ISSN:
0021-8758
Quelle:
Cambridge Journals Digital Archives
Thema:
Anglistik, Amerikanistik
,
Geschichte
,
Politikwissenschaft
,
Sociologie
,
Wirtschaftswissenschaften
Notizen:
“I consider the war of attempted secession, 1860–1865, not as a struggle of two distinct and separate peoples,” wrote Whitman in Specimen Days and Collect, “but a conflict (often happening, and very fierce) between the passions and paradoxes of one and the same identity.” He interpreted the Civil War as a violent expression of the persistent conflict between democratic and broadly anti-democratic tendencies within the one “identity” of American republicanism; and he emphasized that this conflict was as much a subtle feature of social and political life in the North as it was in more blatant form the underlying cause of the war between North and South.The ante-bellum years had seen the political life of the North dominated by Democrats against whom, in “The Eighteenth Presidency,” Whitman had directed some of his coarsest and most unforgiving (if unpublished) invective:Office-holders, office-seekers, robbers, pimps, exclusives, malignants, conspirators, murderers, fancy-men,...deaf men, pimpled men, scarr'd inside with the vile disorder, gaudy outside with gold chains made from the people's money and harlots' money twisted together; crawling, serpentine men, the lousy combings and born freedom-sellers of the earth.
Materialart:
Digitale Medien
URL:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0021875800005119
Permalink
