Secession Research Articles

Medicine, Science, and Making Race in Civil War America by Leslie A. Schwalm (review)

Medicine, Science, and Making Race in Civil War America by Leslie A. Schwalm (review)

The Human Sacrifice: The Trial of Lucy Bagby and the Secession Crisis

The Human Sacrifice: The Trial of Lucy Bagby and the Secession Crisis

Monumentalizing Landscapes: Ontologies of Scale and Guatemalan National Consolidation

ABSTRACT: In 1905, Manuel Estrada Cabrera, one of Guatemala's most infamous dictators, inaugurates a gargantuan relief map, one of Latin American's most dramatic cartographic projects of the time. In 1882, the nation had relinquished vast regions of its territory to Mexico. This exemplified the region's fragility in the face of continuous Central American civil wars and a commercial weakness that rendered Guatemala vulnerable to foreign intervention, both political and economic. In this context, Guatemalan was faced with foundational narrative voids and a lack of any semblance of national identity. In this essay I contend that the state turned to the nation's volcanic geography as a solution: its dramatic landscapes could serve as both settings and protagonists for an alternative spatial narrative. I argue that the relief map can be read as an ideal fossilized artifact capturing these symbolic operations imposed by Guatemala's creole liberal elite within the complex global and national spatial dynamics of the time. In its monumentality, the map attempted to symbolically tap into and domesticate the power of the nation's landscape for the sake of national consolidation: a case of the natural sublime turned cultural/political sublime. In the process, and underlying these symbolic spatial operations, the State inflicted unprecedented violence on nature and rendered invisible entire sections of the population. The project ultimately fails, however, because the semantic power of a volcanic landscape is predicated on a chaotic and volatile land that had seeped into popular and political imagination through a long history of natural disasters and corresponding social turmoil.

Irish American Civil War Songs: Identity, Loyalty, and Nationhood

Irish American Civil War Songs: Identity, Loyalty, and Nationhood

Irish American Civil War Songs: Identity, Loyalty, and Nationhood by Catherine V. Bateson (review)

Irish American Civil War Songs: Identity, Loyalty, and Nationhood by Catherine V. Bateson (review)

Mineral price shocks and Native American conflict

This study exploits exogenous changes in the world price of gold and silver together with a new geocoded dataset of military engagements to investigate the extent to which Native American conflicts were caused by mining discoveries after the American Civil War. We find that mineral price shocks have a large and significant effect on the incidence of conflict. Our results are robust to various sensitivity checks and are consistent with the narrative evidence from historical reports from the Commissioner of Indian Affairs. This is the first paper to establish a causal relationship between mining discoveries and Native American conflict.

Cavalier South vs Puritan North? Hypocrisy and Identity in the American Civil War

During the antebellum period and American Civil War, ‘puritan’ was a contested identity, fraught with layers of meaning and interpretation. Historians have charted the ways Southern intellectuals cast the differences between North and South as an outplaying of the old conflict between Cavalier and puritan. This article highlights the ways Southern ministers claimed the puritan identity for the South and accused the North of hypocrisy, for having fallen far from the theological ideals of their puritan forebears. Furthermore, Southern ministers noted the hypocrisy of Northern puritans for having escaped religious tyranny only to impose it upon those who did not conform to their form of Christianity; they had thus fallen into the very sin which they had decried. This came from Southern ministers whose attempt to appropriate the memory of puritanism as liberty-loving revealed their own hypocrisy in fighting for the ‘liberty’ to maintain a system of racial slavery.

The Polysemic Comedy of Too Busy to Work

ABSTRACT This article examines cultural, narrative and stylistic features of Too Busy to Work, a 1932 film starring Will Rogers. While, on the surface, the movie could be seen as a simple light comedy about the travelogue of a hobo name Jubilo, close examination reveals a tragicomedy interested in issues of justice, marriage, political parody, food, money, work, and a Civil War era song that is used both as a personal identity marker and an illustration of the general complexities of race in the United States. Too Busy to Work instead leads the careful critic to a complex visual text that asks unanswerable social questions. Thus, the film should be studied and remembered as interesting, unusual, and complex.

