Nineteenth-Century American Research Articles

Sarah Anne Carter. Object Lessons: How Nineteenth-Century Americans Learned to Make Sense of the Material World.

Sarah Anne Carter. Object Lessons: How Nineteenth-Century Americans Learned to Make Sense of the Material World.

Sensational Internationalism: The Paris Commune and the Remapping of American Memory in the Long Nineteenth CenturyAmerican Imperialism’s Undead: The Occupation of Haiti and the Rise of Caribbean Anticolonialism

Sensational Internationalism: The Paris Commune and the Remapping of American Memory in the Long Nineteenth CenturyAmerican Imperialism’s Undead: The Occupation of Haiti and the Rise of Caribbean Anticolonialism

Looming Civil War: How Nineteenth-Century Americans Imagined the Future. By Jason Phillips

Looming Civil War: How Nineteenth-Century Americans Imagined the Future. By Jason Phillips

Object Lessons: How Nineteenth-Century Americans Learned to Make Sense of the Material World

Object Lessons: How Nineteenth-Century Americans Learned to Make Sense of the Material World

The Silence of the Soulless Corporation: Corporate Agency in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Bravo

Early nineteenth-century Americans, particularly during the Jacksonian Era, viewed corporations with caution since they were often associated with a dangerous centralization of power, feudal privilege, and even the threat of conspiracy. In The Bravo (1831), James Fenimore Cooper makes the protagonist of his tale such a “soulless corporation”. Set in the eighteenth century, it tells the story of the government of Venice, which has turned from a model republic into a corrupted oligarchy. This article maintains that Cooper’s novel thereby draws attention to the cultural anxieties surrounding the emergence of the private corporation aggregate in the United States and, by analyzing Cooper’s narrative strategy, points out the special challenges of narrating corporations: how their collective nature requires Cooper to find ways of representing corporate agency beyond embodiment in individual characters.

Object Lessons: How Nineteenth-Century Americans Learned to Make Sense of the Material World

Object Lessons: How Nineteenth-Century Americans Learned to Make Sense of the Material World

Gold Mountain Turned to Dust: Essays on the Legal History of the Chinese in the Nineteenth-Century American West. By John R. Wunder. Foreword by Liping Zhu

Gold Mountain Turned to Dust: Essays on the Legal History of the Chinese in the Nineteenth-Century American West. By John R. Wunder. Foreword by Liping Zhu

Jason Phillips. Looming Civil War: How Nineteenth-Century Americans Imagined the Future.

Jason Phillips. Looming Civil War: How Nineteenth-Century Americans Imagined the Future.

Beside You in Time: Sense Methods and Queer Sociabilities in the American Nineteenth Century by Elizabeth Freeman

