The Silent Shore of Memory chronicles the life of James Barnhill from his days as a young Confederate soldier through the trials of Reconstruction in his native Texas and his later career as a lawyer and judge. After being critically wounded at Gettysburg and a long recuperation in North Carolina, James Barnhill returns to Texas where he battles widespread corruption and vigilante violence during the turmoil of Reconstruction. Although he endures tragedy in his personal life, Barnhill becomes a respected lawyer who defends an African American man accused of rape and represents a titan of the Texas lumber industry in a precedent-setting confrontation with a railroad monopoly controlled by Wall Street financiers. Steeped in the history of the South, The Silent Shore of Memory explores the nuances of views on slavery and the dissolution of the Union, the complexity of race relations and race politics during the thirty years following the Civil War, and the powerful bonds of familial love and friendship.
The legacy of Christian mission seems beyond dispute. Western churches carried imperialist and racist assumptions as they evangelized and encouraged the formation of indigenous churches. Amid those realities a different sensibility took root. As the history of Virginia Theological Seminary illustrates, missionaries who were alumni adapted to contextual circumstances in ways that challenged Western presumptions. Mission encouraged cosmopolitan ties featuring mutuality and reciprocity. The path to such relations was not straight nor always readily taken. Yet, over the seminary's two-hundred-year history, the cosmopolitan direction has become evident on several continents. As missionaries came home, and leaders and students from abroad visited the seminary, the ideal of cosmopolitan relations spread. It became evident as mission churches took indigenous form and control. It was reinforced as Western churches explored the dimensions of social justice. American theological education affirmed the reality of diversity and recast its pedagogies in appreciative ways. This book traces an epic shift in mission and theological education measured by the rise of cosmopolitanism in the life of Virginia Theological Seminary.
The definitive account of the lynching of twenty-three-year-old Matthew Williams in Maryland, the subsequent investigation, and the legacy of "modern-day" lynchings. On December 4, 1931, a mob of white men in Salisbury, Maryland, lynched and set ablaze a twenty-three-year-old Black man named Matthew Williams. His gruesome murder was part of a wave of silent white terrorism in the wake of the stock market crash of 1929, which exposed Black laborers to white rage in response to economic anxieties. For nearly a century, the lynching of Matthew Williams has lived in the shadows of the more well-known incidents of racial terror in the deep South, haunting both the Eastern Shore and the state of Maryland as a whole. In The Silent Shore, author Charles L. Chavis Jr. draws on his discovery of previously unreleased investigative documents to meticulously reconstruct the full story of one of the last lynchings in Maryland. Bringing the painful truth of anti-Black violence to light, Chavis breaks the silence that surrounded Williams's death. Though Maryland lacked the notoriety for racial violence of Alabama or Mississippi, he writes, it nonetheless was the site of at least 40 spectacle lynchings after the abolition of slavery in 1864. Families of lynching victims rarely obtained any form of actual justice, but Williams's death would have a curious afterlife: Maryland's politically ambitious governor Albert C. Ritchie would, in an attempt to position himself as a viable challenger to FDR, become one of the first governors in the United States to investigate the lynching death of a Black person. Ritchie tasked Patsy Johnson, a member of the Pinkerton detective agency and a former prizefighter, with going undercover in Salisbury and infiltrating the mob that murdered Williams. Johnson would eventually befriend a young local who admitted to participating in the lynching and who also named several local law enforcement officers as ringleaders. Despite this, a grand jury, after hearing 124 witness statements, declined to indict the perpetrators. But this denial of justice galvanized Governor Ritchie's Interracial Commission, which would become one of the pioneering forces in the early civil rights movement in Maryland. Complicating historical narratives associated with the history of lynching in the city of Salisbury, The Silent Shore explores the immediate and lingering effect of Williams's death on the politics of racism in the United States, the Black community in Salisbury, the broader Eastern Shore, the state of Maryland, and the legacy of "modern-day lynchings."
This book offers, for the first time, a detailed comparative study of how speakers of different languages express memory concepts. While there is a robust body of psycholinguistic research that bears on how memory and language are related, there is no comparative study of how speakers themselves conceptualize memory as reflected in their use of language to talk about memory. This book addresses a key question: how do speakers of different languages talk about the experience of having prior experiences coming to mind (‘remembering’) or failing to come to mind (‘forgetting’)? A complex array of answers is provided through detailed grammatical and semantic investigation of different languages, including English, German, Polish, Russian and also a number of non-Indo-European languages, Amharic, Cree, Dalabon, Korean, and Mandarin. In addition, the book calls for a broader interdisciplinary engagement by urging that cognitive semantics be integrated with other sciences of memory.
Esther Schor tells us about the persistence of the dead, about why they still matter long after we emerge from grief and accept our loss. Mourning as a cultural phenomenon has become opaque to us in the twentieth century, Schor argues. This book is an effort to recover the culture of mourning that thrived in English society from the Enlightenment through the Romantic Age, and to recapture its meaning. Mourning appears here as the social diffusion of grief through sympathy, as a force that constitutes communities and helps us to conceptualize history. In the textual and social practices of the British Enlightenment and its early nineteenth-century heirs, Schor uncovers the ways in which mourning mediated between received ideas of virtue, both classical and Christian, and a burgeoning, property-based commercial society. The circulation of sympathies maps the means by which both valued things and values themselves are distributed within a culture. Delving into philosophy, politics, economics, and social history as well as literary texts, Schor traces a shift in the British discourse of mourning in the wake of the French Revolution: What begins as a way to effect a moral consensus in society turns into a means of conceiving and bringing forth history.
Through a wide variety of verbal and pictorial references, this book demonstrates how Wordsworth's iconography, albeit apparently 'collateral', makes crucial contributions to his central arguments and preoccupations in The Excursion, as well as in his other major works.
