post-Civil War Research Articles

Posthumous Images: Contemporary Art and Memory Politics in Post-Civil War Lebanon, written by Chad Elias

Posthumous Images: Contemporary Art and Memory Politics in Post-Civil War Lebanon, written by Chad Elias

Tangled up in Blue: The Effect of UN Peacekeeping on Nonviolent Protests in Post–Civil War Countries

AbstractDo peacekeeping missions facilitate nonviolent political contention in post–civil war countries? The nonviolent expression of political grievances is a crucial part of the post–civil war peace-building process but is understudied thus far. We claim that the presence of peacekeepers significantly contributes to establishing a secure environment for nonviolent political contention, particularly nonviolent public protest. In addition, we claim that peacekeeping missions with personnel from countries with robust civil societies are more likely to promote nonviolent political contention because of prior socialization to civic engagement and bottom-top political participation. This is particularly true for UN police personnel (UNPOL), who both train local police forces and have the most direct interaction with protesters. We test our hypotheses using a newly crafted dataset on nonviolent protests in post–civil war countries and peacekeeping missions’ presence, size, and home-country composition. We find that peacekeeping missions’ presence significantly increases nonviolent protests in post–civil war country-years. This effect is largely explained by the presence of UNPOL from countries with strong civil societies. Our findings have important implications for our understanding of post–civil war political revitalization and policy implications for the composition of peacekeeping missions.

When aid builds states: party dominance and the effects of foreign aid on tax collection after civil war

ABSTRACT Does foreign aid strengthen or weaken post-conflict states? We examine the effects of aid on tax collection after civil war, an important dimension of state effectiveness. While the literature emphasizes aid’s perverse effects, the relationship between aid dependence and the growth of tax collection is unclear. We argue that the impact of aid reflects its political utility for ruling elites in consolidating their authority after civil war. While dominant parties subvert tax strengthening reforms to solidify their political base, elites in more fractionalized settings rely on external political backing to manage internal challenges to their authority, and are more likely to comply with donor conditions. We test this argument through a Latent Curve Analysis of tax collection rate growth in post-civil war countries from 1978 to 2012. We find that aid is associated with slower growth in tax collection in dominant party settings, and more rapid tax growth in politically fractionalized settings. The findings highlight the need for attention to internal political dynamics to explain aid effectiveness after civil war, and point to opportunities to strengthen institutions in some post-conflict countries.

The spreading of technical knowledge in post-Civil War Spain: the example of Josep Escobar

ABSTRACT Spanish animation went through a Golden Age after the Civil War (1936–1939). No fewer than four feature films were made in seven years. The making of animated cartoons in Barcelona began in the 1920s, reaching a technical zenith in the 1940s through the efforts of press illustrators and comic strip authors. This paper examines the development of Spanish animation language through one of Josep Escobar’s comic strips. Escobar shows how illustrations could be used to explain technical matters to children. Using comic strips to spread technical know-how was uncommon in post-Civil War Spain. It is time to revisit the history of Spanish animation through the eyes of a pioneering comic strip author who had closely followed American and European advances in the field from the early days.

The Morass of the Anti-Injunction Act: a Review of the Cases and Major Issues

As Congress gives the Internal Revenue Service more tasks to perform beyond its function of assessing and collecting taxes, courts, practitioners, and academics are struggling to apply the Anti-Injunction Act (AIA) as the IRS promulgates procedures in the course of fulfilling new mandates. The AIA has its origins in the post-Civil War era when the federal government established new procedures ensuring the assessment and collection of taxes. It may seem odd an over 150-year old provision is fueling a growing number of contested and controversial disputes. Yet, the AIA has taken on renewed importance as courts consider challenges to tax regulations and guidance, fueled in part by the increasing importance of administrative law in issues of tax procedure and administration. From a normative perspective, we sympathize with legislative proposals providing additional ways to challenge regulations and other IRS guidance. We believe allowing an opportunity to bring good faith pre-enforcement challenges to regulations and guidance will enhance public confidence in the tax system and improve the quality of the rules in the first instance. Given congressional dysfunction and a low probability of any meaningful legislation addressing the issue (at least in the short term), courts, practitioners, and academics are left struggling with an increasingly complex and confused AIA jurisprudence. In this Article, which draws heavily on the AIA material in the Thompson Reuters treatise IRS Practice and Procedure where one of us is the lead successor author and the other a contributing author, we provide a discussion and analysis of the case law. Part I details the statutory provisions of the AIA and the Declaratory Judgment Act (DJA). Part II discusses judicially created exceptions to applications of the AIA. Part III examines what constitutes “restraining the assessment or collection” of tax. Part IV explores what constitutes a “tax” for purposes of the AIA and DJA.

