to U.S. commercial interests in the Caribbean. That the Doctrine had been transformed into an instrument for intervention in later years was no fault of the Monroe administration, Perkins pointed out. But most importantly, Perkins brought his thorough research of European archives into the historiographical discussion. He concluded that the European threat—the Russian expansion in the Northwest and the attempt of the Holy Alliance to restore the Spanish former colonies—was not real. Hence the prevailing myth that Monroe's message had shielded Latin America from European despotism was inaccurate. Soon after, Edward Tatum broke away from the Holy Alliance-menace argument. In United States and Europe, 1815-1823 (1936), he made a case of the serious danger Great Britain had posed to her former colonies. It was a realistic assumption at the time of the drafting of the message that Britain could indeed upend U.S. interests in the Western Hemisphere. Then during World War II, Walter Lippmann turned the argument around. He strongly suggested that [End Page 243] the Doctrine had been an attempt to protect U.S. security by relying on the British fleet to resist European interference, thus brushing aside the idea that it had been an effort to stake out a U.S. empire. The "agreement with the British" assertion was taken up by the diplomatic historians of the 1940s. Arthur P. Whitaker contended that the U.S. unilateral declaration was not primarily to challenge the former colonial power, even though the administration was certainly suspicious of it; rather it was to warn against a joint venture with Great Britain, considered to be a part of the European system.1 Another major shift in the debate took place in the 1970s. In The Making of the Monroe Doctrine (1975), Ernest May argued that the foreign policy factors had not counted in the decision for the message. In fact, domestic considerations—notably the 1824 presidential elections—explained why Secretary of State John Quincy Adams upheld a unilateralist policy, whereas Secretary of the Treasury William Crawford and Secretary of War John Calhoun favored Britain's offer of a joint declaration. Because anti-British feeling ran strong among the U.S. electorate, a U.S.-Great Britain alliance would have hurt Adams' presidential candidacy. Hence Crawford and Calhoun, candidates as well, promoted the coalition, fully aware that Adams would be blamed for it. Today May's singular interpretation still stands alone, yet it should be credited for having introduced home issues into the discussion. Indeed, Cold War revisionists emphasized that domestic pressure for the U.S. capitalist economy to expand overseas had driven the Monroe administration to issue the 1823 declaration. It was a warning to rival empires to steer away from the budding U.S. empire. So where does The Monroe Doctrine: Empire and Nation in Nineteenth-Century America come in this major historiographical debate—which the author strangely overlooks...

The Monroe Doctrine: empire and nation in nineteenth-century America

A succinct, analytical history of the Monroe Doctrine from its inception in 1823 to its broad extension in the early twentieth century, this book explains in vivid detail this cornerstone of American foreign policy. Covering more than a century of history, Jay Sexton, who teaches American history at the University of Oxford, explores the varying conceptions of the doctrine as its meaning was distorted over the course of decades to further an ever-expanding American empire. When in 1823 President Monroe issued his vaguely worded declaration that the United States would not allow European states to further colonize the western hemisphere, America had little means of enforcing it. The doctrine proclaimed anti-colonial principles, yet it rapidly became the myth and means for subsequent generations of politicians to pursue expansionist foreign policy agendas. Time and again, debates on the key issues of nineteenth- and early twentieth- century foreign relations - expansion in the 1840s, the imperialism of 1898, entrance into World War I and the League of Nations - were framed in relation to the Monroe Doctrine. In Sexton's adroit hands, the doctrine provides a new lens from which to view the still-unresolved question at the centre of American diplomatic history: the nation's contradictory traditions of anti-colonialism and imperialism.

The Monroe Doctrine: Empire and Nation in Nineteenth-Century America (review)

The Monroe Doctrine: Empire and Nation in Nineteenth-Century America. By Jay Sexton. (New York: Hill and Wang, 2011. Pp. 294. Paper, $26.00.)Reviewed by James E. Lewis, Jr.A touchstone for American foreign policy for better part of two centuries, Monroe possesses a rich and varied history that has been examined for many different eras and from many different angles by historians, political scientists, and others. One might wonder if it remains possible to say anything novel about it, particularly in a work that is broadly accessible and largely synthetic. By making new choices about periodization and perspective, however, Jay Sexton offers an informative and impressive account of Monroe it developed over a sweep of American history. In process, he highlights domestic and foreign possibilities and pressures that slowly transformed a tentative and limited assertion of anticolonial ideals into a confident and sweeping - but always contested - basis for imperialist actions. In his hands, considering evolution of Monroe becomes a means to examine the protracted, contentious, and interconnected processes of anticolonial liberation, internal national consolidation and imperial expansion that underlay United States' emergence as preeminent global power of twentieth (5).Rather than limit work to doctrine's origins and early impacts or extend coverage to its ongoing relevance, Sexton addresses what we might describe Monroe Doctrine's long nineteenth - from Treaty of Paris in 1783 to Roosevelt Corollary in 1904. Drawing heavily from recent scholarship, he begins by grounding doctrine in a way of thinking about newly independent American states and their place in world that emphasized both necessity and fragility of union. The second of book's six chapters describes international developments that led to doctrine and cabinet discussions that shaped it, before turning to its initial reception and early abandonment. The remaining chapters trace resurrection, reinterpretation, and elaboration of doctrine between late 1820s and early 1900s. Across these chapters, Sexton shows that doctrine was summoned up from increasingly distant past - and redefined in process - to address internal and partisan often external and diplomatic purposes. In fact, he argues, over course of nineteenth century doctrine was more often, and more successfully, invoked against other Americans than against foreign powers. These invocations ultimately contributed to a rising sense of national identity and purpose.Similarly, rather than focus solely upon thinking of American policymakers, Sexton traces doctrine's creation and evolution by considering active roles of a large number of groups and individuals. Monroe's annual message to Congress of December 1823 was work of a small body of policymakers, but elevation of three paragraphs from that message into the Monroe Doctrine required labors of a much broader array of actors over course of decades. …

