Public Rallies Research Articles

Threat, Competition, and Mobilizing Structures: Motivational and Organizational Contingenies of the Civil Rights-Era Ku Klux Klan

While previous studies of ethnic contention and conflict identify important structural and meso-level indicators of threat and competition, analysis of variation in the mechanisms linking these sources of potential grievance formation with mobilization remains unclear. To address this issue, this study explores the social organization of Ku Klux Klan mobilization in 1960s North Carolina. While regarded as a progressive state in the civil rights era, North Carolina exhibited a greater level of Klan mobilization than the rest of the South combined. We build on models of “mediated competition,” where ethnic competition and group threat are held as necessary, and propinquity, authority work, and legacies of previous racial violence link threat and competition with mobilization. Extending prior formulations centered on the discrete impact of individual components of competition, we employ fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis to precisely specify the conjunctural conditions governing two modes of Klan mobilization: public rally events and the establishment of local organizational units. Our findings indicate that the mobilizing effects of threat and competition varied between rural and urban areas, and that threat/competition and organization/leadership play a dual role in translating collective grievances into mobilization.

Mobilizing Gay Singapore: Rights and Resistance in an Authoritarian State. By Lynette J. Chua. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2014. 215 pp. $69.50 cloth.

Mobilizing Gay Singapore: Rights and Resistance in an Authoritarian State. By Lynette J. Chua. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2014. 215 pp. $69.50 cloth.What can activists do when an authoritarian state wary of anything that can be perceived as a challenge to its power, and a socially conservative society that values stability and nonconfrontation, combine to cut off all readily recognizable avenues to collective organizing and action? One answer, as described in Lynette Chua's book Mobilizing Gay Singapore, is to employ resistance-a unique and creative form of activism that subtly pushes boundaries while appearing, at the same time, to stay within them.Looking at gay activism in Singapore from the early-1990s to 2013, Professor Chua examines how activists created, preserved, and advanced the gay movement by interpreting and subsequently responding to changes-both concrete and implied-in the citystate's social and political conditions. The book blends a concise explanation of Singapore's sociopolitical history with activist interviews to both recount the course of gay activism in Singapore and to develop a model of how activism can be undertaken in an authoritarian state via pragmatic resistance.As a general term, pragmatic resistance is a way of understanding how activists pull on their contextually embedded knowledge and experiences as resources (p. 16) to read political and cultural environments, develop movement tactics, and then revise them as experience is gained and/or as conditions are perceived to change. Within the specific context of Mobilizing Gay Singapore, pragmatic resistance takes the form of activists avoiding direct conflict with the state, ensuring the legality of the movement's public actions, making narrow claims that both appeal to the value of social stability and are careful to not be perceived as broader rights claims, and, finally, appealing to the need to preserve a certain international image of Singapore.The narrative proceeds by presenting a linear and detail-rich history of the gay movement in Singapore. As the book progresses through the movement's distinct stages-its precarious and largely hidden beginnings, its relocation to the relative safety of the internet, and finally to its incremental emergence into the public realm where it has taken increasingly bold steps-attention is paid to describing how the specific tactics of pragmatic resistance change over time while the basic form remains constant. It is in Chapters 3-7 that pragmatic resistance is repeatedly demonstrated and the movement's creativity comes through. Activists circumvent public event registration requirements by publicly advertising private, invitation-only events where one simply responds to the advertisement to obtain an invitation. Singapore citizens effectively undo denied foreign speaker licenses by reading papers written by the rejected persons at events that these same people still attend as audience members and where the floor is opened up for discussion. Media censorship rules that ban nondeviant portrayals of homosexuality are undermined by activists finding ways to place stories in the media that do not appear to publicize gay issues as such (e.g., focusing on a licensing denial for a gay organization), but that subsequently lead to stories and letters to the editor that raise issues about the treatment of gays and ultimately create public awareness. As the movement's confidence grows activists unearth and use obscure parliamentary rules to prompt official state discussions of gay issues and exploit the state's token loosening of public free speech and assembly rules to stage increasingly large public rallies. …

‘Stepping on the heads of our Gods'

The Himalayan region of India is experiencing rapid development in tourism, agriculture, highway construction and hydroelectric dam construction. This research considered the role of the public both within and outside of development decision-making processes in these high mountain environments using the proposed Himalayan Ski Village (HSV) in Manali as a case study. The qualitative data revealed that there has been an extensive array of public participation activity related to the HSV project over approximately 10 years. Very little of this activity has evolved, however, through the formal decision-making process. Rather, most participation activities, such as general house meetings, objection letters, public rallies, court cases against the proposed project, and a religious congregation were instigated by the public to protest the proposed development. The findings also show that involvement in the participatory activities undertaken by the public and project proponent fostered instrumental and communicative learning outcomes.

