History

Kansas is legendary for geographical monotony, for a landscape allegedly so absent of trees and relief that the state has become the butt of national jokes and a cultural synonym for flat. Kansas is not really flat; tilted might be a better description, for the state rises some 3,300 feet in elevation along the 400-mile stretch between Kansas City and Kanorado.

This article uncovers significant economic links between antebellum Virginia and southeastern Brazil. Consumer demand in Rio de Janeiro for high-quality Richmond flour led to the collapse of small-time gristmilling throughout the state, as the largest, most technologically-advanced flour mills in the nation arose along the banks of the James River in the future capital of the Confederacy.  Rural deindustrialization dovetailed with new, elite-driven concerns over the malarial effects of standing water, as well as a desire to expand wheat acreage, spurring the drainage of thousands of acres of abandoned millponds.  Thus, the continuing entanglements of a slavery-centered Atlantic economy transformed the rural landscape of piedmont Virginia in the twenty years before the Civil War.

Aside from the few envoys dispatched to the Jin court in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, Southern Song subjects seldom experienced the occupied north after the Jurchen conquest of 1127. Passing through the former Northern Song capital of Kaifeng, ambassadors found a neglected, depopulated, and impoverished city, and described its destroyed and reconstructed urban spaces as
metaphors for the Jurchen occupation of the homeland. Their private travel records transposed their experiences of Jin Kaifeng into a pre-existing textual framework of Northern Song geographical knowledge. These authors shared a collective diasporic memory of Kaifeng’s lost spaces, recognizing its rebuilt cityscape and ruined sites from pre-conquest accounts rather than from direct experience. In their accounts, Kaifeng’s urban spaces became legible not only for their survival under Jurchen rule, but for how far they deviated from textual representations of the
pre-conquest past, evoking homelessness and nostalgia for a lost time and place.

After the fall of the Northern Song 北宋 (960–1127) capital of Kaifeng 開封 to Jurchen invaders in 1127, diasporic literati of the Southern Song dynasty 南宋 (1127–1279) recreated and revisited its lost sites through textual commemoration, especially in memorabilia literature (biji 筆記, lit. ‘brush notes’). As knowledge of the city passed from communicative memory into cultural memory, its decline and destruction became the focus of nostalgia and indignation for Yue Ke 岳珂 (1183–1234), the author of the Pillar Histories (Ting shi 桯史), a collection of counter-narratives of Northern Song history that expressed the shared experience of social trauma induced by dynastic collapse. Disconnected from their spatial context and even from historical fact, the city’s memory sites became stages for amoralistic declension narrative, in which the city’s destruction and occupation was assumed to have been instigated by the decadence of the imperial court of the passive Emperor Huizong 徽宗 (r. 1100–26) and his ‘nefarious ministers’. The most colourful elements of Yue’s ludic and fantastical narratives became the focus of his indignation, which encouraged his readers to denounce the traitors who had betrayed theempire by inviting the Jurchen invasion. In the Pillar Histories, Yue deployed textual imaginaries of nostalgia as forms of resistance by re-contesting the past events that led to dynastic collapse. By reconstructing the city in the cultural memory of his fellow diasporic literati, Yue was creating a vision of an ideal political, cultural and moral community that once existed at the dynasty’s inception, and might be reconstituted in the future, if and when Song subjects recaptured their lost homeland.

Kaifeng, the capital of the Northern Song (960-1127) dynasty,
boasted sophisticated siege defence installations, which were ultimately breached by the Jurchen invasion of 1126-1127. According to both the archaeological and textual evidence, its concentric city walls and militarized gates with barbicans and bastions represented a crucial stage in the militarization of urban form in early-modern China, as well as a more open approach to planning. While Kaifeng’s urban defences evoked imperial majesty and personal security for Northern Song residents who described them, diasporic literati of the Southern Song (1127-1279) invoked the violation of this defensive perimeter as a metonym for the invasion of their lost homeland. The concept of security theatre explains how Northern Song Kaifeng’s city walls and gates could simultaneously function as efficacious siege defence installations and be perceived as symbolic defences.

The Northern Song Empire (960–1127) was the most spatially integrated and bureaucratically centralized polity in the late medieval world, and its rulers articulated ideological claims to unitary and universal sovereignty. Both its monarchs and ministers shared a discourse of authority that postulated the throne as the only legitimate source of authority, which was not openly challenged by organized blocs of aristocratic, religious, or urban elites. Yet, the Northern Song Empire was much less autocratic in practice than in theory, since monarchs chose to delegate the making of state policy and the civil and military administration of the empire to a hierarchy of central, regional, and local officials, so that intra-bureaucratic dynamics limited arbitrary monarchical action. Using a micro-level case study of the abolition of the Green Sprouts rural credit policy (qingmiao fa 青苗法)