Reviewed by: Beside You in Time: Sense Methods and Queer Sociabilities in the American Nineteenth Century by Elizabeth Freeman Sarah E. Chinn FREEMAN, ELIZABETH. Beside You in Time: Sense Methods and Queer Sociabilities in the American Nineteenth Century. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019. 228 pp. $99.95 hardcover; $25.95 cloth; $14.99 e-book. In recent months, there’s been a lot of talk about time and what bodies do with it. “Corona time” has seemed to slow days down and stretch time out, especially for those people under strict lockdown orders, kept from mingling with friends and strangers. The resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement has brought thousands out into the streets of the United States and other countries in seemingly an instant, and the dismantling of symbols of white supremacy has taken place in accelerated time after the decades or even centuries that they have loomed over our cities and towns (as I write this, the statue of John Calhoun that dominated Charleston, South Carolina, is being removed from its perch, something I never thought I’d live to see). And the eight minutes and forty-six seconds in which George Floyd’s life was snuffed out by another man’s body pressing down on his are horrifyingly long. Elizabeth Freeman’s new book, Beside You in Time, comes at exactly the right moment to think about the biopolitics of bodies existing over time as well as across space, especially bodies existing in contiguity to each other. Freeman is especially interested in how bodies operate collectively and relationally over time, creating what she calls “queer hypersociality,” bodies that are “reducible neither to institution nor population, neither to identities nor genital sex—but in ephemeral relationalities organizing and expressing themselves through time” (7). As this quotation suggests, Freeman’s task here is to avoid both the Scylla of Foucauldian biopolitics that speaks on the register of population and the Charybdis of queer theory that focuses on the vagaries of sexuality defined through genitality and desire, finding both insufficient for the project at hand, and to steer a new route to understanding queer collectivities that find their source in knowledges and practices enacted through physical bodies. Freeman’s key term here is “sense-methods,” which, as she says, “consist of bodywork, of inarticulated or unspoken carnal forms of knowledge…inhabited and performed in groups or on behalf of them” (10). These performances can be scripted or spontaneous (or a combination), but they are above all relational, concerned with the interconnection and interaction of bodies over time. For Freeman, this mode is grounded in the ways of being present in the long nineteenth century (and it’s very long: roughly 1780 to 1936, and the book moves chronologically chapter by chapter), which, she says, “we have forgotten, or never learned how to see” (8). Paradigmatic of these modes is the topic of her first chapter, Shaker worship practices, which comprised singing and dance that enacted radical gender equality, asexuality, and communitarianism. What’s most appealing to Freeman is the early Shaker practice, in which singing and dance were unscripted and unpredictable, upswellings of the spirit that resisted the pressures of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to regularize and regulate the body in time. Profoundly communal while at the same time idiosyncratic, Shaker [End Page 349] dance was not about what social dance focused on—romance, pairing up, a prelude to courtship, marriage, and heteronormativity. Even when the Shakers formalized their dances into set movements they still pushed against the demands of heterosexual desire, rendering women and men identical in movement rather than differentiated. Freeman also points to the racialization of the Shakers in response to their dance practice. When they were “wild” and “enthusiastic,” they were like Indigenous people, whose dance rituals and family arrangements seemed incomprehensible to white bourgeois culture. When they were choreographed they were “monotonous” and “imitative” as Africans and African Americans were characterized. As Freeman argues, embodied temporal resistance to what in her first book Time Binds she called chrononormativity is always raced and gendered. In her exploration of African American literature in the second half of the nineteenth century Freeman hits her...

The 1791 Amendments as the 'Bill of Rights,' Founding to Reconstruction (A Response to Revisionists)

Unlike the “Declaration of Rights” annexed to many state constitutions, the ten amendments added to the federal Constitution in 1791 have no formal title at all. It is only by cultural tradition that Americans refer to these provisions as our national “Bill of Rights.” Until recently, most scholars assumed that this tradition could be traced back to the moment of ratification. Over the last decade or so, however, a number of scholars have challenged this assumption. These “Bill of Rights revisionists” claim that Americans did not commonly refer to the first ten amendments as “the bill of rights” until the twentieth century. Prior to that, most Americans either did not believe they had a national bill of rights or they would have more likely pointed to the Declaration of Independence as the country’s “bill of rights” than to the 1791 amendments. If the revisionists are right, then a substantial portion of constitutional historical scholarship is shot through with historical error, in particular scholarship supporting the incorporation of the Bill of Rights as part of the Fourteenth Amendment. This essay examines the historical record in order to determine whether the claims of the Bill of Rights revisionists are correct. It presents the results of an exhaustive investigation of political, legal and cultural references to the “bill of rights” from the time of the Founding to Reconstruction (and beyond). These references, most of which are presented here for the first time, suggest that the revisionist claims about the ten amendments are false. Long before the twentieth century, and decades before Reconstruction, Americans commonly referred to the first ten constitutional amendments as “the Bill of Rights.” Moreover, references to the 1791 amendments as the national bill of rights vastly outnumber historical references to the Declaration of Independence as a “bill of rights,” and indicate that nineteenth century Americans were not at all confused about the meaning and content of their national “Bill of Rights.” If any “revision” is in order, it is the need to (1) revisit and revise our understanding of the original theoretical role played by the Bill of Rights at the time of the Founding and (2) recognize the remarkably broad coalition of Americans who, by the time of Reconstruction and the Fourteenth Amendment, embraced an altogether different theory of the 1791 amendments.