Stuart Hall: An Exemplary Socialist Public Intellectual?

Most assessments of the influence of scholars and public intellectuals focus on their ideas, which are based upon an implicit assumption that their widespread circulation are a result of the veracity and strength of the ideas themselves, rather than the processes of production and distribution, including the intellectual’s own contribution to the ideas’ popularity by attending conferences and public rallies, writing for periodicals, and so on. This concise article offers an assessment of the late Stuart Hall’s role as a socialist public intellectual by connecting the person, scholar and public intellectual to the organisations, institutions and publications through which his contributions to both cultural studies and left politics were produced and distributed. This article includes an emphasis on Hall’s ‘Thatcherism’ thesis and his public interventions via the periodical, Marxism Today, during the 1980s.

Long Island and the Woman Suffrage Movement by Antonia Petrash

107 Book Reviews Long Island and the Woman Suffrage Movement. By Antonia Petrash. Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2013, 157 pages, $19.99 Paper. Reviewed by Carrie Casagrande, University of Louisiana Monroe, LA When it comes to the women’s suffrage movement in the United States, New York’s grassroots efforts led the way in 1848 with the Seneca Falls convention. The women of Long Island worked tirelessly to see the dreams of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott become a reality with the passage of the 19th Amendment. New York librarian, Antonia Petrash investigates the struggle of a select group of Long Island residents as they contributed to the passage of both state and national women’s suffrage amendments. According to Petrash, the suffrage movement was not a united front but rather a loose coalition of strong willed and opinionated individuals. In such a group, it was only natural that disagreements often arose. Long Island resident, Harriot Stanton Blatch, for instance, grew up in the suffrage movement but disagreed with her famous mother, Elizabeth Cady Stanton. She felt in order for the movement to be successful working class women had to be included. Others, such as Alva Vanderbilt Belmont and Katherine Duer Mackay, moved in the same political and social circles but had contentious relationships. Clashing personalities and differing opinions did not end there; some suffrage leaders were proponents of state-by state legislation, while others found inspiration in the national agenda of England’s suffragettes. Rosalie Gardiner Jones, Lucy Burns, and Elisabeth Freeman all spent time incarcerated for their participation in suffragette rallies in England. Each woman found inspiration in Emmeline Pankhurst’s hands on approach to the British suffrage movement. When they returned to the states, they brought with them the courage to speak 108 ■ NEW YORK HISTORY openly in the streets organize public rallies and expand the American suffrage agenda to include a national amendment. Not all participants in the movement shared the same motivation. Elizabeth Oakes Smith, for example , became frustrated by her lack of legal rights when financial difficulties forced her into the workforce. Through this struggle, she became a writer and proponent of suffrage. Petrash uses the events in each of these women’s lives as a means for discussing the issues related to suffrage. Long Island and the Women Suffrage Movement is composed of twelve short biographical essays. The author provides a brief sketch of the background of each woman. Afterwards, she focuses attention on the woman’s contribution to the suffrage movement. Unlike Petrash, many were not native New Yorkers but called Long Island home at some point in their life. The majority of the women were from wealthy families who had the economic resources to travel around the United States presenting their perspective on suffrage. The author does include, however, four chapters on women who suffered economic hardships. Lucy Burns, Elizabeth Freeman, Edna Buckman Kearns, and Elizabeth Oakes Smith struggled to support themselves and their families by working as teachers or writers . Petrash also includes a biography of Theodore Roosevelt, who after his time as president changed his view on women’s suffrage and became an avid spokesman until his death in 1919. One chapter devotes a good deal of attention to James Lees Laidlaw and his wife, Harriet Burton Laidlaw. Laidlaw was one of the few men who publicly supported women’s suffrage and the only man recognized by the League of Women Voters in their bronze memorial tablets unveiled March 25, 1931. The biographies are organized alphabetically, which causes considerable overlap in content. Individuals such as Carrie Chapman Catt and Alice Paul are repeatedly introduced. The same is true of important events in the suffrage movement at both the state and national level. A chronological approach may have lessened this problem. In addition, the biographies of Elisabeth Freeman and Rosalie Gardiner Jones could have easily been combined since the two ladies worked almost exclusively together for the cause. The volume does have some factual errors. Petrash indicates that slavery was abolished with the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and not the 13th Amendment in 1865 (13). Prior to 1951, there were no presidential term limits, which is why Roosevelt...