Birth & reconstruction of equality in the United States

Os Estados Unidos nasceram de uma aspiração normativa e política afirmada em sua declaração de independência. O documento não continha apenas uma lista de razões para acabar com a colonialização, mas estabeleceu a igualdade como ideal fundamental, que permaneceu incorporado ao ethos da nação e é central para a democracia representativa americana. Apesar das declarações normativas de direitos humanos, o status dos Estados Unidos foi profundamente manchado porque os autores da Constituição mantiveram proteções ao instituto da escravidão. Mas muitas outras anomalias legais e culturais também existiram desde o início da nação, incluindo a subjugação das mulheres e a retenção de privilégios apropriados como qualificação para votar e obter cargos políticos. As emendas feitas à Constituição após a Guerra Civil (1861-1865) avançaram significativamente o estado de direito, mas simultaneamente exigiram maior sinceridade ao cumprir o testamento fundador. A reconstrução nos Estados Unidos foi alcançada por meio de emenda da Constituição original, em vez de promulgação de um novo documento. A ratificação dos três novos instrumentos legais, conhecidos como Emendas da Reconstrução, codificou a declaração de direitos e igualdade da Declaração. Só a liberdade não era resposta para o problema da escravidão. As emendas pós-Guerra Civil também proibiram o tratamento desigual de pessoas e criaram novas garantias quanto ao direito de voto. O judiciário, responsável por interpretar as novas disposições constitucionais, mostrou-se uma instituição conservadora que controlou a reconstrução e, com isso, diminuiu o efeito das novas garantias de igualdade.

Medicinal plants used by ‘root doctors’, local traditional healers in Bié province, Angola

Ethnopharmacological relevanceThis study is one of the first post-civil war efforts to document traditional botanical knowledge in Bié province, central Angola, in a first step to bring more studies on the use of medicinal plant resources in this area so as to bring new insights into Angolan bio-cultural diversity. Aim of the studyExamine the variety of plant species used for medical purposes, as well as characterize their social and cultural values. Also, it is aimed to compare their uses in the studied region with those in Sub-Saharan Africa and report new ethnomedicinal uses. Materials and methodsWe documented traditional medicinal plant knowledge among professional herbalists in two areas in Bié province through participatory observation, semi-structured interviews and transect walks. Ethnobotanical information was quantified based on Use Reports to (1) rate traditional knowledge; and (2) determine most useful taxa. ResultsIn total, 10 traditional healers shared information on their knowledge. A total of 87 plant species distributed among 57 genera and 36 botanical families were documented with Fabaceae being the best-represented family with 18 species, followed by Phyllanthaceae (6), Apocynaceae (5), Asteraceae (5), Rubiaceae (5), Lamiaceae (4), and Ochnaceae (3). Most medicinal plants are usually gathered at a distance from human settlements because of the belief in the higher efficacy of ‘wild’ plants shared by all herbalists. Roots are the most common plant part used (79%), explaining why the consulted herbalists call themselves ‘root doctors’. ConclusionsThe culturally most important medicinal species identified in this study, i.e. Securidaca longepedunculata, Garcinia huillensis, Annona stenophylla, Afzelia quanzensis and Strychnos cocculoides, were previously reported for the same use in neighbouring countries and elsewhere in Africa. Our study also indicates that there are several locally valuable species that have not yet been studied for their medical potential, to name a few: Alvesia rosmarinifolia, Diplorhynchus condylocarpon, Eriosema affine, Paropsia brazzaeana, Rhus squalida, Sclerocroton cornutus or Xylopia tomentosa. Moreover, the ethnomedicinal use of 26 species was reported for the first time to sub-Saharan Africa. ClassificationEthnopharmacological field studies.

