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Alternative Americas: A Reading of Antebellum Political Culture
"...Anne Norton offers a provocative ...reinterpretation of the character and development of American political culture....she identifies and examines radically different conceptions of American national identity that developed in the North, South , and West....She shows that slavery,tariffs, and other controversies are best understood not as the causes or as the occasion for war, but rather as issues around which the debate over meaning coalesced."
352 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1986
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
December 2, 2025
another book from the Nut-Bar Ranch
uh, and a review to match
The individual as abstraction and the One as the individual
ten out of ten
Norton makes a great deal out of the concept of liminality and identifies certain groups who were considered liminal and outside the city and civilization proper.
The Puritan north developed an idea of civilization that tended to identify certain groups as closer to the state of nature and paganism and thus in need of reforming or expulsion.
The South and the North developed ideas of liminality that were similar but the South believed that the liminal groups and liminality itself was essential to a civilized order whereas the North was less tolerant of groups it considered as outside the covenant.
These concepts are still operative today and bring different ideas of the Founding down to a personal level.
Ultimately, for the new nation founded by the war, Walt Whitman becomes the poetic representative of an imperialistic democratic regime that reduces the individual to an abstraction who can still pretend that he is free because he is spontaneous.
But ultimately, for Whitman, it is the One which is free and all that matters is Union and the mystical idea of a Union held together by force is not a problem for him.
Self-absorption and solipsism and citizenship blur for Whitman and for the new nation forged by the war.
This union of the self-absorbed narcissistic self of the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and the imperialistic policies of the Lincoln forged nation refounded by force can be denied but that is because truth is not the goal of this new nation. Power is our new goal.
Roderick H. Mills
////////
I'll bet you a pizza its this guy
Roderick H. Mills, former SEC Chairman and former White House Counsel, right, testifies before the House Committee on Financial Services on the restoration of investor confidence in the era of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in Washington DC on July 22, 2004
uh, and a review to match
The individual as abstraction and the One as the individual
ten out of ten
Norton makes a great deal out of the concept of liminality and identifies certain groups who were considered liminal and outside the city and civilization proper.
The Puritan north developed an idea of civilization that tended to identify certain groups as closer to the state of nature and paganism and thus in need of reforming or expulsion.
The South and the North developed ideas of liminality that were similar but the South believed that the liminal groups and liminality itself was essential to a civilized order whereas the North was less tolerant of groups it considered as outside the covenant.
These concepts are still operative today and bring different ideas of the Founding down to a personal level.
Ultimately, for the new nation founded by the war, Walt Whitman becomes the poetic representative of an imperialistic democratic regime that reduces the individual to an abstraction who can still pretend that he is free because he is spontaneous.
But ultimately, for Whitman, it is the One which is free and all that matters is Union and the mystical idea of a Union held together by force is not a problem for him.
Self-absorption and solipsism and citizenship blur for Whitman and for the new nation forged by the war.
This union of the self-absorbed narcissistic self of the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and the imperialistic policies of the Lincoln forged nation refounded by force can be denied but that is because truth is not the goal of this new nation. Power is our new goal.
Roderick H. Mills
////////
I'll bet you a pizza its this guy
Roderick H. Mills, former SEC Chairman and former White House Counsel, right, testifies before the House Committee on Financial Services on the restoration of investor confidence in the era of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in Washington DC on July 22, 2004
Displaying 1 of 1 review