Social learning, herd behaviour and information cascades: A review of the recent developments in relation to their criticisms

The social learning literature shows that when agents learn from the actions of others (in addition to their own private information) herd behaviour can arise. In some cases this may take the form of agents entering into an information cascade. Social learning has the potential to provide insights into many areas involving choice including how people choose their political leaders, join public rallies, purchase stocks or potentially make the decision to engage in criminal activities. In the application of social learning it has been asserted that the underlying assumptions are unrealistic and the characteristics associated with social learning are not robust to a relaxation of these assumptions. This paper reviews the growing literature on social learning in relation to these claims.

The Cosmopolitan Grassroots City as Megaphone: Reconstructing Public Spaces through Urban Activism in Jakarta

AbstractDiscussions on social movements in Asian cities are inseparable from the abundance of public rallies in the region. In this article, I look at the case of Thamrin‐Sudirman, the main thoroughfare in Jakarta, Indonesia, to uncover how physical urban spaces constituting part of the city as living systems broaden the reach of social movements' agendas. The study involved continuous observation at rallies, interviews with social movement leaders and participants, and a look at simultaneous public rallies in various cities. This article analyzes the sites of public rallies as ‘megaphones’, based on the patterns of issues featured in the rallies, the groups participating, and the nodes and paths that they constructed. Two key dimensions of the megaphone are: (1) the symbolic and historical significance of the sites of rallies; (2) the relationship between the space and the media. Particular sites in cities become places where information is gathered, distributed and transferred through the media, facilitating a network among cities. This article concludes that cities are agents of political actions that amplify ideas and spread them across the globe. The urban centers' megaphonic function results from the synergy between the public space in the built environment and the public sphere, and is reflective of the recentering of the city.

Women in blue staging the nation: The gendered articulation of the ‘New State’ in early Francoist propaganda documentaries

Although previous studies have underlined how Francoist film propaganda during and immediately after the Spanish Civil War aimed to revive Spain’s glorious past, women’s role in national history and state building has barely been analysed. This article explores cinematographic representation of the Sección Femenina (Women’s Section) of the Spanish Falange during the early years of Franco’s regime, when the propaganda was led by the Falangist sector. Through textual analysis, the rituals, symbols and rhetorical strategies deployed in two documentaries are analysed. These documentaries depict the two main public rallies of the Sección Femenina, one in Medina del Campo at the end of the Civil War in 1939 and the other in El Escorial in 1944. A comparative analysis reveals that while the Sección Femenina played an active and progressive role in the articulation of the nation in 1939, by 1944 its function was mainly to represent tradition but outside the spaces where politics were negotiated and were visible

Contesting Urban Space and Disability in HighlandEcuador

AbstractThis article examines the experiences of people with physical and visual disabilities encountering inaccessible urban spaces in highlandEcuador. I draw on the notion of “embodied space” to explore how people with disabilities have begun to contest discourses of contagion, exclusion, and pity through collective action and spatial tactics aimed at constructing more inclusive spaces, such as community centers or public plazas. Through ethnographic analysis of both conflicts over transportation systems and public rallies aimed at social awareness, I argue thatEcuadorians with disabilities face new forms of socio‐spatial exclusion as they challenge legacies of isolation and stigma.