Civil–Military Relations and Civil War Recurrence: Security Forces in Postwar Politics

Does restructuring security forces reduce the risk of civil war recurrence? Prior research has examined effects of military integration in alleviating commitment problems, but the evidence has been inconclusive. Other aspects of civil–military relations have received less attention. This article examines the effects of civil–military relations in the context of postwar struggles to consolidate authority. It outlines three pathways through which security forces contribute to renewed civil war: by excluding rival factions and facilitating insurgent mobilization, by exploiting control over resources to challenge the regime, or by escalating incipient insurgency through repression. Analysis of original, cross-national data on postwar civil–military relations shows that reducing the potential for exclusion and exploitation through diverse officer appointments and robust civilian oversight lowers the risk of civil war. These findings emphasize the distributive effects of restructuring security forces and highlight the value of examining political contests around state institutions to understand why civil wars restart.

Managerial Perceptions of Leadership in Sri Lanka: Good Management and Leadership Excellence as Foundation for Sustainable Leadership Capacity Building in Post-Civil War Sri Lanka

In this paper, we examine cultural values that influence the leadership perceptions from a sample of 1140 managers in Sri Lankan organizations. Multivariate analysis such as regression, factor analysis and structural equation modeling was employed to explain leadership excellence. Trust and sustainability were found to be the most important ethical leadership characteristics with three distinct leadership perspectives—nurtured organization, good management and excellent leadership. Implications of this study suggest that trust, sustainability and loyalty should be emulated within a nurtured organization, and good management practice with less emphasis on morality should be emulated for developing HR capacity in Sri Lanka.

A Legislative History of the Shotgun Quarantine

The recent Ebola threat from western Africa raised unanswered questions about the scope of the U.S. federal government’s quarantine authority. For decades, a widespread assumption has existed that states have absolute control over quarantines imposed within their boundaries. This article suggests that the presumption of limited federal authority is overly restrictive and not constitutionally mandated. The history of the “shotgun quarantines” imposed during the yellow fever epidemics of the late 19th and early 20th centuries offers an alternative constitutional interpretation. This fascinating but previously untold account reveals that leading politicians of the day believed the federal government had a broad constitutional authority. The human suffering and disruption to commerce caused by the local shotgun quarantine led the South to implore Congress for legislation to remedy it – the only significant instance in which the post-Civil War South united in favor of ceding state’s rights to the federal government. The controversy faded as effective measures against yellow fever were found, only to emerge again when Ebola confronted public health policy makers a century later. Because Congress never acted, we have largely forgotten the history of these legal debates over interstate quarantine authority. In recovering that history, this Article offers a new perspective on how to manage public health crises in our federal system. The need for regulatory standards that could preempt an unnecessary, parochial local quarantine requires Congress to act.

Comparing American perceptions of post-Civil War Ku Klux Klan and transnational violence

Recently, public debates have questioned whether or not the American government responds differently to terrorism by white, right-wing, Americans. This article examines a historical period in which similar dynamics were on display in state responses to the Reconstruction-era Ku Klux Klan (KKK), Irish-American Fenians, and anarchists from 1860 to 1920. This history suggests that political officials responded to these groups more on the basis of ideas than their actual levels of violence, including discourses of Americanism shaped by ideology, nativism, and racism. Successful claims to ‘Americanism’ lent the KKK a sense of familiarity that led it to be seen as less of a threat to ontological security, even as it posed a significant threat of physical violence. In contrast, the ideologically subversive and foreign anarchists were responded to more severely, despite being responsible for far fewer deaths and injuries than the KKK. This history suggests that American counter-terrorism has been influenced by factors of racial and national belonging in the past, and provides significant context for the consideration of current debates about responses to right-wing groups.

Bipolar satiric patterns in Zakani’s “The Mouse and the Cat” and John Dryden’s “The Hind and the Panther”

Satirists have used animal characters to discuss their socio-political problems. In fact, they illustrate immorality, cruelty, and follies in the mirror of satiric allegories, thereby remedying shortcomings in their fables. In this regard, ʿUbayd-I Zakani, in “The Mouse and the Cat” and John Dryden, in “The Hind and the Panther”, employed the satirical techniques of animalization and reduction. Indeed, Zakani used talking animals to demonstrate the social and political contrast between oppressors and the oppressed, thereby providing people with moral instruction during the post-Mongol period of Iran. Similarly, Dryden also used animal characters to show the contrast between true and false religious sects. He defended the true Catholic sect and satirized the false sects, thereby preserving order within the post-Civil War period of England. Thus, this study shows how Zākānī and Dryden, in the selected fables, used similar bipolar satiric patterns to attack human foibles and socio-political corruption in their societies.

