Between 1848 and 1865 white southerners felt the grounds of nationhood shift beneath their feet. The regional conflict over slavery that culminated in the American Civil War forced them to confront difficult problems of nationalism. What made a nation a nation? Could an individual or a group change nationality at will? What were the rights and responsibilities of national citizenship? Why should nations exist at all? As they contemplated these questions, white southerners drew on their long experience as American nationalists and their knowledge of nationalism in the wider world. Shifting Grounds tells the fascinating story not just of the radical secessionists who shattered the Union in 1861, but also of the moderate majority who struggled before and after secession to balance their southern and American identities and loyalties. As they pondered the changing significance of the Fourth of July, as they fused ideals of masculinity and femininity with national identity, they revealed the shifting meanings of nationalism and citizenship. Southerners also looked across the Atlantic, comparing southern separatism with movements in Hungary and Ireland, and applying the European model of romantic nationalism first to the United States and later to the Confederacy. Evaluating the American South in transnational context sheds new light on the ideas and motivations behind America's greatest conflict. The creation of the Confederacy and the onset of brutal war in 1861 both built on and transformed antebellum ideas. A powerful national government imposed newly stringent obligations of citizenship while the shared experience of suffering united many Confederates in a sacred national community of sacrifice. For all white southerners-Unionists, die-hard Confederates, and the large majority torn between the two-the problems of nationalism had come to matter more by 1865 than ever before.
| ISBN | 0199735484 | | Pages | 272 | | ISBN13 | 9780199735488
(What's this?) | | Weight (grammes) | 572 | | Publisher | Oxford University Press Inc | | Published in | New York | | Imprint | Oxford University Press Inc | | Height (mm) | 236 | | Format | Hardback | | Width (mm) | 162 | | Publication date | 08 Dec 2011 | | Spine width (mm) | 28 | | DEWEY | 975.03 | | Academic level | Postgraduate | | DEWEY edition | DC23 | |
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS; INTRODUCTION; CHAPTER 1. FOUNDATIONS: NATIONALISM IN THE ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN SOUTH; CHAPTER 2. DREAMS: SOUTHERN NATIONALISM BEFORE NATIONHOOD; CHAPTER 3. THE PINCH: AMERICAN NATIONALISM IN CRISIS; CHAPTER 4. DEFINITIONS: CONFEDERATE CITIZENSHIP AND NATIONAL IDENTITY IN 1861; CHAPTER 5. WAR: SUFFERING, SACRIFICE, AND THE TRIALS OF NATIONALISM; CONCLUSION; LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS; NOTES; BIBLIOGRAPHY
"Paul Quigley engages the topic of Confederate nationalism within a spacious analytical context that begins in the 1840s and extends across the Atlantic. This important and original book sheds considerable light on the process by which white southerners forged a sense of Confederate identity." --Gary W. Gallagher, author of The Confederate War
"This masterful book makes sense of how the South's ambition for nationhood in the 1860s resonated with the shared resentments and common dreams already embedded in its history and culture. Hundreds of books dwell on how this long, cruel war was fought; Paul Quigley helps us understand why it was fought." --Don H. Doyle, University of South Carolina
"From the opening pages of this carefully crafted and judiciously nuanced study, when a Rebel soldier cites Edmund Burke in his letters home, we are given brilliant insights into the hearts, but especially the minds of the Old South. Quigley's deft talent for clarity and context affords readers vivid appreciation of the pull of nationhood in nineteenth century America, which led to the rise and fall of the Confederate project. Shifting Grounds shines a bright light on ideology's role in social change and takes to task those who fail to take seriously those key political moments when ideas rearrange events in dramatic and dangerous ways. The implications for what Quigley calls 'the intractable problems of nationalism' reverberate today." --Catherine Clinton, Queen's University Belfast
"Finally! We at last have a book that anchors Confederate nationalism in the viscera, in the hearts and minds of the people who believed they were fighting for it. In Shifting Grounds, Quigley takes us to the very heart of what the Confederacy thought it was." --Stephen Berry, author of All ThatMakes a Man: Love and Ambition in the Civil War South
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