The Brokered Exuberance of the Middle Class: An Ethnographic Analysis of Iran's 2009 Green Movement

Based on ethnographic fieldwork and participant observation, this article moves from a microscopic to a wide-angle view to explain the dynamics of the 2009 post-election Green movement in the Islamic Republic of Iran: how it manifested, why it weakened, and who participated. After mapping out the protest wave, I make three main arguments. First, pre-electoral campaigns created spaces for interaction rituals of "brokered exuberance" among participants in public rallies that lowered perceptions of risk and spilled over into contentious protest after the election. Second, ordinary, non-networked Iranians utilized face-to-face interaction to broaden and recharge the protest wave, while Internet activism confused as much as coordinated the organization of street protests. Third, the social power and political orientation of Green protestors were connected to the increased relative size of the middle class in Iran, which had been empowered and enlarged through the state's developmental efforts over the past two decades.

The ‘Condemned Criminals’: sexual violence, race, and manliness in colonial Australia

In 1879, the New South Wales government took the unusual step of recommending the execution of three men—two white and one black—for two separate crimes of rape. The government's decision provoked outcry from capital punishment abolitionists who inundated the parliament and press with appeals for mercy, and held sensational public rallies decrying the use of the death penalty. Politicians' varied responses to the crimes show their preoccupations in ensuring ideals of colonial manliness and colonial honour remained intact no matter what the cost. This case offers an important example of the complex relationship between gender, race, sexuality and colonial politics.

C.L.R. James, Vanity Fair and the Audience

Abstract This essay considers what we can learn about the role of the audience or the reader from the work of C.L.R. James. Beginning with a brief consideration of James' theorisation of audiences, it moves on to discuss his own reading practice and, in particular, his relationship to Thackeray's Vanity Fair. It L· argued that in important ways James' love of Thackeray reflects and informs the construction of his own novel, Minty Alley, as well as the critical populism of his politics more generally. Keywords C.L.R. James, William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair, Minty Alley, Audience, Marxism In 1948 C.L.R. James delivered a report to the national conference of the Socialist Workers' Party in America, entitled 'The Revolutionary Answer to the Negro Problem in the USA. The report, which was published under a pseudonym in Fourth International later that year, is widely seen as the culmination of James' decade-long grappling with the experience and history of racism in America, and with the question of the relationship between the politics of black resistance and class struggle.1 In his peroration James appealed, as he did often in his writings and speeches, to a kind of ethnographic evidence. The 'awakening passions'2 which simmer among the black population in America, he says, are there to be recognised by anyone who takes the time to get to know that population and its history 'intimately'. And for James, it becomes clear, such intimacy begins with a willingness to watch that population as it gathers, not only in the overtly political contexts of public rallies and marches, but also in those social spaces given over to expressive and creative activity. Learn to watch this community, James suggests to his comrades, 'at their own theatres [...] at their dances [...] in their churches'.3 Anyone reasonably familiar with James' work will no doubt recognise this move on his part. For all of the close critical attention that James always paid to the action up on the screen, or to the texts in front of him, he spent just as much time glancing sidelong at his fellow watchers and readers. Repeatedly in his cultural criticism he steps back from the events or texts at hand in order to watch those who bring themselves and their longings to these things. When, to give a famous example, at the start of Beyond a Boundary* James remembers the shot making of the local 'ne'er-do-well' Matthew Bondman, it is a memory secured by the 'long, low Ah!' [which] came from many a spectator'5 as those shots were played. Indeed, in a sense, it is the memory of that 'ah', that James records. Although Bondman is the one who makes his shots, it is the 'ah' of the crowd which makes something of them. And it is that response, therefore, which raises for James all of his subsequent questions regarding the true definition of art, and the relationship between popular culture and politics.6 Later on in Beyond a Boundary James admits that his critical, historicising approach to understanding sport is unlikely to be common practice among the crowds who attend sporting events.7 Nevertheless, James arrives at his own historical interpretation of sport, and of other forms of culture, precisely through an attentiveness to the attitudes of such crowds. That intimacy with the audiences of cultural production which he called for in 1948 was not a pretentious populist gesture. Rather, it was something like a statement of practice, and repeatedly the conclusions of James' cultural analyses are informed by the judgements or responses of those around him, by the vernacular criticisms which he overhears on the terraces during a dull day's play at the Dover cricket festival,8 for example, or by the communication of energy between band and dancers which he recognised excitedly as he spent an afternoon watching the audience in Harlem's Apollo theatre.9 In other words, as Neil Lazarus has argued, 10 an emphasis on the role played by the audience is a pivotal and pioneering part of the way in which James went about analysing the colonial and postcolonial politics of culture. …

Review: Matthias Reiss, ed., The Street as Stage: Protest Marches and Public Rallies since the Nineteenth Century, Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2007; 367 pp., 7 maps, 2 tables; 9780199226788, £60.00 (hbk)

Review: Matthias Reiss, ed., The Street as Stage: Protest Marches and Public Rallies since the Nineteenth Century, Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2007; 367 pp., 7 maps, 2 tables; 9780199226788, £60.00 (hbk)

Matthias Reiss (ed.), The street as stage: protest marches and public rallies since the nineteenth century. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.) Pages xiv+367. $175.00.