Les transformations morphologiques du tissu bâti de Beyrouth depuis 1950

Cet article présente une méthode d’analyse du bâti de Beyrouth-municipe permettant de resituer les transformations du bâti dans une trajectoire spatio-temporelle débutant au milieu des années 1950, et de distinguer ainsi, les évolutions récentes de celles opérant sur le temps long. Pour parvenir à cet objectif, une démarche inédite de création de l’information spatio-morphologique a été réalisée à une échelle fine. Les analyses dégagent les tendances générales opérées sur les cinquante dernières années, ainsi que les spécificités géographiques qui résultent à la fois de la transformation incessante de la ville et de la reconstruction de l’après-guerre civile. Elles soulignent en outre, les conséquences de l’évolution morphologique du bâti sur la vulnérabilité actuelle face aux séismes considérés comme un risque majeur pour la ville de Beyrouth.

Sectarianization and De-sectarianization in the Struggle for Iraq’s Political Field

Iraq’s political system, an elite pact justified through ethno-religious consociationalism or sectarian apportionment (Muhasasa Ta’ifiyya), was created in the aftermath of invasion and regime change in 2003. The system’s legitimation was based on a very specific understanding of Iraqi society and the role of elections in managing that society. However, this system did not prevent the brutal civil war that raged in Iraq from 2004 until 2008. Once the civil war ended and communally justified violence declined, other negative consequences of the system became increasingly apparent, namely the widespread and systematically sanctioned political corruption at its core and the institutional incoherence the system created. A sustained post-civil war challenge to the system has come through a series of mass demonstrations, starting in 2009, but reaching their peak, in terms of size and ideational coherence, in 2019. In the face of its unpopularity, the majority of Iraq’s politicians may have moved away from the overt promotion of sectarianism, but the political system still functions, as it has since 2003, with systemic corruption and coercion taking the place of sectarian ideology in terms of delivering elite cohesion and defending the status quo.

Civil War Monuments and the Militarization of America by Thomas J. Brown

Reviewed by: Civil War Monuments and the Militarization of America by Thomas J. Brown William B. Lees Civil War Monuments and the Militarization of America. Thomas J. Brown. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2019. ISBN 978-1-4696-5374-7. 384 pp., paper, $29.95. In a thorough and well-researched book, Thomas J. Brown seeks "to reframe a rich recent literature on Civil War Memory" (9). Growth of this literature has paralleled increased interest in heritage-related memory studies and a growing pushback to Confederate symbolism, racism, and violent hate crimes. Much of this literature has focused on Southern monuments espousing in word and symbol the Lost Cause narrative or "useful history" of the Civil War. This history negated Southern defeat, extolled values supported by the Confederacy, and supported resurrection of the antebellum social contract between former master and former slave in a Jim Crow world. Brown's goal, clearly established in his introduction, is not to refute the existing literature but to make a very compelling argument that Civil War monuments, irrespective of their location in the former Confederacy or the loyal Northern states, also mirror or in fact had a role in the militarization of the United States. In chapter 1, Brown considers emergence of the soldier monument in post–Civil War America after a decade or so of commemoration by stark and impersonal forms (such as the obelisk) generally placed in cemetery or square to acknowledge human loss in the absence of the body itself. An essential part of this chapter, though, is a review of the nation's earlier, post-Colonial rejection of honoring great leaders and military heroes, and the military state in general, that was not seen to befit the new republican form of government. He argues successfully that the rejection of the aristocratic model in our new nation is reflected on the antebellum landscape by a general lack of monuments to the common soldier or military leaders. Prior to the Civil War, the standing army was small, and concepts of citizenship, manhood, and [End Page 430] leadership were vested in civilian, and usually agrarian, pursuits. The huge losses of the war, however, with so many soldiers buried on distant and usually unknown fields, inspired a substitute in the form of an obelisk or stone, which soon was supplanted by a sculpture of a nameless common soldier. Chapter 2 discusses how these sculpted portraits of soldiers on perpetual picket duty remained nameless but evolve to represent the soldier as a model of citizenship; a mantle previously held by the likes of the farmer or blacksmith. Chapters 3 and 4 consider the broadening of the post–Civil War monumental landscape to include parallel themes of leadership and victory. Leadership monuments, which extolled the virtues and importance of Union and Confederate officers such as Lee and Grant and political leaders such as Lincoln and Davis, became more and more commonplace as the veterans, now in places of political and economic prominence, vied for a lasting place in the story of our nation's greatest conflict. Monuments extolling victory through grand arches and other forms long familiar throughout Europe were understandably more common in the north, but commemoration of victory (of perhaps a different sort) was no less sought out in the South—and to some degree, it was achieved there. In chapter 5, Brown presents a useful discussion of the conflation of Civil War commemoration with that of World War I, which often receives little attention in most studies of monuments of the former. Brown concludes his book with an epilogue focusing on a new iconoclasm resulting from increasing opposition to existing Confederate monuments starting in the Jim Crow era but escalating rapidly with racially charged events of the current century. This resulted in "the most important season of American iconoclasm since the destruction of the equestrian statue of George III in 1776" (283). Anyone interested in Civil War monuments as memory, especially those who think they have this figured out, need to read this impressive book. Brown's volume is at times tedious, and it dives deep into the art history aspects of monuments, but this is itself an oft-neglected value...