Another Look: American Catholics and the Quest for Equality in the Civil War Era

Robert Emmett Curran’s masterful treatment of American Catholicism in the Civil War era is the first comprehensive history of Roman Catholics in the North and South before, during, and after the war. Curran provides an in-depth look at how the momentous developments of these decades affected the entire Catholic community, including Black and indigenous Americans. He also explores the ways that Catholics contributed to the reshaping of a nation that was testing the fundamental proposition of equality set down by its founders. Ultimately, Curran concludes, the revolution that the war touched off remained unfinished, indeed was turned backward, in no small part by Catholics who marred their pursuit of equality with a truncated vision of who deserved to share in its realization.

A Man by Any Other Name: William Clarke Quantrill and the Search for American Manhood

Few men of the Civil War era were as complicated or infamous as William Clarke Quantrill. Most who know him recognize him as the architect of the Confederate raid on Lawrence, Kansas, in August 1863 that led to the murder of 180 mostly unarmed men and boys. Before that, though, Quantrill led a transient life, shifting from one masculine form to another. Using new documents and old documents examined in new ways, A Man by Any Other Name paints the most authentic portrait of Quantrill yet rendered. The detailed study of this man not only explores a one-of-a-kind enigmatic figure but also allows us entry into many representative experiences of the Civil War generation.

To be or not to be a state? The alignment behaviours of Abkhazia and South Ossetia with Russia

This article presents an adaptation of Kuik's hedging theory to analyse the secessionist movements in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, both seeking independence from Georgia with Russian support. By examining their distinctive strategies, this study addresses the extent to which these regions seek to maintain their independence from Russia, as their patron state. The article argues for the need to modify hedging theory to accommodate the unique context of former Soviet actors and de facto states. The adaptation develops the concept of a "political hedge," with a focus on elite-driven nation-building as a mechanism to influence the likelihood of Russian integration. Abkhazia is identified as an illustrative case of hedging behaviour, whereas South Ossetia displays characteristics resembling but distinct from bandwagoning. This analysis contributes to refining the applicability of hedging theory within novel political environments and underscores the significance of elite-led nation-building in shaping state and national legitimacy in secessionist regions.

Rhetorical Strategies and Appraisal Markers in Online Civic Engagement of the Yoruba Nation Secessionist Agitation on Nairaland

This study examines rhetorical strategies and appraisal markers in the engagement of the Yoruba Nation (YN) secessionist agitation in Nairaland. Adopting the appraisal framework and Fairclough’s notions of intertextuality and interdiscursivity as a theoretical anchorage, analysis unveils historical and biblical allusion, proverbs and adages, rhetorical questions, code alternation and pidgin as prominent rhetorical practices and intertextual and interdiscursive resources that index cognitive positioning and ideological evaluations of the agitation and related social actors. While the anti-YN participants express negativity and ideological dissociation from the secessionist course, the pro-YN participants express positivity, solidarity and ideological alignment with the separatist agitation. As the secessionist movement generates concerns about ethnic synergy and national integration, participants take advantage of a heterogeneous virtual space to influence other online participants’ ideological positions on whether to sustain patriotic spirit to strive continually towards Nigeria’s nationhood or to join the vociferous call for the nation’s geo-ethnic dismemberment and ultimately secession.

Experiments in Cotton and Conversion: Post-Abolition Labor and Community at the Mission of St. Joseph, Senegal

ABSTRACT A series of abolition and emancipation moments occurred over the nineteenth century, shifting orientations and structures of labor. The Agricultural Colony of St. Joseph, a Catholic mission in Senegal, illuminates some of the ways in which abolition rippled across the globe. Founded in 1863, St. Joseph’s was envisioned as a place where both proselytization and economic development would flourish. The mission was conceived of as a cotton plantation to address the international cotton shortage resulting from American Civil War. Cultivation was carried out by neophytes, most of whom were formerly enslaved individuals or refugees. This article explores the social and economic implications and repercussions of the St. Joseph cotton experiment, exploring how overseas abolition and emancipation shaped a nascent colonial community. Two interconnected histories emerge: one about the global economy, and the other a local narrative about the ways in which entanglement in missionization produced a new community.

