JournalTOCs

About Help News

Wacana : Journal of the Humanities of Indonesia
Number of Followers: 1

This is an Open Access Journal

Open Access journal
ISSN (Print) 1411-2272 - ISSN (Online) 2407-6899
Published by Universitas Indonesia

[19 journals]

Things Mattered, and Why: Material Culture in the Civil War Era
- Abstract: The material turn in the study of American history is well underway. This surge of interest in material culture, and the material aspects of human experience, began about twenty-five years ago. Writers in many fields, including the history of the body, gender, slavery, race, ethnicity, foodways, textiles, clothing, architecture, and the creation of memory have turned their attention to the palpable, the concrete, the real. They examine physical objects and what people have written about these objects, and they encompass many places over long periods of time. This work has already yielded rich results on the significance of objects to human beings, such as how people experienced the body, deployed objects to express ... Read More
  PubDate: 2022-12-19T00:00:00-05:00
Losing Lady Breckinridge: Artillery, Agency, and Assemblage at the Battle
of Missionary Ridge
- Abstract: From the crest of Missionary Ridge, Lady Breckinridge fired down on Union infantry intent on capturing her on November 25, 1863. A twelve-pounder Napoleon cannon belonging to Capt. Robert Cobb's First Kentucky Artillery, she jumped each time a shell left her mouth. This powerful jolt caused the nine humans that served her to scamper about, performing their mechanical tasks. One cleaned her mouth with a sponge, Two loaded another round for One to ram home, and Three plugged her vent with his thumb. Four added the primer and pulled the lanyard. Five, Six, and Seven shuttled fresh ammunition to her from limber chests, while Eight managed her caisson. An unnumbered man, Lady Breckinridge's gunner, calculated distances ... Read More
  PubDate: 2022-12-19T00:00:00-05:00
Bullet Tales: Bodies and Embedded Projectiles from the Civil War
- Abstract: In May 1864, at the Battle of Spotsylvania in Virginia, Pvt. James M. Denn of the Ninety-Sixth Pennsylvania Volunteers was shot in the hand. The ball shattered many of his metacarpal bones, causing permanent damage, and the bullet remained near the thumb in a cyst that formed around it. Nearly four decades later, the cyst hemorrhaged, "being no doubt the result of frequent traumatisms [i.e., conditions caused by traumatic injury] from shaking the hand violently near the ears of his friends to cause them to hear the ball rattle in the cyst." Denn's hand was X-rayed at the US Soldier's Home Hospital Laboratory in 1902, and the ball was finally removed in what medical historian Frank R. Freemon has called "the last ... Read More
  PubDate: 2022-12-19T00:00:00-05:00
The Fabric of War: Civil War Uniforms and the Making of Memory
- Abstract: Bullet and blade hit 1st Lt. Nathaniel "Nat" Bowditch at the height of a cavalry charge during the battle of Kelly's Ford, on March 17, 1863. A member of the First Massachusetts Cavalry, Nat was quickly removed from the battlefield and taken to camp. He died shortly after eleven o'clock. His father, Henry, learned of the news en route to the battlefield. Writing his wife, Olivia, he immediately sought to elevate the event despite still reeling from their son's death. Nat had been killed in service of their country, a sacrifice of liberty. For the rest of his life, Henry Ingersoll Bowditch made meaning of the loss of his eldest son. Although he wrote about it prolifically, he also collected and displayed relics ... Read More
  PubDate: 2022-12-19T00:00:00-05:00
The Shelbys, the Harts, and Their Houses: Material Culture in Wartime
Kentucky
- Abstract: "Oh, the Shelbys and their houses!" So an archivist in Kentucky said to me during a research trip in 2019. He was quoting a Bluegrass aphorism about the deep attachment shared by the Shelbys and their kinfolk, the Harts, for their houses, and the disputes some of them had over those buildings. The family history does reflect the strong feeling that human beings can develop for their houses, over the generations. Scholars from several fields, such as Dell Upton, Charlotte Mires, and Tiya Miles, have done important work on the history of famous homes and public buildings, but we need more scholarship on the lived experience of ordinary people residing in the American house. Most people care about where they live not ... Read More
  PubDate: 2022-12-19T00:00:00-05:00
"Pretty Well Fixed": Material Culture and Occupation in Civil War Kentucky
- Abstract: One frigid day in January 1862, enslaved workers drew up a wagon to the back door of the house of their Unionist enslavers—the Underwoods. Trunks, bedding, and a few books were loaded alongside the white family's provisions, a carpet thrown over top to shield them from Confederate soldiers' notice. Some furniture had been sent ahead to the cabins to which the white family and a few enslaved people were relocating, spurred by military orders to leave their farm in Bowling Green, Kentucky. But most of the Underwoods' furnishings were stored at a friend's home or left behind, where they would be used, and perhaps abused, by occupying Confederate soldiers.1Furnishings and houses of people from all backgrounds ... Read More