Football at Historically Black Colleges and Universities in Texas by Robert C. Fink

Reviewed by: Football at Historically Black Colleges and Universities in Texas by Robert C. Fink Alan C. Atchison Football at Historically Black Colleges and Universities in Texas. By Robert C. Fink. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2019. Pp. 282. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.) Since the 1950s, football has dominated American sports pages year round. In addition to reports of trades, drafts, game summaries, etc., current articles address themes as diverse as social protest (e.g., kneeling during the National Anthem), the lifelong effects of injuries, and dwindling youth participation. These issues reflect the game’s broad influence on American culture. Football is also a major part of black culture; most National Football League players are African American, a strong indication of minority interest and participation in football from youth leagues to university elevens. Football at Historically Black Colleges and Universities in Texas examines the historical impact of America’s game on black Americans’ culture. Concentrating on the eight historically black colleges in Texas (Bishop College, Jarvis Christian College, Paul Quinn College, Samuel Huston College, Prairie View A&M College, Texas College, Texas Southern University, and Wiley College) that consistently fielded teams in the twentieth century, Robert C. Fink divides football history into eight eras. Beginning with the post-Civil War years and continuing through World War I, the first chapter briefly chronicles the overall expansion of football at both white and black colleges. This was a time of minimal sway, especially in Texas, as the first black college in Texas did not field a team until 1901, and all college teams played abbreviated schedules (far fewer than ten games). With so few games, how and when did the game become a major cultural factor in the black community? Fink’s information, using sources such as the major twentieth-century African American newspapers Dallas Express and Houston Informer, provides some answers. These dailies contain vivid accounts of major contests, descriptions of players and coaches, as well as discussions of tactics and strategies, which Fink ably incorporates into his narrative. More importantly, in these chapters readers will discover, through stories highlighting band performances, homecoming traditions, and various festivities that surrounded the annual State Fair Classic played in the Cotton Bowl on Negro Day at the State Fair of Texas, the connection between the college game and the African American community. The author implies that football was a driving force in black life. However, after many pages lauding the cultural effects of the game, Fink notes, “for many African Americans in Texas, the State Fair game ranked second in importance” to Negro Day at the State Fair (132). Elsewhere, Fink comments on newspaper accounts of other games that contain more coverage of pre-game and half-time activities than the football teams’ performance. [End Page 479] Similarly, one other claim lacks satisfactory support. For example, Fink emphasizes that segregation allowed black college football to develop “away from the control of whites” (22). Yet the growth of black collegiate football and associated groups and events mirrored the development of the white game: bands, cheerleaders, homecoming festivities, and post-season bowl games. Football at Historically Black Colleges and Universities in Texas provides valuable insights into the connection between football and black culture. Fans will find it an interesting and entertaining read. But Fink’s well-documented monograph raises a number of important questions that beg for further research. Anyone endeavoring to answer those questions will find the book’s bibliography valuable and extensive. While Fink’s work does not totally “fill the void in the historiography” (2) of football at predominately black colleges, it does add a valuable portion. Alan C. Atchison San Marcos, Texas Copyright © 2020 The Texas State Historical Association

