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RIGHTS HELD

All rights in all languages


AUTHOR Gary W. Gallagher



TITLE The Union War

CATEGORY history
trade

NUMBER OF PAGES 304
40 halftones
PUBLICATION MONTH April

AUTHOR BIO Gary Gallagher was born in Glendale, California in 1950. Educated at Adams State College and the University of Texas at Austin, he is now John L. Nau III Professor in the History of the American Civil War at the University of Virginia. He is the editor or co-author of many books and the author of six titles, most recently Causes Won, Lost and Forgotten published by UNC Press in 2008.

BOOK DESCRIPTION

Provides a fresh look at the motivation of the mass of loyal citizens in the North during the American Civil War in order to challenge recent scholarship relating to the meaning of Union, the role and importance of emancipation within a northern framework, and the relationship between United States armies composed of citizen-soldiers and conceptions of nation.

This book argues that the concept of Union lay at the heart of what motivated citizens in the loyal states during the Civil War to mount an unimaginably costly military effort against slaveholding secessionists. Recapturing how Union resonated and reverberated throughout the loyal states poses formidable problems because the word has lost its mid-19th-century meaning. No single word in the American contemporary political vocabulary shoulders so much historical, political, and ideological weight; none stirs deep emotional currents so easily. Devotion to the Union functioned as a bonding agent among Americans who believed, as a citizenry and a nation under the Constitution, that they occupied a singular position among western nations. From their perspective, oligarchy and privilege were gaining strength in Europe, leaving the United States as the only successful, large-scale democracy. The mass of northern people believed that losing the war would not only undo the work of the Founding generation but also mark the effective end of democratic governance-the end of what Abraham Lincoln called “the last best, hope of earth” in his annual message to Congress in December 1862.
Emancipation and the example of citizen-soldiers also figured prominently in the North's Civil War. With Union as their pre-eminent goal from beginning to end, most of the white North embraced emancipation as a powerful weapon to help defeat the Confederacy and punish the slaveholding class that had inaugurated a vast bloodletting. From the northern perspective, a restored Union without slavery would be less likely to suffer from the kind of internal friction that had sundered the Union in 1860-1861. That all this was accomplished by citizens who took up arms to save the Union, and then immediately returned to civilian life when they had accomplished that goal, underscored for the wartime generation the American republic's greatness. What other nation, they asked, could build a mighty volunteer army and then disband it almost immediately after a huge war.
By 21st-century standards, this unabashedly exceptionalist reading of the war overlooks stunning inequalities based on race, gender, and wealth-aspects of the conflict that have attracted a great deal of recent scholarly attention. Yet the northern interpretation aligned quite closely with reality. European immigrants did continue to pour into the United States, where they found a society more conducive to economic and political freedom than those they had left behind. The Union's republican form of government featured a franchise broader than any in the major European nations, granting most voting-age men in loyal states a direct voice in politics. Upward movement between economic classes fell short of claims by ardent advocates of the free labor ideology but far exceeded that typical elsewhere. Any reading of the mid-19th-century United States that overlooks or minimizes these things cannot yield anything approaching a true understanding of the era.


RIGHTS HELD

All rights in all languages


AUTHOR Julian Gardner



TITLE Giottto and His Publics
Three Paradigms of Patronage

CATEGORY art history
monograph

NUMBER OF PAGES 220
13 color, 3 line illustrations
PUBLICATION MONTH May

AUTHOR BIO Julian Gardner was born in Dumfries, Scotland in 1940. Educated at Oxford and the Courtland Institute, he is now Professor Emeritus of the History of Art at the University of Warwick.

BOOK DESCRIPTION


A systematic study of Giotto and his patrons in their contemporary historical and cultural contexts.
This book investigates three critical phases of the artistic career of Giotto di Bondone, the preeminet artist of his age: the monumental signed Stigmatization of Saint Francis from San Franceso at Pisa, now in the Louvre; The Bardi Chapel cycle of the Life of St. Francis in Santa Croce at Florence; and the frescoes of the crossing vault above the tomb of Saint Francis in the Lower Church of San Francesco at Assisi. All three commissions were originally for churches of the Franciscan Order. The Stigmatization stood in the Cinquina family chapel in the left transept at Pisa. The Bardi cycle of the life of Francis was in another private transept chapel commissioned by one of Florence’s pre-eminent banking families. The crossing frescoes of the Lower Church stood over the tomb of the founder of the Franciscan Order. During the period of about twenty years within which these masterworks were conceived and executed the Franciscan Order was changing rapidly, both because of tensions among the friars themselves and a radically changing attitude of the papacy towards the Franciscan Order’s defining claim of apostolic poverty. All three commissions represent different kinds of patronage within a Franciscan church, implying differing relationships between the painter and his patrons.

Berenson Lectures at Villa I Tatti



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