Emergent Worlds: Alternative States in Nineteenth-Century American Culture by Edward Sugden

Reviewed by: Emergent Worlds: Alternative States in Nineteenth-Century American Culture by Edward Sugden Alex Calder edward sugden Emergent Worlds: Alternative States in Nineteenth-Century American Culture New York: New York University Press, 2018. v + 238 pp. “Some years ago—never mind how long precisely.” What are we to make of the temporal shrug of Moby-Dick’s second sentence? Ishmael is not adding “once upon a time” to the “never mind who I am” of his more famous first sentence, nor is he offering the teasing redaction of a realist narrator who might begin, “In the town of M. in the year 18__.” Something else is going on. And before being in a position to say quite what is going on, Edward Sugden, our Ishmael-identified guide, throws in a pair of introductory jinks. Firstly, he wants to convey a sense of a time portal opening or closing, and he wants us to know that there is a lot more at stake in the “brief interlude” of Ishmael’s voyage than we might think. Here lie “issues of historical framing, geographical placement, elusive politics, time consciousness, and the roots of a series of alternative internationalist genres” (2). More particularly, Ishmael’s nonchalance as to when all this happened is at once “ultimately . . . the seed” out of which Emergent Worlds grew and a “concentrated, compacted gesture toward the definitional crisis that has engulfed the study of . . . nineteenth-century American literature . . . in the last fifteen years” (2). We have the big build-up—and then swivel number two: “But I am getting ahead of myself” (2). Such swerves are characteristic of writing about worlds that once seemed vibrant with possibility but were then over-mantled by the homogenizing forces of modernity. Compare Sugden’s way of beginning to talk about emergent worlds with the start of a book from Aotearoa written around the same time as Moby-Dick. Ah! those good old times, when first I came to New Zealand, we shall never see their like again. Since then the world seems to have gone wrong somehow. A dull sort of world this, now. The very sun does not seem to me to shine as bright as it used. Pigs and potatoes have degenerated; and everything seems “flat, stale, and unprofitable.” But those were the times!—the “good old times”—before Governors were invented, and law, and justice, and all that. . . . I always held a theory that time was of no account in New Zealand [End Page 92] and I do believe I was right up to the time of the first Governor. . . . so I will just say it was in the good old times, long ago, that, from the deck of a small trading schooner in which I had taken my passage from somewhere, I first cast eyes on Maori land. It was Maori land then; but alas! what is it now? Success to you, O King of Waikato. May your mana never be less!—long may you hold at bay the demon of civilization, though fall at last I fear you must. Frederick Maning’s Old New Zealand (1863) is set in the years of early settlement, when Maori exceeded incoming Pakeha in numbers and influence, and was written soon after that situation had begun to reverse. “Maoriland” was being commodified and alienated as Maori land, and “the good old days” of intercultural mixing were giving way to settler monoculture, to “the demon of civilization.” But distinctly odd things happen to time and space in Maning’s narration. Not only does he, like Ishmael, avoid dates, he finds he cannot even tell how he rowed ashore without losing the thread of his story in digression. He feels “the whole affair is fast becoming one great parenthesis” and is forever having to “start fair and try not to get before my story.” But he cannot. He is like a composer whose opera is becoming all overture, or a novelist who seems not to hear the starter’s whistle and presents us with “Extracts” and other dodges. There is something about Maning’s emergent world that thwarts narrative headway and resists accommodation to historiographical norms. Maning’s word for what...