Coping with War and Trauma in Paulina Chiziane's Niketche: Uma história de poligamia

Pain and violence towards women's bodies appear at every turn in Paulina Chiziane's 2002 novel Niketche: Uma historia de poligamia, as the main plot revolves around the polygamous relationships between Tony, a senior police officer, and up to six different women from various parts of Mozambique. It can be argued that the novel proposes a new national allegory with female victims of polygamy at the center of a renewed, postcolonial Mozambique. Critics, such as Hilary Owen and Russell G. Hamilton, have studied Chiziane's feminist politics and her use of storytelling techniques. However, the entanglement of trauma and war in Niketche is largely absent in recent literary criticism. Through the analysis of interior dialogue by the narrator, Rami, in chapter one, this article offers a close reading of the ways in which female survivors of war and sexual trauma deal with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). I assert that Chiziane's work enacts a two-fold history of personal and national trauma in a post-civil war and postcolonial setting in order to reconceptualize how traumatized women deal with their pain in cathartic and collective ways. The varied women's encounters with violence signal that multiple forms of trauma often intertwine.

Reading Reconstruction: Sherwood Bonner and the Literature of the Post-Civil War South by Kathryn B. McKee

Reviewed by: Reading Reconstruction: Sherwood Bonner and the Literature of the Post-Civil War South by Kathryn B. McKee Elizabeth Boyle Kathryn B. McKee. Reading Reconstruction: Sherwood Bonner and the Literature of the Post-Civil War South. Louisiana State UP, 2019. ix + 354 pp. Over the last decade, critical interest in the literature of the post-Civil War and Reconstruction eras has grown considerably. Tracy O'Neill, Sharon D. Kennedy-Nolle, and Brook Thomas have all published substantial monographs that investigate how the literature of the second half of the nineteenth century responded to the nation's recent past in attempts to define its social, political, and economic futures. Kathryn B. McKee's important new book Reading Reconstruction: Sherwood Bonner and the Literature of the Post-Civil War South contributes to this critical conversation by highlighting the role southern women writers, particularly Sherwood Bonner, played in defining regional and national identities during and after Reconstruction. Bonner's writing, McKee asserts, constitutes "a jumbled response to a jumbled period in American life, her own life an often convoluted set of impulses, decisions, and circumstances that likewise depend upon the indeterminacy of her historical moment" (3). Through a careful synthesis of literary evidence, historical and biographical details, and archival materials, McKee sheds light on Bonner's individual contributions to Reconstruction-era literary culture and positions Bonner within a network of postbellum authors whose works grapple with the "generalized unsteadiness in postbellum American life" (5). Each of Reading Reconstruction's five chapters (excluding its introduction and epilogue) attends to the ways Bonner used a specific literary genre to address a particular facet of Reconstruction-era US life and her identity as a southern woman of letters. Woven throughout McKee's analysis are helpful references to and anecdotes about the other postbellum Americans with whom Bonner interacted, including Mark Twain, Kate Chopin, George Washington Cable, Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Joel Chandler Harris, to name a few. This is an ambitious undertaking, [End Page 571] but McKee performs it admirably. The introduction to Reading Reconstruction, for instance, covers an impressive catalog of criticism on Reconstruction-era literature and synthesizes it seamlessly, creating a comprehensive yet navigable account of existing critical discourse. McKee argues convincingly the manifold ways that examining Bonner's writing can enable scholars of American literature to expand, complicate, and hone their understanding of Reconstruction-era political, social, and literary cultures. And in her epilogue, McKee details her own experiences with recovering Bonner's writing (and the afterlife of her texts), providing readers with helpful insights into how they too might approach similar recovery endeavors. Following an introduction that clearly outlines the challenges and importance of studying post-Civil War southern letters, chapter 1 discusses how the history of the postbellum South, Bonner's lived experiences in the South, and Bonner's fictionalized South overlap and diverge in her writing. Details about Bonner's upbringing and early life in the South enliven the broader national narrative McKee sketches, in turn enhancing a sweeping landscape view of postbellum southern literature with localized details related to the specific regional context Bonner experienced. McKee concludes her first chapter by discussing Bonner's "A Volcanic Interlude," a story that depicts the illegitimate offspring born out of miscegenation. McKee, citing direct parallels to Cable's Old Creole Days and The Grandissimes as well as Kate Chopin's "Désirée's Baby," attributes the power of Bonner's story to its poignant critique of "the havoc men can wreak in the lives of women around them and … the silly lives women are taught to lead" (54–55). With the nuance that comes to define Reading Reconstruction, McKee also notes that this particular story, in which "mixing blood leads to mixing gender identity" (55), evidences "an anxious deepening of the postwar world's blurry boundaries." Chapter 2 builds on the previous chapter's discussion of Bonner's interactions within postbellum sociopolitical landscapes by treating Bonner's domestic travel letters and the role her northern experiences played in shaping her identity as Sherwood Bonner. As McKee demonstrates through her careful analysis of Bonner's writing for the Memphis Avalanche, Bonner's domestic travel writing...