The Western Forces’ March to the Sea

Alex Garland’s Civil War, which depicts journalists covering an American civil war in the near future, is a beautifully shot and stealthily clever film. It is also a strategic warning about a gruesome political outcome that is no longer beyond imagining. Garland does not articulate precisely why or how this civil war, under way for several years, might have arisen. He presumes, credibly, that audiences who have watched bedrock norms of political civility trashed in a toxically divided America will understand. In the movie’s world, the MAGA rebellion that the 6 January 2021 insurrection at the US Capitol purported to foretell has been provisionally successful, and the president faces a counter-rebellion by the so-called Western Forces – an improbably plausible alliance between California and Texas. Garland is thinking the unthinkable out loud in hopes of motivating people to avoid it, and seeking to prepare the next generation for a protracted struggle even if it does not descend into full-blown civil war.

The Union Army's Surgical Handbook and the Positive Story of Civil War Surgery.

Western armies have relied on surgical field manuals to help physicians deal with unfamiliar combat medical conditions from the Napoleonic wars to the present day, but there has been little discussion of whether these handbooks have been used or improved outcomes. Recent research shows that the Union Army's American Civil War (1861-1865) surgical case fatality rates improved as the war progressed, much like the US Army's experience in later wars, and were generally superior to comparable European results. These positive Civil War outcomes have been attributed to field experience, adoption of best practices, and enhanced communication, without consideration of New York surgeon Stephen Smith's widely-used Hand-Book of Surgical Operations. The Army of the Potomac added Smith's pocket-sized Hand-Book to its supply table in 1862. Northern medical journals applauded it, and Smith's contemporaries documented its wide use. Smith's handbook explained and demonstrated surgical techniques that were adopted as the war progressed, such as the use of general anesthesia and limb-sparing resection (debridement) of gunshot wounds. It offered pithy, well-documented advice from recognized experts along with numerous illustrations, which allowed untrained physicians to visualize anatomical relationships and see contemporary best practices in a way that no other wartime publication provided, making it an exemplar of a mass-media surgical improvement change agent.

Conservative Radicals and Radical Conservatives in the Civil War Era and Today

Conservative Radicals and Radical Conservatives in the Civil War Era and Today

No Right to an Honest Living: The Struggles of Boston’s Black Workers in the Civil War Era by Jacqueline Jones (review)

No Right to an Honest Living: The Struggles of Boston’s Black Workers in the Civil War Era by Jacqueline Jones (review)

Bordering a War: Transnational Volunteers to the American Civil War from the Eastern Townships

Bordering a War: Transnational Volunteers to the American Civil War from the Eastern Townships

Transatlantic Relations and Political Dynamics during the Civil War Era in Louisa May Alcott’s “M. L.” and “Pauline’s Passion and Punishment”

Transatlantic Relations and Political Dynamics during the Civil War Era in Louisa May Alcott’s “M. L.” and “Pauline’s Passion and Punishment”

The Biafra Lobby: international civil society patronage in the Biafran secession conflict, 1967–70

ABSTRACT This article sheds light on the partisan involvement of non-state networks in secession conflicts. Building on the patron–client relations framework, it develops a concept of civil society patronage that allows zooming into the relationship between secessionist movements and their allies in international civil society. This framework is then applied to the Biafra conflict (1967–70) and the activities of the so-called ‘Biafra Lobby’ in the United States to examine the motives, instruments and impact of support. The study offers a fresh perspective on the international relations of secessionist movements and demonstrates the benefits and also the limitations of non-state support.