Emergent Worlds: Alternative States in Nineteenth-Century American Culture by Edward Sugden

Reviewed by: Emergent Worlds: Alternative States in Nineteenth-Century American Culture by Edward Sugden Hester Blum (bio) Emergent Worlds: Alternative States in Nineteenth-Century American Culture edward sugden New York University Press, 2018 256 pp. Emergent Worlds is an aspirational and counterfactual history of what might have been—and might yet emerge—within the archives of nineteenth-century American literary and cultural study. These emergent worlds include what Edward Sugden calls the “chaotic Pacific,” “long Caribbean,” and the “immigrant Atlantic.” In a book that makes forceful yet elegant interventions into conversations about the timelines of American studies and oceanic forms of relation, Sugden shows a remarkable ability to zoom among various temporal and literary scales, from the quirkily local to the global, from the canonical to the surprisingly marginalized. These scalar shifts emerge from and are focalized on scenes in Herman Melville’s writing in particular, although a range of other authors and texts might be read within such frames. Sugden is interested in the temporal “folds” that preserve traces of liberatory political roads not taken in the early nineteenth century. In his account, the maritime world or oceanic geoculture both enabled such potentialities and rendered them ultimately diaphanous. As an example of how the telescoping methodology of Emergent Worlds functions, here is how Sugden understands Queequeg in Moby-Dick, from the global to the local scale. The Polynesian sailor Queequeg is at large within the “chaotic Pacific,” an interstitial space that is foreclosed by the global events of 1848, which “rationalize” an unruly Pacific cultural system that had previously not been imagined as part of US imperial expansion. With the “comparatively unexpected incursion of the United States onto the west coast,” combined with the gold rush and San Francisco’s emergence as a globally significant port, Sugden writes, “a previously dynamic, fluid, and vibrant ecosystem hardened into a more ossified form” (41). He is interested in what forms of possibility (whether political, imaginative, or individual) exist within these spaces, in which the teleology of US westward expansion was not a given. Within the “chaotic Pacific,” we narrow to focus on a literary form Sugden identifies as the “Pacific elegy” (a coinage that rings sterling to me as a scholar of maritime narratives). In these narratives, capitalistic voyage plans go awry, whether because of storm, [End Page 232] mutiny, or disordered captaincy; in the aftermath, an alternative but unsustainable political reality emerges in concentrated, localized form. Inevitably, “the standardizing energies of global capitalism, the nation-state, and imperialism” impose themselves on this transitional world of possibility, and the Pacific elegy ends with the collapse of chaotic potentiality into “the mute, indifferent ocean” (73). In their literary form, Pacific elegies such as James Fenimore Cooper’s The Crater “archived this early Pacific world in the hope that it might one day be resurrected” (43). From the chaotic Pacific to the Pacific elegy, Sugden’s analysis narrows still further to the figure of the “queer migrant” in this ocean. The queer migrant is appealingly described as a character who is “antischematic, irreverent toward authority, transformative, self-sacrificial, blithe, friendly, trusting, ephemeral, migratory, and doomed” (79). We see queer migrants in the paired figures of Queequeg and Ishmael, and Ahab and Pip, Sugden writes. The queerness of these relationships is not a new critical insight, but their relationship to Pacific forms of mobility, contingency, and loss very much is. The tragedy of the queer migrants found in Pacific elegiac tales within a chaotic Pacific is that the new order their characters exemplify can only be identified in their loss or death. Queequeg’s tattoos—unreadable to the character himself—narrate “a complete theory of the heavens and the earth, and a mystical treatise on the art of attaining truth,” as Melville writes (qtd. in Sugden 82). As Sugden concludes from this example, “[T]he potential worlds that the early Pacific invoked were complete and self-sustaining, yet, in spite of this fact, not only basically unreadable with the codification of Pacific space but also doomed to be lost, as that oceanic world, predicated on change, was consequently every bit as ephemeral as human skin” (82). Emergent Worlds is characterized by such inventive categorical...

Reform Judaism, Reconciliation Romance, and the Civil War: Nathan Mayer's Differences and Nineteenth-Century Reform Jewish American Life

Reform Judaism, Reconciliation Romance, and the Civil War: Nathan Mayer's Differences and Nineteenth-Century Reform Jewish American Life

‘Mechanization Takes Command’: Inanimate Power and Labor Productivity in Late Nineteenth Century American Manufacturing

During the nineteenth century, the US manufacturing sector shifted away from the “hand labor” mode of production, characteristic of artisan shops, to the “machine labor” of the factory. This was the focus of an extremely detailed but extraordinarily complex study by the Commissioner of Labor published in 1899 that has until now defied systematic analysis. Here, we explore the overall productivity gains associated with these changes in production methods and the specific, causal role of inanimate power. Under the machine labor mode, the time necessary to complete production tasks declined by 85 percent, a remarkable gain in labor productivity. We also present OLS and IV estimates of the effects of using inanimate power, such as steam, at the production operation level Our IV is based on the gerunds describing the various production activities. Treating our IV estimates as causal, about one-third of the higher productivity of machine labor is attributed to greater use of inanimate power per se.

