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This book looks at various ways freedom was both gained and lost during Reconstruction. Its unifying theme is the expansion and contraction of the many and varied manifestations and meanings of freedom. The central issue of the that shaped Reconstruction was freedom—but not always in the way we might expect. The essays explore the frequent “gaps” between legal and political gains supposedly secured in the statute books and people’s actual lived experience. Even after legal emancipation, formerly enslaved people faced a lack of economic freedom dependent on equal educational access and employment opportunity. Freedom was not just a question of being enslaved or not enslaved; nor was it just about access to the ballot. Freedom to be educated; freedom to testify in court; freedom from imprisonment; even economic opportunity was a form of freedom. The book takes an expansive approach to studying Reconstruction. This book reaches beyond just the American South, to consider Reconstruction’s impact on freedoms in border states, on northerners, in Brazil, and even in Australia. It also expands the traditional periodization beyond 1876, because Reconstruction—when seen as a series of conflicts in which freedoms were gained and lost—doesn’t end in 1876 but one might argue continues to this day. Approximately 150 years after this crucial period in American history—so often overlooked in popular memory—a group of scholars come together to demonstrate that struggles over the meaning of freedom not only defined Reconstruction but also continue to shape America to this day.

This volume tells the little-known story of the Dominican Family—priests, sisters, brothers, contemplative nuns, and lay people—and integrates it into the history of the United States. Starting after the Civil War, the book takes a thematic approach through twelve essays examining Dominican contributions to the making of the modern United States by exploring parish ministry, preaching, health care, education, social and economic justice, liturgical renewal and the arts, missionary outreach and contemplative prayer, ongoing internal formation and renewal, and models of sanctity. It charts the effects of the United States on Dominican life as well as the Dominican contribution to the larger U.S. history. When the country was engulfed by wave after wave of immigrants and cities experienced unchecked growth, Dominicans provided educational institutions; community, social, and religious centers; and health care and social services. When epidemic disease hit various locales, Dominicans responded with nursing care and spiritual sustenance. As the United States became more complex and social inequities appeared, Dominicans cried out for social and economic justice. Amidst the ugliness and social dislocation of modern society, Dominicans offered beauty through the liturgical arts, the fine arts, music, drama, and film, all designed to enrich the culture. Through it all, the Dominicans cultivated their own identity as well, undergoing regular self-examination and renewal.

This book explores the tumultuous history of North American state-making in the middle decades of the nineteenth century from a continental perspective. Today’s political map took its basic shape in the continental crisis of the 1860s, marked by Canadian Confederation (1867), the end of the U.S. Civil War (1865), the restoration of the Mexican Republic (1867), and numerous wars and treaty regimes conducted between these states and indigenous peoples through the 1870s. This crisis transformed the continent from a patchwork of foreign empires, republics, indigenous polities, and contested no-mans-lands into the nation states of Mexico and the United States and the Dominion of Canada, an expanding, largely self-governing polity within the British Empire. Key to this process was the question of sovereignty, or the power to rule. Battles over sovereignty ran through the struggles waged not only by the nation states that came to dominate the North America, but also those that failed, like the Confederate States of America, and others—like the European empires and indigenous peoples—that came into conflict with the three main states. In light of the global turn in 19th-century historiography, this book examines these political crises as an inter-related struggle to redefine the relationship of North Americans to new governments. This volume brings together distinguished experts on the history of Canada, indigenous Americans, Mexico, and the United States to re-evaluate an era of political transformation that has had profound consequences for the future of the continent.

This study explores the planning considerations of the United States military in formulating and implementing policy for the occupation of Okinawa from April 1945 to July 1946. American soldiers, Marines, and sailors on Okinawa encountered not only a Japanese enemy, but a large local population. The Okinawans were ethically different from the Japanese, yet Okinawa shared politics with Japan as a legal prefecture. When devising occupation policies, the United States military analyzed practical military considerations such as resources, weapons capability and terrain, as well as attempted to ascertain a conclusive definition of Okinawa’s relation to Japan through conscious, open, rational analysis of racial and ethnic identity. While the Marines held steadfast to the image of the enemy civilian, soldiers’ ideas about the race, ethnicity, and identity of the Okinawans evolved through their interactions with the civilians on the battlefield. As the population exhibited obedience and cooperation, the Army expressed feelings of kinship toward the civilians and reshaped its military government policies toward leniency. With the exception of the Marines, the U.S. military recognized the Okinawans as competent and civilized: a group that formed a distinct, separate, unique ethnic community that was neither American nor Japanese in its likeness. Considerations of race, ethnicity, and identity by the Americans deeply influenced the conduct of the occupation beyond practical concerns of resources and battlefield conditions. The mercurial nature of the identity of the Okinawans displays both the malleability of race and ethnicity and its centrality in occupation planning.

