Established in 1824, the United States Indian Service, now known as the Bureau of Indian Affairs, was the agency responsible for carrying out U.S. treaty and trust obligations to American Indians, ...but it also sought to "civilize" and assimilate them. InFederal Fathers and Mothers, Cathleen Cahill offers the first in-depth social history of the agency during the height of its assimilation efforts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.Making extensive and original use of federal personnel files and other archival materials, Cahill examines how assimilation practices were developed and enacted by an unusually diverse group of women and men, whites and Indians, married couples and single people. Cahill argues that the Indian Service pursued a strategy of intimate colonialism, using employees as surrogate parents and model families in order to shift Native Americans' allegiances from tribal kinship networks to Euro-American familial structures and, ultimately, the U.S. government. In seeking to remove Indians from federal wardship, the government experimented with new forms of maternalist social provision, which later influenced U.S. colonialism overseas. Cahill also reveals how the government's hiring practices unexpectedly allowed federal personnel on the ground to crucially influence policies devised in Washington, especially when Native employees used their positions to defend their families and communities.
The Calouste Gulbenkian Museum is located off the tourist paths, on the outskirts of Europe, and far away from the centre of Lisbon, in the serenity of the Santa Gertrudes Park. Its austere concrete ...buildings hide treasures from the collection of an extraordinary man, a millionaire of Armenian origin, an oil magnate, and an art and garden lover. The article presents the collector, the history of his collection and the museum buildings which now form an original park and museum complex run by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. In 2010, the complex was entered into the register of national monuments of Portugal, thus being the first masterpiece of the 20th-century architecture to feature in this register.
The Civil War marked a significant turning point in American history -- not only for the United States itself but also for its relations with foreign powers both during and after the conflict. The ...friendship and foreign policy partnership between President Abraham Lincoln and Secretary of State William Henry Seward shaped those US foreign policies. These unlikely allies, who began as rivals during the 1860 presidential nomination, helped ensure that America remained united and prospered in the aftermath of the nation's consuming war.
InLincoln, Seward, and US Foreign Relations in the Civil War Era, Joseph A. Fry examines the foreign policy decisions that resulted from this partnership and the legacy of those decisions. Lincoln and Seward, despite differences in upbringing, personality, and social status, both adamantly believed in the preservation of the union and the need to stymie slavery. They made that conviction the cornerstone of their policies abroad, and through those policies, such as Seward threatening war with any nation that intervened in the Civil War, they prevented European intervention that could have led to Northern defeat. The Union victory allowed America to resume imperial expansion, a dynamic that Seward sustained beyond Lincoln's death during his tenure as President Andrew Johnson's Secretary of State.
Fry's analysis of the Civil War from an international perspective and the legacy of US policy decisions provides a more complete view of the war and a deeper understanding of this crucial juncture in American history.
More than 150 years after its end, we still struggle to understand the full extent of the human toll of the Civil War and the psychological crisis it created. In Aberration of Mind, Diane Miller ...Sommerville offers the first book-length treatment of suicide in the South during the Civil War era, giving us insight into both white and black communities, Confederate soldiers and their families, as well as the enslaved and newly freed. With a thorough examination of the dynamics of both racial and gendered dimensions of psychological distress, Sommerville reveals how the suffering experienced by Southerners living in a war zone generated trauma that, in extreme cases, led some Southerners to contemplate or act on suicidal thoughts. Sommerville recovers previously hidden stories of individuals exhibiting suicidal activity or aberrant psychological behavior she links to the war and its aftermath. This work adds crucial nuance to our understanding of how personal suffering shaped the way southerners viewed themselves in the Civil War era and underscores the full human costs of war.
Hawthorn comments about Ernest Bramah who invented Chinese proverb of Ford Madox Ford. Ernest Bramah (1868-1942) is today chiefly remembered for his Max Carrados detective stories, and his tales ...involving the mythical Chinese storyteller Kai Lung. He has however located no example of Ford's proverb that predates Bramah's use of it in 1900, and there is something about its arch humour that suggests that it is a coinage of Bramah's.
Modern western Oregon was a crucial site of imperial competition in North America during the formative decades of the United States. In this book, Gray Whaley examines relations among newcomers and ...between newcomers and Native peoples--focusing on political sovereignty, religion, trade, sexuality, and the land--from initial encounters to Oregon's statehood. He emphasizes Native perspectives, using the Chinook wordIllahee(homeland) to refer to the indigenous world he examines.Whaley argues that the process of Oregon's founding is best understood as a contest between the British Empire and a nascent American one, with Oregon's Native people and their lands at the heart of the conflict. He identifies race, republicanism, liberal economics, and violence as the key ideological and practical components of American settler-colonialism. Native peoples faced capriciousness, demographic collapse, and attempted genocide, but they fought to preserveIllaheeeven as external forces caused the collapse of their world. Whaley's analysis compellingly challenges standard accounts of the quintessential antebellum "Promised Land."
Henri Matisse (1869-1954) adopted medievalism, a motif of cultural resistance in Occupied France, as a symbol of national unity through his appropriation of the fifteenth-century poems of Charles de ...Valois, duc d'Orléans (1394-1465). Matisse saw parallels between the plight of the medieval poet, held captive in England, and his own circumstances in France during the Second World War. Begun in 1942, while recovering from his near-fatal illness, aided by his friend André Rouveyre (1879-1962), encouraged by the fugitive poet Louis Aragon (1897-1982), Matisse introduced covert symbols and coded messages of hope and rebirth into his book to highlight his nation's heritage as he silently participated in the cultural battle that was being fought in France. This article analyses the aesthetic evolution of his wartime illustrated book Poèmes de Charles d'Orléans (1950), and examines his choice of poems, the handwritten text, his decorative illuminations, the images, d'Orléans's portrait and the frontispiece within the context of the disruption to the French nation and his own personal circumstances.
Philosophers, sociologists and political scientists may analyse political crises by looking at the relationship between the liberal and democratic pillars of liberal-democratic regimes. Social ...questioning of representation (abstention, apathy and protest) is a democratic response to the failure of the liberal pillar to democratise access to political power, therefore, the crisis of liberalism. M. K. Gandhi developed an alternative theory based on intercultural perspectives and on local, ethical communities. Through Boaventura de Sousa Santos’ “epistemologies of the South”, this article analyses how Gandhi’s work can be mobilised to foster democratisation theory. The study contends that to overcome the crises, democratisation of the liberal pillar is both paramount and achievable with a new interplay of the state and civil society.
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