Savannah's Midnight Hour: Boosterism, Growth, and Commerce in a NineteenthCentury American City by Lisa L. Denmark

Reviewed by: Savannah's Midnight Hour: Boosterism, Growth, and Commerce in a NineteenthCentury American City by Lisa L. Denmark David K. Thomson Savannah's Midnight Hour: Boosterism, Growth, and Commerce in a NineteenthCentury American City. By Lisa L. Denmark. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2019. Pp. xvi, 248. $59.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-5632-7.) Although Savannah, Georgia, is now more commonly equated with bachelorette parties, St. Patrick's Day celebrations, and debates over plantation weddings, Lisa L. Denmark explores some of the lesser known but vital components of this charming southern city. In Savannah's Midnight Hour: Boosterism, Growth, and Commerce in a Nineteenth-Century American City, [End Page 714] Denmark sheds light on the growing pains of Savannah during a tumultuous nineteenth century of growth and financial insecurity. Front and center in this story was municipal debt—a financial industry that exploded in the nineteenth century. Municipal debt stood at $25 million in 1840 in the United States, but that number rose to $821 million just forty years later. At its root, Savannah's Midnight Hour shows readers how the city struggled to remain financially afloat, even nearly succumbing to bankruptcy in 1877. But as Denmark aptly demonstrates, the collapse in 1877 did not stem from the yellow fever outbreak that plagued the city but rather from "a long-standing ideology of over-optimistic risktaking for a goal that soon proved illusory" (p. 8). After a brief overview of Savannah's founding and early life, as part of James E. Oglethorpe's colony, and its subsequent experience during the Revolutionary War, Denmark dedicates the bulk of the work to the nineteenth century. She demonstrates that, from Savannah's earliest days, the rival city of Charleston, South Carolina, fueled Savannah's jealousy and bond issuances. As cotton gained ground in the early-nineteenth-century economy, Savannah moved in earnest to beat its South Carolina neighbor to be a key port to ship cotton across the Atlantic Ocean. This thirst for cotton led the city to push for a canal. But Savannah's boosters found themselves just as frustrated as those in other municipalities who found cost overruns and delays in construction denying the realization of profits. The failure of the canal did little to assuage the concerns of the city, which went on to pursue a railroad to try once again to draw upcountry cotton to Savannah and away from rival Charleston. Despite economic panic in 1837, Savannah retained its faith in the railroad project—one that saw much of the rail line eliminated during the Civil War. Denmark provides some context to Civil War and Reconstruction-era Savannah, which is largely centered on two key mayors of the era, Edward C. Anderson and John Screven. Denmark's analysis of Reconstruction-era Savannah focuses on the political machinations in the city and Savannah's increasing struggles to meet its financial obligations, with a small emphasis on the changing racial dynamics in the city itself. Altering the tax schemes and tax bases of Savannah did little to save the city's finances. Finally, in 1877, a yellow fever outbreak shook the city and provided a fitting culmination to the tumultuous period and a realization "that boundless goals were no longer attainable with the establishment of just one more rail connection or just one more steamship line" (pp. 12–13). While Denmark provides her readers with a compelling tale of Savannah's economic rise and demise, I could not help but wonder what outside interests thought of Savannah's actions—particularly its creditors. While there is a brief nod to a meeting with New York City creditors in 1877, this reader would have greatly appreciated a deeper look into the nature of creditors and what compelled them to keep coming back to the Savannah well, despite the precarious nature of Savannah's finances. These creditors were not restricted domestically, as European bankers invested heavily in American municipal debt, and even a cursory glance at these individuals or institutions would have helped provide a more complete picture of Savannah's financial plight in the nineteenth century. These reservations aside, Savannah's Midnight Hour is a welcome addition to nineteenth-century capitalism...