In the years leading up to India’s independence, a young Punjabi woman known to us only as Mrs. A., ill at ease in her marriage and eager for personal and national freedom, sat down with psychiatrist Dev Satya Nand for an experiment in his new and “Oriental” method of dream analysis. Her analysis, which appeared in a case self-published by Satya Nand, included a surge of emotion and reflections on sexuality, gender, marriage, ambition, trauma, and art. She turned to female figures from Hindu myth to reimagine her social world and its ethical arrangements. The stories of Draupadi and Shakuntala, from the Mahabharata, and Ahalya, from the Ramayana, helped her envision a future beyond marriage, colonial rule, and gendered constraints. This book is an exploration of Mrs. A.’s case, its window onto gender and sexuality in late colonial Indian society, and the ways her case put ethics in motion, creating alternatives to ideals of belonging, recognition, and consciousness. It finds in Mrs. A.’s musings repertoires for the creative transformation of ethical ideals and explores the possibilities of thinking with a concept of “counter-ethics” and from a position that sees ethics as plural in both content and form. Following Mrs. A. in pursuing mythic narratives and turning in its conclusion to art as a guide for theorizing, this book asks what perspectives on gender, power, meaning, and imagination are possible from the position of the counter-ethic and its orientation toward movement and change.

This work is an exploration of possible experiential traces of Orthodox Christian ontology and soteriology in the healing of the psyche as known and experienced through depth psychology. It explores a possible relationship between theology and depth psychology as mediated through a lens of the sacramentality of creation. Using a variety of patristic soteriological images, all of which converge around the central theme of “that which is not assumed is not healed,” it then goes on to offer a possible psychological exegesis of that key patristic maxim, seeking to understand how this might be experienced psychologically. This is done through the lens of the assumption of being qua being as explored through insights into the natural healing impetus of the psyche qua psyche. The exploration then turns to the ontological energies of eros, desire, and will and looks for traces of the assumption of eros in psychological healing, as seen primarily through the lens of object-relations theory.

Allied Encounters: The Gendered Redemption of World War II Italy is the first-ever monograph to analyze cultural representations of Allied-occupied Italy, one of the war’s most unstable spaces. While the U.S. military viewed itself as a redemptive force, competing narratives emerged in the Italian imaginary. Both national paradigms, however, are deeply entangled with the gendering of redemption long operative in Anglo-American and Italian discourse, emerging from a Dantean topos that depicts Italy as a whore in need of redemption. Tracing the formation of these gendered paradigms and pointing to their intersection with sexualized and racialized identities, this book examines literary, cinematic, and military representations of the soldier-civilian encounter, by Anglo-Americans and Italians, set in two major occupied cities, Naples and Rome. Informed by the historical context as well as their respective representational traditions, these texts—produced during and in the immediate aftermath—become more than mirrors of the intercultural encounter or generic allegories about U.S.–Italian relations. Instead, they are sites in which to explore other repressed traumas—including the Holocaust, the American Civil War, and European colonialism, as well as individual traumatic events like the massacre of the Fosse Ardeatine and the mass civilian rape near Rome by colonial soldiers— that inform how the occupation unfolded and is remembered. In addition to challenging canonical interpretations of emblematic texts, this book introduces several little-known diaries, novels, and guidebooks.

New Perspectives on the Union War explores, at a wide array of points along the political spectrum, the many shapes patriotic sentiment took in the loyal states during the Civil War. The essays provide new insights into well-known figures such as Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase, political philosopher Francis Lieber, African American author/entrepreneur Elizabeth Keckley, abolitionist Abby Kelly Foster, New York governor Horatio Seymour, and Attorney General Edward Bates. They also offer the perspectives of common soldiers, of the partisan press, of the clergy, and of social reformers.

This book brings together a diverse group of scholars whose work concerns the reign of Alfonso VIII (1158–1215). This was a critical period in the history of the Iberian Peninsula, when the conflict between the Christian north and the Moroccan empire of the Almohads was at its most intense, while the political divisions between the five Christian kingdoms reached their high-water mark. From his troubled ascension as a child to his victory at Las Navas de Tolosa near the end of his fifty-seven-year reign, Alfonso VIII and his kingdom were at the epicenter of many of the most dramatic events of the era.

This book employs postcolonial critique to analyze the transformations of Greek and Latin religious identity in the wake of the Fourth Crusade. Through close readings of texts from the period of Latin occupation, the book argues that the experience of colonization splintered the Greek community over how best to respond to the Latin other while illuminating the mechanisms by which Western Christians authorized and exploited the Christian East. The experience of colonial subjugation opened permanent fissures within the Orthodox community, which struggled to develop a consistent response to aggressive demands for submission to the Roman Church. This internal fracturing has done more lasting damage to the modern Orthodox Church than any material act perpetrated by the crusaders. Ultimately, the statements of Greek and Latin religious polemic that emerged in the context of the Fourth Crusade should be interpreted as having been produced in a colonial setting and, as such, reveal more about the political, economic, and cultural uncertainty of communities in conflict than they offer genuine theological insight.