  PubDate: 2022-12-19T00:00:00-05:00
A History of Root and Herb Gathering in Appalachia by Luke Manget (review)
- Abstract: An image lingers after one reads Luke Manget's superb Ginseng Diggers: a wagon train wending through the hills of Virginia, on its way to Baltimore. It is late 1789. The wagons creak under more than a ton of ginseng, pulled from the soil of old-growth forests. The earthy cargo has thousands of miles and months of hard travel ahead of it. Upon such humble scenes, a global market was made. Ginseng root was such a pillar of early European American economic activity in Appalachian Virginia, Kentucky, and North Carolina that it functioned like currency. Manget's achievement both documents the evolution of this fascinating trade and connects its story to wider conversations about environmental and economic change in ... Read More
  PubDate: 2022-12-19T00:00:00-05:00
The Civil War in Maryland Reconsidered ed. by Jean W. Baker and Charles W.
Mitchell (review)
- Abstract: Disagreements about how best to remember Maryland's Civil War experience persisted long after the guns fell silent at Appomattox. In their introduction to The Civil War in Maryland Reconsidered, Jean H. Baker and Charles W. Mitchell offer a concise overview of this ongoing discourse. As they note, "most Marylanders endorsed the Union to some degree." Indeed, in the 1860 presidential election, the three unionist candidates (Lincoln, Douglas, and Bell) received roughly 55 percent of the state's votes. Nonetheless, Maryland's allegiance "became a flash point of historical contention" (1).Veterans produced many of the earliest narratives. While three quarters of soldiers from Maryland served the Union, many of the most ... Read More
  PubDate: 2022-12-19T00:00:00-05:00
African American Workers and the Appalachian Coal Industry by Joe William
Trotter Jr. (review)
- Abstract: Joe William Trotter Jr. has spent decades researching and writing about race and labor, with his most well-known works exploring Black workers in Appalachia. His books and essays are among the crucial texts that explore Black work, life, and community during a period when Black folk were regularly overlooked in studies of Appalachia, leading to the false assumption that Appalachian history was predominantly white. Trotter is one of a handful of scholars who have consistently disproved this assumption. Consequently, his work has been formative for many students of Appalachian history and Black labor history in general.Trotter's new book, African American Workers and the Appalachian Coal Industry, is a kind of a ... Read More
  PubDate: 2022-12-19T00:00:00-05:00
America's Religious Crossroads Faith and Community in the Emerging Midwest
by Stephen T. Kissel (review)
- Abstract: As the cover image of the Old Cathedral Basilica of Saint Francis Xavier, in Vincennes, Indiana, underlines, the Old Northwest's religious landscape is older, and less uniformly Protestant, than suggested by the Methodist circuit-riding stereotype of the mid-western frontier. The Catholic cathedral was constructed in 1826, but Catholic presence in Vincennes dates to 1732, a colonial legacy of New France. Of course, the American Indian presence in this region is far older, but both the colonial antecedents of the midwestern religious landscape and its Native foundations lie outside the scope of Stephen T. Kissell's concise study.Kissel tells a self-deprecating anecdote by way of explaining his interest in midwestern ... Read More
  PubDate: 2022-12-19T00:00:00-05:00
The Filson to host opening for the latest exhibit, "People, Passage,
Place: Stories of the Ohio Valley" on January 13
- Abstract: The Filson Historical Society will host a public exhibit opening for "People, Passage, Place: Stories of the Ohio Valley" on January 13, 2023 from 5:00-6:00 pm. This exhibit is curated by Emma Bryan, Hannah Costelle, Abby Glogower, Kelly Hyberger, James J. Holmberg, Maureen Lane, Patrick A. Lewis, Heather J. Potter, and Brooks Vessels.People, Passage, Place reimagines ways for visitors to engage with the Filson's collections and invites them to think about how history shapes their lives and communities. The exhibit distills more than 250 years of history and the Filson's millions of portraits, objects, manuscripts, and photographs into three thematic sections: Land, Water, Labor; People, Family, Community; and ... Read More
  PubDate: 2022-12-19T00:00:00-05:00

JournalTOCs
School of Mathematical and Computer Sciences
Heriot-Watt University
Edinburgh, EH14 4AS, UK
Email: journaltocs@hw.ac.uk
Tel: +00 44 (0)131 4513762

Your IP address: 3.93.74.25

Home (Search)
API
About JournalTOCs
News (blog, publications)