Looming Civil War: How Nineteenth-Century Americans Imagined the Future by Jason Phillips

Looming Civil War: How Nineteenth-Century Americans Imagined the Future by Jason Phillips

Single, White, Slaveholding Women in the Nineteenth-Century American South by Marie S. Molloy

Single, White, Slaveholding Women in the Nineteenth-Century American South by Marie S. Molloy

Confederate Exceptionalism: Civil War Myth and Memory in the Twenty-First Century by Nicole Maurantonio

Reviewed by: Confederate Exceptionalism: Civil War Myth and Memory in the Twenty-First Century by Nicole Maurantonio Amy Laurel Fluker Confederate Exceptionalism: Civil War Myth and Memory in the Twenty-First Century. By Nicole Maurantonio. CultureAmerica. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2019. Pp. xxiv, 236. $32.50, ISBN 978-0-7006-2869-8.) As monuments to the Lost Cause of the defeated Confederacy have come under increasing criticism, it is easy to think of them as antiquated—out of time and out of place. Crafted in stone and bronze, topped by mythological figures, and bedecked with opaque symbols, the monuments perhaps conveyed their meanings more readily to nineteenth-century Americans schooled in the classics. In Confederate Exceptionalism: Civil War Myth and Memory in the Twenty-First Century, however, Nicole Maurantonio reveals that the Lost Cause is far from obsolete. Not only do its defenders work to preserve the memorials constructed by their forebears, but also they have rebranded the Lost Cause for the new millennium. In order to understand how fundamentally inaccurate interpretations of Confederate history have gained widespread acceptance, Maurantonio examines the appeal of "Confederate exceptionalism"—a melding of the Lost Cause memory of the Civil War and the ideology of American exceptionalism (p. 2). By employing this framework, Maurantonio argues, neo-Confederates have normalized the Confederacy and invited others to empathize with its history. By adopting a neoliberal posture of race-blindness and refusing to acknowledge the inherent racism of the Confederacy, they depict themselves as the inheritors [End Page 763] of the most accurate knowledge about the Confederacy and as the victims of political correctness and historical revisionism. According to Maurantonio, the precepts of Confederate exceptionalism are best exemplified through an analysis of what she calls the "neo-Confederate museum" of Virginia (p. 15). This is not a brick-and-mortar museum but instead a dynamic assortment of cultural artifacts, individuals, and elements of the built environment, all carefully curated to perpetuate Confederate exceptionalism. In particular, Maurantonio examines the role of music, relics, living historians, cookbooks, Richmond's Monument Avenue, and the "Digital Confederacy" in reinforcing Confederate exceptionalism in Virginia (p. 18). For example, Maurantonio argues that General Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson's taxidermied mount Little Sorrel, housed at the Virginia Military Institute, acts as a "sacred relic," inspiring reverence for the martyred general and his Lost Cause by encouraging admiration for his beloved horse (p. 47). In one particularly compelling chapter, Maurantonio introduces her readers to the digital Confederacy—the latest installation in the neo-Confederate museum. In this digital realm, neo-Confederates promote their agenda not by invoking classical mythology but by proliferating memes associating Confederates with the heroic rebels of the Star Wars saga or with the superheroes of Marvel Comics's Avengers. Maurantonio demonstrates that the cultural touchstones of Confederate exceptionalism have changed over the decades, but its message—one that reifies Confederates and erases their racism—remains the same. Maurantonio's unique approach to the study of Civil War memory and her strong authorial voice make for an engaging read. As a self-identified northerner living in Richmond, Maurantonio writes Confederate Exceptionalism to understand this titular phenomenon both as an inhabitant of the neo-Confederate museum and as a scholar. This perspective lends her work a journalistic flair, not unlike that of the beloved book Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from America's Unfinished Civil War (New York, 1998) by Tony Horwitz. Maurantonio, however, does not sacrifice scholarship for readability. She successfully incorporates the historiography of Civil War memory while condensing complex theories about memory, identity, politics, race, and place into what is ultimately an informed, entertaining, and relevant work. This book is a timely reminder that Confederate exceptionalism is not a passé philosophy that can be dismantled along with its memorials; rather, it is an active movement in the process of extending its influence. As a consequence, Maurantonio suggests, Confederate exceptionalism will not be easily corrected. Amy Laurel Fluker Youngstown State University Copyright © 2020 The Southern Historical Association

