The first thoroughly interdisciplinary study to examine how the transatlantic relationship between the United States and Britain helped shape the conflicts between North and South in the decade before the American Civil War, Twice-Divided Nation addresses that influence primarily as a problem of national memory. Samuel Graber argues that the nation was twice divided: first, by the sectionalism that resulted from disagreements concerning slavery; and second, by Unionists’ increasing sense of alienation from British definitions of nationalism. The key factor in these diverging national concepts of memory was the emergence of a fiercely independent press in the U.S. and its connections to Britain and British news. Failing to recognize this shifting transatlantic dynamic during the Civil War era, scholars have overlooked the degree to which the conflict between the Union and the Confederacy was regarded at home and abroad as a referendum not merely on Lincoln’s election or the Constitution or even slavery, but on the nationalist claim to an independent past. Graber shows how this movement toward cultural independence was reflected in a distinctively American literature, manifested in the writings of such diverse figures as journalist Horace Greeley and poet Walt Whitman.

This volume focuses on the uses of collective memory in transatlantic relations between the United States, and Western and Central European nations in the period from the Cold War to the present day. Sitting at the intersection of international relations, history, memory studies and various "area" studies, Memory in Transatlantic Relations examines the role of memory in an international context, including the ways in which policy and decision makers utilize memory; the relationship between trauma, memory and international politics; the multiplicity of actors who shape memory; and the role of memory in the conflicts in post-Cold War Europe. Thematically organized and presenting studies centered on the U.S., Hungary, France, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, the authors explore the built environment (memorials) and performances of memory (commemorations), shedding light on the ways in which memories are mobilized to frame relations between the U.S. and nations in Western and Central Europe. As such, it will appeal to scholars across the social sciences and historians with interests in memory studies, foreign policy and international relations.

"This study gauges the effects that Walt Whitman's poetry had in Italy in the period from 1870 to 1945: the reactions it provoked, the aesthetic and political agendas it came to sponsor, and the creative responses it facilitated. But it also investigates the contexts and causes of Whitman's success abroad, in the lives, backgrounds, beliefs, and imaginations of the people who encountered it. Ultimately, it chronicles the evolution of a literature intent on regenerating itself and moving toward modernity. Bernardini gives particular attention to women writers and noncanonical writers often excluded from previous discussions of Whitman's Italian reception. The book is grounded in archival studies and examination of primary documents, which led to a series of noteworthy discoveries. While the main focus is on the Italian literary scene, the history of the reception retraced here is constantly evaluated in relation to other cultures that were also intent, in those same years, on reading and recreating Whitman. Studying Whitman's reception from a transnational perspective shows how many countries were simultaneously carving out a new modernity in literature and culture. In this sense, Bernardini not only shows the interconnectedness of various international agents in understanding and contributing to the spread of Whitman's work, but, more largely, a constellation of similar pre-modernist and modernist sensibilities. This stands in contrast to the notion of sudden innovation: modernity was not easy to achieve, and most of all, it did not imply a complete refusal of tradition. Instead, a continuous and fruitful negotiation between tradition and innovation, and not a sudden break with the literary past, is at the very heart of the Italian and transnational reception of Whitman"--

Visions of Glory brings together twenty-two images and twenty-two brisk essays, each essay connecting an image to the events that unfolded during a particular year of the Civil War. The book focuses on a diverse set of images that include a depiction of former slaves whipping their erstwhile overseer distributed by an African American publisher, a census graph published in the New York Times, and a cutout of a child’s hand sent by a southern mother to her husband at the front. The essays in this collection reveal how wartime women and men created both written accounts and a visual register to make sense of this pivotal period. The collection proceeds chronologically, providing a nuanced history by highlighting the multiple meanings an assorted group of writers and readers discerned from the same set of circumstances. In so doing, this volume assembles contingent and fractured visions of the Civil War, but its differing perspectives also reveal a set of overlapping concerns. A number of essays focus in particular on African American engagements with visual culture. The collection also emphasizes the role that women played in making, disseminating, or interpreting wartime images. While every essay explores the relationship between image and word, several contributions focus on the ways in which Civil War images complicate an understanding of canonical writers such as Emerson, Melville, and Whitman.

The legacies of the Civil War and Reconstruction remain a central part of American life a century and a half later. Drawing together leading scholars in literary studies and history, this volume offers accessible treatments of major authors and genres of this period, including Walt Whitman, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Rebecca Harding Davis, Frederick Douglass, and Charles Chesnutt, as well as fiction, poetry, drama, and life-writing. Although focused on literature, this Companion also canvases battlefields, homefronts, and hospitals, and discusses a range of topics, including constitutional reform and presidential impeachment; emancipation and Africa; material culture and monuments; education, civil rights, and reenactment. The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the American Civil War and Reconstruction speaks powerfully to literature's ability to help readers come to terms with a violent, oppressive history while also imagining a different future.

This book explores the continuous British fascination with the American Civil War from the 1870s to the present. Analysing the War's place in British political discourse, military writing, intellectual life and popular culture, it traces the sources of Britons' appeal to the American conflict and their use of its representations at home and abroad.

Racism has deep roots in both the United States and Europe. This important book examines the past, present, and future of racist ideas and politics. It describes how policies have developed over a long history of European and White American dominance of political institutions that maintain White supremacy. Givens examines the connections between immigration policy and racism that have contributed to the rise of anti-immigrant, radical-right parties in Europe, the rise of Trumpism in the US, and the Brexit vote in the UK. This book provides a vital springboard for people, organizations, and politicians who want to dismantle structural racism and discrimination.

Towards a New Ethnohistory engages respectfully in cross-cultural dialogue and interdisciplinary methods to co-create with Indigenous people a new, decolonized ethnohistory. This new ethnohistory reflects Indigenous ways of knowing and is a direct response to critiques of scholars who have for too long foisted their own research agendas onto Indigenous communities. Community-engaged scholarship invites members of the Indigenous community themselves to identify the research questions, host the researchers while they conduct the research, and participate meaningfully in the analysis of the researchers’ findings. The historical research topics chosen by the Stó:lō community leaders and knowledge keepers for the contributors to this collection range from the intimate and personal, to the broad and collective. But what principally distinguishes the analyses is the way settler colonialism is positioned as something that unfolds in sometimes unexpected ways within Stó:lō history, as opposed to the other way around. This collection presents the best work to come out of the world’s only graduate-level humanities-based ethnohistory field school. The blending of methodologies and approaches from the humanities and social sciences is a model of twenty-first century interdisciplinarity.

This volume offers a timely and dynamic study of the rise of religion in American politics, examining the public messages of political leaders over the past seventy-five years. The authors show that U.S. politics today is defined by a calculated, deliberate, and partisan use of faith that is unprecedented in modern politics. Beginning with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, America has seen a no-holds-barred religious politics that seeks to attract voters, identify and attack enemies, and solidify power. Domke and Coe identify a set of religious signals sent by both Republicans and Democrats in speeches, party platforms, proclamations, visits to audiences of faith, and even celebrations of Christmas. The updated edition of this ground-breaking book includes a new preface, an updated analysis of the last Bush administration, as well as a new final chapter on the Jeremiah Wright controversy, the candidacies of Mike Huckabee and Sarah Palin, and Barack Obama's victory.