Healing the Republic: The Language of Health and the Culture of Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century America (review)

Reviewed by: Healing the Republic: The Language of Health and the Culture of Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century America JoAnne Brown Joan Burbick. Healing the Republic: The Language of Health and the Culture of Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century America. Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. x + 355 pp. $59.95. Joan Burbick has given us a lucid cultural history of certain literary relations between politics and hygiene in the United States. Healing the Republic brings together medical and literary narratives in service of a cogent theoretical analysis. Following the conceptual work of Martha Banta, the literary historian, and the political theories of the philosopher Antonio Gramsci and the feminist Chantal Mouffe, Burbick takes seriously the analog of the “body politic,” recognizing it to be an old yet fecund source of models and metaphors for constitutional governance. [End Page 535] The work, the author acknowledges, is the product of ten years’ thought—and it shows. Well supported, subtly nuanced, and rigorously argued, Healing the Republic integrates medical writings familiar to the Bulletin’s readers with related works of fiction, both classical and obscure. Burbick entertains several medico-political worlds of the nineteenth century while slighting neither medical nor cultural history. The rewards of this effort are surprisingly symmetrical: Burbick plies medical history with her literary knowledge, and expands the literary purview with informed medical-historical insights. She has a fine command of both literatures, and a deft, eclectic approach to theory that eschews obscurantism. Healing the Republic, though clearly engaged with issues that literary theorists will appreciate, is not beholden to any critical orthodoxy. Burbick uses theory, rather than allowing it to use her, and her historical analysis gives the reader not only a richer understanding of nineteenth-century medicine, culture, and political thought, but a set of conceptual tools for working other ground. The book is divided into two large sections: the first, on the structures of political and medical authority; and the second, on the significance of the body’s anatomy. In the first, “Textures of Authority,” we are treated to readings of Thoreau’s Walden and the predicaments of truth and sensation, of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and the human body as the fundament of democracy. In section two, “Fictions of the Body Politic,” Burbick parses her analysis into parts, exploring the political and cultural meanings of the brain, the heart, the nerves, the eye. Yet this does not entail a “clinical gaze” that takes apart body and soul; Burbick’s own search for historical meaning is respectful of the meaningful worlds of past lives. For all of its merits, this work has two related shortcomings. The cataclysmic war that divided the nation and the nineteenth century, and nearly made two hostile nations of one, barely appears in Burbick’s account, and is not mentioned at all in the index. Further, the multiple discourses of race, enslavement, and freedom appear oddly muted. While her analysis of Whitman’s various drafts of Leaves of Grass is compelling, we are left to wonder what place that celebrated abolitionist’s body, John Brown’s body, had in Whitman’s political iconography. We do not glimpse the Civil War, or the unfree labor over which it was fought, except through Whitman. Given the importance of the Civil War to the authority structures of both medicine and politics, and given the centrality of medical expertise to the delineations of race that framed these social structures, these omissions are surprising. This underplaying of race also appears in Burbick’s discussion of Oliver Wendell Holmes’s weird 1861 novel, Elsie Venner. The reptilian Elsie Venner is the child of symbolic miscegenation, her mother having been bitten by a “serpent.” Burbick does not explain, however, that the serpent was a topical symbol of treachery, representing in Southern politics the dangerous masterless “negro”; in Northern politics, conversely, it represented the treacherous Confederate. These symbolic usages were both historically specific to the moral, political, and martial contests over slavery, and at the same time references to biblical archetypes. A [End Page 536] thoroughgoing engagement with the political speeches of abolition, Civil War, and Reconstruction would have deepened the literary interpretation without contradicting...

Healing the Republic: The Language of Health and the Culture of Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century America

Healing the Republic: The Language of Health and the Culture of Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century America

Healing the Republic: The Language of Health and the Culture of Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century America

Healing the Republic: The Language of Health and the Culture of Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century America

Joan Burbick. <italic>Healing the Republic: The Language of Health and the Culture of Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century America</italic>. (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture, number 82.) New York: Cambridge University Press. 1994. Pp. x, 355. $59.95

Journal Article Joan Burbick. Healing the Republic: The Language of Health and the Culture of Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century America. (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture, number 82.) New York: Cambridge University Press. 1994. Pp. x, 355. $59.95 Get access Burbick Joan. Healing the Republic: The Language of Health and the Culture of Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century America. (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture, number 82.) New York: Cambridge University Press. 1994. Pp. x, 355. $59.95. Daniel M. Fox Daniel M. Fox Milbank Memorial Fund, New York Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 101, Issue 2, April 1996, Pages 564–565, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/101.2.564-a Published: 01 April 1996

Healing the Republic: The Language of Health and the Culture of Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century America.

Healing the Republic: The Language of Health and the Culture of Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century America.

Healing the Republic: The Language of Health and the Culture of Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century America.

Healing the Republic: The Language of Health and the Culture of Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century America.

Healing the Republic: The Language of Health and the Culture of Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century America. Joan Burbick

Healing the Republic: The Language of Health and the Culture of Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century America. Joan Burbick

Healing the Republic: The Language of Health and the Culture of Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century America

Introduction Part I. Textures of Authority: 1. The common senses of America 2. Writing the constitution of the body Part II. Fictions of the Body Politic: 3. Riddles of the brain 4. The tell-tale heart 5. Nervous reports 6. The recording eye Conclusions: somatic politics Notes Index.