Looming Civil War: How Nineteenth-Century Americans Imagined the Future by Jason Phillips

Reviewed by: Looming Civil War: How Nineteenth-Century Americans Imagined the Future by Jason Phillips Jesse George-Nichol Looming Civil War: How Nineteenth-Century Americans Imagined the Future. By Jason Phillips. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Xi, 320 pp. $34.95. ISBN 978-0-1908-6816-1. Years before his infamous raid on Harpers Ferry, John Brown commissioned a blacksmith to make one thousand pikes for fending off “border ruffians” in Kansas (46). The pikes consisted of a blade mounted atop a six-foot pole---the former part modeled after a Bowie knife Brown had seized from one of those border ruffians (a Virginian, as fate would have it) whom the pikes were meant to defend against. When he traveled east to incite a slave rebellion in Virginia in 1859, Brown took the pikes with him, expecting to distribute them among the slaves who joined his cause. They were circulated as relics after his capture and execution; southern nationalist Edmund Ruffin wound up with one, as did abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. For each the pikes embodied a different vision of the future: one saw race war and bloodshed while the other imagined justice and liberation. In Looming Civil War, Jason Phillips uses material objects like these pikes to help explain “how nineteenth-century visions of the future formed, spread, and made history” (3). He also looks at cultural productions like songs and novels, technological innovations like the railroad and telegraph, as well as private writings like letters and diaries from both ordinary and prominent people. The result is 260-page mosaic of how nineteenth-century Americans grappled with the future, encompassing not only a range of ideas about what the future held but also about Americans’ relationship to it. These constitute Phillips’ two principal goals in the book---to paint a more comprehensive picture of what they imagined in the future and how they conceived of the future itself. [End Page 275] He argues that two competing temporalities governed the way that Americans thought about the future. Those who “anticipated” the future saw themselves traveling toward it, believing that people could shape it and their own lives as they went along. For them the future was open, and they felt confident in the forward march of human progress. Meanwhile those who “expected” it saw the future approaching them, believing that its course was predetermined. For them the future was closed and largely outside of their control- in the hands of God or other impersonal forces. When applied to specific people these categories sometimes seem overly simplistic, but in a more general sense they highlight that Americans encountered the world and the future differently. Phillips claims that before the Civil War Americans were more likely to anticipate the future; the ensuing conflict, however, shook their faith in progress and in their (or anyone’s) power to influence the events around them, and fatalism proliferated as a result. In short, the Civil War changed the way many Americans thought about the future. Yet Phillips emphasizes that this shift was neither complete nor universal, for his main historiographical mission in this book is to dispel the idea that Americans foresaw a short, glorious war when the Civil War began. This “short war myth” is widespread in both scholarship and public history, but---drawing on his wide array of sources---Phillips effectively demonstrates that contemporaries envisaged the approaching conflict in various ways. He juxtaposes stories of young men eager to live out their romantic visions on the battlefield with stories of conservatives who warned of approaching cataclysm, women who perceived death and destruction ahead, abolitionists who anticipated the convulsions of revolution, and slaves who saw new opportunities for freedom and emancipation. These different perspectives influenced the behavior of all of these groups and helped to shape the war itself. In the beginning, men rushed to enlist in numbers that the United States and Confederate governments could hardly handle, and slaves running to Union lines forced American soldiers and statesmen to contend with the role of slavery [End Page 276] in the struggle. Phillips also shows that the impulse toward reconciliation after the war helped to quash these diverse viewpoints in historical memory, because...