Fires on Shipboard: Sandbars, Salvage Fraud, and the Cotton Trade in New Orleans in the 1870s

Fires on Shipboard:Sandbars, Salvage Fraud, and the Cotton Trade in New Orleans in the 1870s Bruce E. Baker (bio) At the beginning of 1880, the commercial world of New Orleans was in crisis. The problem was evident in the smell of burning cotton that often hung over the waterfront and the frequency with which the phrase fires on shipboard was used in the columns of the Daily Picayune. One businessman had pieced together "with considerable difficulty" a list of all the ships in the harbor that had caught fire since the end of the Civil War. The figures were startling. There had been thirty-seven incidents, but more significant was the trend. In the first thirteen years, there had never been more than four fires in a year, but in 1879 and the first five weeks of 1880 there had been fifteen, more than one per month. And more worrying, there was a pattern: "During these past three years fires seem to have systematized themselves," since they "have all been sailing vessels, either filled or partially filled with cotton, lying mostly in the upper districts, within a few posts of each other. The usual time of the discovery of these fires has been between the hours of two and five in the morning, the location on board in or near the main hatch and burning often in two or more places and always in the last bales that have been stowed." These fires damaged individual cargoes of cotton, but unchecked they could destroy the port's business if marine insurance companies had to raise their rates to cover the losses. The writer was convinced that salvage suits (called libels in admiralty) were part of the problem: "The incendiary is some one or more persons who are tempted directly or indirectly by the hope of getting salvage either by compromise or by a suit."1 These fires were the result of a cyclical [End Page 601] process in the organization of trade and commerce and of capitalist development in post-Civil War New Orleans. The process started, to the extent that these things have beginnings and endings, with a cartel of towboats that controlled ships getting over the sandbar at the mouth of the Mississippi River, and it led to a salvage fraud operation that threatened the commercial recovery of New Orleans shipping and to the creation of new policing, surveillance, and organizational practices that changed the business of the New Orleans waterfront. That New Orleans struggled commercially after the Civil War has never been a secret, but framing that struggle within what has come to be known as the "organizational synthesis" oversimplifies the situation.2 The most thorough recent critique of this approach was presented by Richard White in Railroaded, his history of the transcontinental railroad corporations in the United States. He argues that, according to Alfred D. Chandler Jr. and Robert M. Wiebe, "modernity was synonymous with order imposed by impersonal large-scale organizations" as "temporary disorder gave way to a more lasting order."3 That is not what White finds with the transcontinental railroads, and it seems to have been even less the case with the business community of New Orleans in the same period. Rather than a march from disorder to order, capitalist development is better seen as a recurrence or cyclical process—two steps forward, one step back at best. Within the organizational synthesis, focused as it was on bureaucrats, experts, and businessmen, crime and corruption are treated as distractions, as noise in the system, or possibly as a sort of peasant rebellion. This article suggests instead that corruption and crime, motivated by personal gain, also served a diagnostic function within capitalist development, finding cracks and weak spots in systems, inspiring those with more power to control and shape those systems to fix the problems and to find more efficient and effective ways to do [End Page 602] things.4 Capitalists need criminals. Part of the reason why, though not argued explicitly here, is that corruption and crime have no ideology beyond self-interest, no vision of the city to boost, no theory to prove. They rely on the materiality and the reality...

