Clements Department of History

Between 1861-1865 the United States experienced immense social, political, and economic upheaval. The divided U.S. populace, unfamiliar with violent and turbulent aspects inherent of a civil war, used Mexico and, specifically, the term “Mexicanization” to describe their internal discord. Although the term was heavily politicized, “Mexicanization” carried racialized overtones—overtones that negatively and incorrectly portrayed Mexicans to the U.S. populace.

“The ‘Mexicanization’ of the United States: Mexico in U.S. Public Discourse, 1862-1880” examines U.S. perceptions of Mexico in the latter half of the nineteenth century, specifically arguing that the use of the racial pejorative “Mexicanization” exacerbated the American populace’s negative view of Mexicans. Moreover, the use of the term illustrates the United States’ continued denigration of Mexicans in the years following the U.S. Civil War until the early twentieth century—an era in which the idea of Mexico is largely absent from the U.S. national narrative. Indeed, U.S. Border States and/or border territories had significant Mexican populations, and U.S. businesses invested heavily in Mexican industry. Yet the idea of Mexico, and its influence within the United States, is largely overlooked in lieu of U.S. internal matters, such as industrialization, Eastern European immigration, and the Progressive Era. Thus, “The ‘Mexicanization’ of the United States” analyzes “Mexicanization” rhetoric throughout the U.S. in latter half of the nineteenth century.

Akademik/yarı akademik çalışmaların büyük kısmı Şeyh Ubeydullah İsyanı'nı "Büyük bir feodal isyan", "On dokuzuncu yüzyılın son ve tahminen en önemli Kürt İsyanı" olarak resmeder. Kürt tarihçiliğinin önemli isimlerinden Martin Van Bruinessen'e göre şeyh net bir milliyetçi programla yola çıkar. Benzer şekilde Wadie Jwadieh'i esas alan Kürt tarihçiler Kürt milliyetçiliğinin başlangıcına bu isyanı koyar.

The American political economist Henry Charles Carey is generally thought of as a spokesman for industrialization due to his strident protectionism. In fact, his most original contributions came in his discussions of agriculture, the environment, and their relation to technological progress. Carey developed his ideas by drawing on the contemporary discourse of “scientific agriculture,” which enjoyed great influence, thanks to a widespread agricultural reform movement. This allowed him to argue effectively against Malthusian population doctrine and Ricardian rent theory by stressing the almost limitless potential of technological innovation, not only in manufactures but also in agriculture. Analogous views were also expressed by George Perkins Marsh, known today as the “father of conservationism,” indicating a broader contemporary engagement with questions of economic development and humanity’s relationship to nature, an engagement in some ways strikingly parallel to present-day concerns.

This course asks students to consider the origins and sustaining conditions of nation-states. It focuses on the emergence and early history of nation-states and nationalist consciousness rather than on the more recent twentieth- and twenty-first-century manifestations of nationalism. It also considers nationalism largely in structural rather than ideological terms, that is, as a function of durable patterns in politics, culture and the economy.

Questions addressed include: How did the nation-state come to predominate over other political forms such as empires and city-states? What causes us to identify with a particular nation? Is national identity a prerequisite for a modern sensibility or vice versa? Is a nation endowed with moral or spiritual significance? What is the relationship between nationalism and ethnicity and culture? How important are state institutions to the development of national identities? Where and how do markets and the economy fit into national political structures? And finally, what are the limits to nation-centric conceptions of culture, politics, and history?

Readings include both theoretical works and historical monographs. The course begins with major theoretical studies of the rise of nations and nationalist consciousness. It then moves into a series of case studies that examine specific countries and contexts. The final few weeks are devoted to readings in the early history of the United States. These are designed to test the arguments of previous readings against the American experience, which lacks the ethnic homogeneity and linguistic uniqueness often thought to constitute national distinctions. Is the United States a nation-state and, if so, when did it become one?

Drew Faust once identified “the problem of Confederate nationalism” was its failure. This paper explores the possibility that the problem of northern nationalism was its success. Union victory ratified northerners’ conflation of sectional and American identity in a way that seemed to render the problem unproblematic. Highlighting the segmented and uneven terrain of antebellum print and related aspects of federal governance, this paper argues that we should begin by stepping back from the question of sectional ideologies to consider the underpinnings of a national social imaginary and only then consider how one set of regional social experiences could come to appear normative.