Adulthood and Other Fictions: American Literature and the Unmaking of Age by Sari Edelstein

MLR, .,   (p. ). e references to the ‘nagging question of identity and nationality’, for example (p. ); or the suggestion that Browning’s ‘polyphonic, arabesque-like’, and multilingual style anticipates aspects of modernist literary practice (p. ), could have received further elaboration with reference to recent work on Victorian literature’s ‘global’ aesthetics, and translational writing more generally. Jaouad’s book will, however, prove a useful resource to students, scholars, and admirers of Browning’s poetry, and indeed to anyone interested in the manifold networks of cultural affiliation and response evidenced by Victorian literature. Its range of reference and scholarship will undoubtedly lead to the satisfaction of Jaouad’s desire to ‘excite further interest in Browning’s life-long fascination with Eastern religion, culture, and literature’ (p. ). B C, O J H Adulthood and Other Fictions: American Literature and the Unmaking of Age. By S E. Oxford: Oxford University Press. . xii+ pp. £. ISBN ––––. Sari Edelstein’s Adulthood and Other Fictions is a refreshing, thought-provoking excavation of age as an o-overlooked political tool that rose to power in nineteenthcentury US culture. Rather than treating age as a stand-alone discourse, Edelstein shows how age has been instrumental in the enforcement of social hierarchies, including race, gender, class, sexuality, and ability. e book considers an archive of visual culture, interviews, and writings, but it centres on imaginative literature’s varied history of, on one hand, supporting and disseminating conventional notions of age and, on the other, exposing, challenging, and reimagining them. e nineteenth-century novel proves a fruitful site for Edelstein’s investigation of age owing to its structural reliance on linear development. However, unlike a large portion of literary scholarship interested in age, which focuses on childhood and the Bildungsroman, Adulthood and Other Fictions attends to middle and old age, showing all life stages to be narrative constructs—fictions that nineteenth-century writers such as Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Louisa May Alcott , Mary Wilkins Freeman, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Henry James have reimagined to question the normative life course prescribed by capitalism, heterosexuality, patriarchy, and white supremacy. In the first chapter, Edelstein argues that Melville’s ‘anti-coming of age novel’ (p. ), Redburn, exposes the nation’s call to grow up as a capitalist demand and nationalist project; Redburn’s refusal to mature (and Bartleby’s refusal to move) challenges the agenda of white, male coming of age that ‘is contingent not only upon oppressing oneself but upon exploiting others’ (p. ). Chapter  demonstrates, however, that age categories also functioned by exclusion: slavery weaponized age by denying enslaved people the privileges of adulthood while simultaneously corrupting childhood. Edelstein reads slave narratives by Douglass and Jacobs alongside interviews with formerly enslaved people who made claims of extraordinary longevity, showing how they seized and challenged the discourse of  Reviews ageing. e third chapter notes, without claiming a direct comparison to slavery, how the discourse of ageing also infantilized and marked the economic value of free white women. Edelstein shows how Alcott’s Little Women exposes age as ‘a core disciplinary idiom’ that women were expected to perform (p. ), while Alcott’s Work reimagines how numerical age could support a ‘female life course that does not peak in girlhood or conclude with marriage’ (p. ). Chapter  highlights the protest against a monolithic conception of old age as decline in the short fiction of Freeman and Jewett; Freeman contests this ‘pathologization of old age’ (p. ) with her contented elderly characters and Jewett theorizes a ‘temporality of old age’ (p. ) that is ‘inherently oppositional to the demands of power, capitalism, and gender’ (p. ). In the final chapter, Edelstein revisits the fiction of James, oen considered ‘the only mature American novelist’ (p. ), and shows how his work denaturalizes the association of adulthood with independence, instead registering interdependence and caregiving as forms of unacknowledged maturity. Adulthood and Other Fictions has much to offer the fields of age studies and nineteenth-century American literature but also queer theory, feminism, and disability studies. Edelstein’s intersectional approach reveals age as a missing link that invigorates established arguments about discipline and power in these fields. Furthermore, the book pushes scholars to examine our emphasis on youth (for example, the...