Matthias Reiss (ed.), The street as stage: protest marches and public rallies since the nineteenth century. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.) Pages xiv+367. $175.00.

Journalism as “Prostitution”: Understanding Russia's Reactions to Anna Politkovskaya's Murder

When the Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya was gunned down in her apartment building in Moscow in October 2006, heads of Western governments and nongovernmental organizations hurried to make strong statements condemning the murder, and public rallies in Politkovskaya's honor were held in front of Russian embassies across the world. In contrast to this swift and unequivocal response, the reaction of Russian officials, journalists, and the public at large was delayed, lukewarm, or nonexistent, much to the incomprehension of Western observers. To understand why the majority of Russian citizens were unmoved by Politkovskaya's murder, this article will contend, we need to understand the specific history of media-political transformation in Russia over the past decade and a half. This includes (a) approaching Soviet journalism as a unique nexus of ethics and politics, (b) studying the centrifugal forces unleashed during Russia's media privatization in the 1990s, and (c) understanding how those forces (in tension with the centering pull under Putin) have been shaping the practices and meaning of journalism in post-Soviet Russia over the past decade and a half. Such context-sensitive and historically contingent exploration will, in turn, suggest new theoretical tools for thinking about journalistic action, or agency, in political contexts short of classical liberalism more broadly.

Political grandstanding and the use of proverbs in African political discourse

In Africa, the transmission of the overwhelming complexity of the people's day-to-day experiences are deeply rooted in the continent's rich cultural artistry. Proverbs are the most widely and commonly used in the continent's long standing history of oral arts. Proverbs are regarded as repositories of the people's collective social, political and cultural wisdom and as analytic tools of thought. This paper analyses how different Kenyan politicians and political parties used proverbs to strengthen and further their respective political positions with regard to the then proposed new constitution of Kenya, during the various countrywide campaigns in public political rallies and through the media. More specifically, the paper looks at how politicians and political parties used proverbs to further their different ideologies, to woo potential voters and to discredit opposing views.

The Street as Stage: Protest Marches and Public Rallies since the Nineteenth Century

The Street as Stage: Protest Marches and Public Rallies since the Nineteenth Century

World Hypertension Day and global awareness

The World Health Organization attributes hypertension, or high blood pressure, as the leading cause of cardiovascular mortality. The World Hypertension League (WHL), an umbrella organization of 85 national hypertension societies and leagues, recognized that more than 50% of the hypertensive population worldwide are unaware of their condition. To address this problem, the WHL initiated a global awareness campaign on hypertension in 2005 and dedicated May 17 of each year as World Hypertension Day (WHD). Over the past three years, more national societies have been engaging in WHD and have been innovative in their activities to get the message to the public. In 2007, there was record participation from 47 member countries of the WHL. During the week of WHD, all these countries -- in partnership with their local governments, professional societies, nongovernmental organizations and private industries -- promoted hypertension awareness among the public through several media and public rallies. Using mass media such as Internet and television, the message reached more than 250 million people. As the momentum picks up year after year, the WHL is confident that almost all the estimated 1.5 billion people affected by elevated blood pressure can be reached. The success of WHD is due to the enthusiasm and voluntary action of multiple stakeholders from every member country.

