In short, everyone agrees that nationalism is important and no one can agree on what we are really talking about. For these reasons alone, Civil War historians will continue to debate. I do not want to suggest, however, that nationalism studies have moved, or are doomed to move, in a circle.
There has been a definite trajectory to the recent historical literature, and a spate of excellent studies on Civil War and mid-nineteenth-century American nationalism have provided fresh insights and opened exciting new areas for exploration. For instance, there is the problem of definition, which in the past has often been too narrowly conceived.
To some extent, this is understandable, given the nature of the conflict. The war was a crisis of nationalism, and this has encouraged historians to view nationalism in overly stark terms. Civil War Americans have been sorted into two categories—either they were nationalists or they were not.
This type of rigid categorization sometimes has led to the conflation of nationalism with political affiliation and support—support for the government, support for a party, support for particular political leaders presidents , and so forth.
In our own lives, of course, we understand that one need not support the current administration or the political party in power to have a nationalist outlook. We understand that disagreements are permissible, that there is no one single vision or platform of nationalism, and that it is not required that everyone march in lockstep for nationalism to exist. Yet, we often seem to apply these standards to Civil War Americans, and this has allowed us to draw lines too readily.
It can cause us to overlook the nationalism of Democrats in the North, for instance. It can lead us to group all those opposed to Jefferson Davis in the Confederacy as antinationalists and to see their opposition as a sign of a lack of nationalism. Recent work, to its credit, has taken a broader, more inclusive, more nuanced view of Civil War nationalism.
It has recognized that there are different conceptions and means of expression of nationalist sentiment. When viewed in this light, that there were disagreements and competing visions of the nation does not mean that nationalism did not exist or that it was necessarily weak. Indeed, such debates, such conflicts, are intrinsic to all nationalist projects, and flexibility within nationalist thought and ideology is as important as its constraints.
As a result, our understanding of Civil War nationalism has become much fuzzier and harder to quantify, but at the same time more dynamic, more true to life, and more human. Recent work has also tried to extricate itself from some of the questions that so dominated the past scholarship on the subject. For Confederate studies, it is no longer necessary to prove that Confederate nationalism existed or to argue about its legitimacy an ahistorical question in any case.
Instead, for the past thirty years, the strong versus weak debate has shaped the field—a central component of the even larger internal versus external causes of Confederate defeat debate—and nearly every monograph on Confederate politics, leaders, soldiers, guerrillas, the home front, slavery and race, gender, class, ethnicity, religion, economics, individual communities, unionism, loyalty, dissension, and resistance has weighed in, at least in part.
The fruits of this ongoing debate have been many, and despite the inherent difficulties of measuring something as abstract and slippery as nationalism, scholars have employed great care and much analytical sophistication in delineating both what held the Confederacy together and what pulled it apart. The Role of Ambiguity in Irish Nationalism. Any attempt to understand nineteenth-century Irish history must balance the dangers of reading history backwards against the need to take account of long-term trends.
Comerford 1. But others, like Foster 1. The origins of a unionist tradition can be traced back to the first decades of the nineteenth century. The dismantling of the religiously exclusive institutions of the kingdom of Ireland, along with the rise from the s of Catholic mass politics, meant that self-government became a luxury which most Irish Protestants were convinced they could not afford 2.
But in seeking to understand this tradition, it is important not to look backwards from the perspective of twentieth-century Northern Ireland 5. They have also stressed the extent to which his success depended on his ability to be all things to all men, and his contribution to linking nationalism with Catholicism 3.
Comerford questions whether it in fact should be taken seriously as a revolutionary movement 3. On the other hand Foster is clearly right to emphasise that the Fenians made more impact in defeat than as a functioning revolutionary movement 3. Most historians of the period would now follow Walker 4. Although both movements appealed to the past, both were in fact the products of recent change: the emergence in the south of a more prosperous rural population dominated by the tenant farmer class, urbanisation in Ulster, the growth of literacy, improved communications, the widening of the franchise.
Hoppen 4. The key feature of both the Unionist and the Nationalist movement that emerged in the mids is that they represented coalitions of disparate elements 5. Publications Pages Publications Pages. Recently viewed 0 Save Search. The Oxford Handbook of the History of Nationalism.
Read More. Your current browser may not support copying via this button. Subscriber sign in You could not be signed in, please check and try again. Username Please enter your Username. Password Please enter your Password. Forgot password? Don't have an account? There were two main ways of exemplification: the French method of "inclusion" - essentially that anyone who accepted loyalty to the civil French state was a "citizen".
In practice this meant the enforcement of a considerable degree of uniformity, for instance the destruction of regional languages. The US can be seen to have, eventually, adopted this ideal of civic inclusive nationalism. The German method, required by political circumstances, was todefine the "nation" in ethnic terms. Ethnicity in practice came down to speaking German and perhaps having a German name.
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