Creating "Common Sense" Responses to the "Unmarried Mother" in the Irish Free State

Creating "Common Sense" Responses to the "Unmarried Mother" in the Irish Free State* Paul Michael Garrett (bio) To better understand the treatment of the "unmarried mother" in twentieth-century Ireland, it is important to regard the encompassing institutional order that evolved after the Free State attained a limited measure of independence in 1922.1 This economic, societal, and cultural order furnishes the context for the construction of the unmarried mother as a "social problem" demanding a solution. In this essay Antonio Gramsci's theorization of hegemony offer conceptual tools to comprehend how such a climate of opinion was created and nurtured in Free State Ireland. I will argue, moreover, that Father Richard Stanislaus Devane, S.J. (1876–1951), as well as other Catholic intellectuals in the period, operated as "primary definers" of the unmarried mother.2 Particularly significant for the essay's argument is the rarely examined testimony heard by the Commission on the Relief of the Sick and Destitute Poor, Including the Insane Poor (1927), which listened to evidence from 180 witnesses during thirty-two public sittings between May 1925 and December 1926.3 Evidence provided by [End Page 120] witnesses and members of this commission further conveys how the unmarried mother in Ireland became a criminalized figure. A somewhat neglected presence in Irish historiography, Devane was a public intellectual whom Aidan Beatty describes as one of the "most important figures in the legislative history of the Irish Free State, with a strong influence on the soft authoritarian world of post-1922 social reform and social control."4 Devane gave evidence to the 1927 commission and later to the Committee on the Criminal Law Amendment Acts, 1880–85, and Juvenile Prostitution (1931), which produced the Carrigan report (1931).5 A prominent Jesuit, he wrote a number of articles for the Irish Ecclesiastical Record on a range of interrelated topics such as jazz, the "dance menace,"6 and the "indecent" literature found in the "reptile press"—especially the "English Sunday and other weekly gutter journals."7 He was committed to safeguarding a particular form of Catholic Irishness that he viewed as threatened by young people's capacity to expand—through, for example, the growing popularity of the motor car—the "circle of their enjoyments."8 Such fears applied particularly to "girls" and young women who appeared increasingly able to slip through the nets of community surveillance. [End Page 121] Hegemony and the Emergence of the "Social Problem" of the "Unmarried Mother" Gramsci's theorizing of hegemony focuses on how a dominant class organizes, persuades, and maintains the consent of the subjugated by ensuring that its own ideas constitute embedded "mental conceptions"9 and "common sense" within a particular social formation.10 Hegemonic power does not "flow automatically from the economic position of the dominant group," but has to be "constructed and negotiated."11 This imperative becomes key at specific historical conjunctures at which "levels of society, the economy, politics, ideology, common sense … come together or 'fuse.'"12 During such a period a constellation of seemingly unrelated circumstances cluster; particular thematic concerns and preoccupations appear to accumulate or condense to highlight broader questions within an emerging hegemonic apparatus. This essay contends that the figure of the unmarried mother functioned as such a nodal point during the early years of the post–Civil War Irish Free State. In the mid-1920s the Free State could best be perceived as transitional—that is, it was in the process of developing what Michel Foucault would view as specific ideologies concerning the "just" treatment of "deviant" and "shameless classes."13 Located at a conjuncture marked by an evolving postcolonial hegemony, the new polity slowly achieved both conservative stability and a modernization of the state's social apparatus.14 Breathnach and O'Halpin suggest that the first decade of Irish [End Page 122] independence was characterized by "unprecedented centralization in public administration, a process marked by an almost puritanical zeal for efficiency, modernity, and probity."15 An institutional social order was being crafted to serve the material interests of a new national ruling class. In 1914 James Connolly had accurately predicted that the partition of Ireland was likely to...