“Two Brotherless Peoples”: On the Constitutive Traumas of Class Struggle

In this article, I use as a starting point a “social symptom” of contemporary Greek politics: Greek left patriots have mixed feelings toward Jews, feelings that have arisen because of the Jews' universally accepted victim status. In the postwar period, the patriots have come to view Jews as a threat but also as a model for imitation. The mixed feelings, I argue, are linked to a specific subjectivity formation, which I term “radical nationalism”, and which I attribute to the specificities of 20th-century Greek history: to the civil war during the 1940s, and the subsequent handling – or non-handling – of the painful memories from this split in the national subject. Accordingly, in the first part I go through the genealogy of this subjectivity formation and its affective economy; then, departing from this specific historical example, I try to draw some more general conclusions about social antagonism and the nature of the traumas in which it results – or really, in which it consists. In the last part, I go back to a corpus of social discursive material – declarations, articles in newspapers, public rallies – and try to show how these illustrate my construction and in what sense they can be construed as efforts to suture the chasm of social antagonism.

"War Governor of the South": North Carolina's Zeb Vance in the Confederacy (review)

Reviewed by: “War Governor of the South”: North Carolina’s Zeb Vance in the Confederacy Robert C. Kenzer “War Governor of the South”: North Carolina’s Zeb Vance in the Confederacy. By Joe A. Mobley. (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005. Pp. 264. Cloth, $39.95.) Governors Joseph E. Brown of Georgia and Zebulon Baird Vance of North Carolina have come to be paired as the Confederate governors who "sabotaged the South's struggle for nationhood by their commitment to state sovereignty and preoccupation with local defense and individual liberties" (3). Joe A. Mobley explains how this view of Vance first emerged in Frank L. Owsley's State Rights in the Confederacy (1925) and persisted for a number of decades until it was initially challenged by Richard S. Yates's The Confederacy and Zeb Vance (1958). Mobley's book represents the culmination of nearly fifty years of extensive reevaluation of Vance started by Yates. Reaching maturity during the early 1850s and winning his first elective office in 1854, Vance made the transition of many residents of the Upper South from the Whig to the Constitutional Union party. Remaining loyal to the Union until the attack on Fort Sumter, Vance then resigned from his seat in Congress and was appointed colonel of a North Carolina regiment. While his military service was undistinguished, in 1862 the North Carolina Conservative party (primarily former Whigs and Constitutional unionists) nominated Vance for governor. He handily won the election and in his inaugural address promised to "keep North Carolina united and under control by proclaiming himself a defender of individual and states' right and simultaneously urging North Carolinians to bend to the will of the Confederate government" (35). After Vance's inauguration, Mobley stresses how the new governor worked very closely with the government in Richmond. For example, despite his [End Page 321] initial concerns that the Confederate forces in eastern North Carolina were insufficient to withstand the Union invaders, it only took one reassuring letter from Gen. Robert E. Lee and Vance "began to see that, as troubling as Federal raids from the coast could be for his citizens, the real threat to North Carolina's survival as a Confederate state was the Federal campaign against the Army of Northern Virginia" (37). Even when Confederate forces executed thirteen North Carolina civilians suspected of being unionists in Shelton Laurel, Mobley emphasizes how Vance accepted Secretary of War James A. Seddon's reasoning why the Confederate officers in charge had not been court-martialed: "With that response by Seddon, Vance apparently dropped the matter of the Shelton Laurel massacre—an early indication of his willingness to bend to the decisions of the Confederate government" (41). Mobley delineates how Vance also worked with the Davis administration to circumvent state supreme court chief justice Richmond M. Pearson, an opponent of conscription, until the full state supreme court could meet and make a ruling in line with Richmond. On the whole, Mobley concludes, "Historians should be cautious about inferring from the disagreements between Davis and Vance that the governor was anything less than totally committed to the Confederacy and its efforts to win its independence" and that "Vance made conscientious efforts to cooperate and compromise with the Davis government" (74). Two matters dealing with the book's coverage of the issue of public communication need to be raised. Although Mobley convincingly argues that Governor Vance enjoyed the support of most North Carolinians, it is not always clear why. Near the end of the war, Mobley points to Vance personally visiting Wilmington after calling for volunteers to defend Fort Fisher. He also notes that at this time Vance spoke at public rallies to inspire state residents. However, it would be helpful to know to what degree Vance used visits and speeches outside Raleigh throughout the war to communicate with North Carolinians and how this personal contact helped bond him and his people. The other matter of communication concerns Mobley's discussion of how North Carolina women wrote Vance. Examining their many surviving letters leads Mobley to argue that they "generally did not blame Vance or the Richmond government for the hardships inflicted on their families by the war" (155). In this...