Congratulations to former CLAW Director David Gleeson, who just announced that his new book,The Green and the Gray: The Irish in the Confederate States of America, has been published by the University of North Carolina Press. Dr. Gleeson is a reader in American History at Northumbria University in the Newcastle upon Tyne, England. For more information about the book, click here.
Category Archives: Publication Announcement
Mark Auslander’s New Article: “Touching the Past”
Check out Mark Auslander‘s new article “Touching the Past: Materializing Time in Traumatic “Living History” Reenactments” in the open access journal Signs and Society.
Auslander’s article includes a discussion of the reenacted slave auction in the March 22, 1865 Charleston emancipation procession.
Abstract:
Many living history reenactors speak of “touching the past” in their performances. In nearly all instances, these profound experiences of intimate traffic with previous epochs and persons are brought about not through physical contact with historical artifacts but through deployments of replicas and props, including recently produced adornment, weaponry, vehicles, and tools. This essay explores the roles and functions of material reproductions or substitutes of historic artifacts in reenactment performances, and how these object-oriented practices often bring about powerful sensations of historic authenticity on the part of reenactors and their audiences. Auslander gives particular attention to the use of physical objects by those who seek to reenact traumatic events and experiences related to American histories of racial injustice, including experiences of slavery and Jim Crow racial violence.
CLAW publishes its Eighteenth Volume with USC Press
Ambiguous Anniversary: The Bicentennial of the International Slave Trade Bans
Edited by David T. Gleeson and Simon Lewis
An examination of the 1808 international slave trade ban and its impact on the American South and
Atlantic World
In March 1807, within a few weeks of each other, both the United States and the United Kingdom passed laws banning the international slave trade. Two hundred years later, Great Britain, an instigator of the slave trade and the chief source of slaves sold into continental North America, was awash nationwide in commemorations of the ban. By contrast the bicentennial
of the ban received almost no attention in the United States. Ambiguous Anniversary aims to remedy that omission and to explain the discrepancy between the two commemorative responses. Edited by David T. Gleeson and Simon Lewis, this volume examines the impact that closing the international slave trade in 1808 had on Southern American economics, politics,
and society.
Recasting the history of slavery in the early Republic and the memory of slavery and abolition in
American culture, the foreword, introduction, and ten essays in this volume present a complex picture of an important but partial step in America’s long struggle toward the ambitious but ambiguous goal of liberty and justice for all.
A native of Ireland, David T. Gleeson is a reader in history in the School of Arts and Social Sciences at Northumbria University in Newcastle upon Tyne and a former director of the College of Charleston’s Carolina Lowcountry and Atlantic World program. He is the editor of The Irish in the Atlantic World.
Simon Lewis is a professor of world literature at the College of Charleston, where he is also an associate director of the Carolina Lowcountry and Atlantic World program. Lewis is the author ofWhite Women Writers and Their African Invention and British and African Literature in Transnational Context.
New Publication: The Irish in the Atlantic World
Reply
The Irish in the Atlantic World: A New Vision of the Irish Diaspora within the Atlantic Context from the Eighteenth Century to the Present
Edited by David T. Gleeson
The Irish in the Atlantic World is the 17th publication in the CLAW series with the University of South Carolina Press. It presents a transnational and comparative view of the Irish historical and cultural experiences as phenomena transcending traditional chronological, topical, and ethnic paradigms. Edited by David T. Gleeson, this collection of essays offers a robust new vision of the global nature of the Irish diaspora within the Atlantic context from the eighteenth century to the present and makes original inroads for new research in Irish studies.
These essays from an international cast of scholars vary in their subject matter from investigations into links between Irish popular music and the United States—including the popularity of American blues music in Belfast during the 1960s and the influences of Celtic balladry on contemporary singer Van Morrison—to a discussion of the migration of Protestant Orangemen to America and the transplanting of their distinctive non-Catholic organizations. Other chapters explore the influence of American politics on the formation of the Irish Free State in 1922, manifestations of nineteenth-century temperance and abolition movements in Irish communities, links between slavery and Irish nationalism in the formation of Irish identity in the American South, the impact of yellow fever on Irish and black labor competition on Charleston’s waterfront, the fate of the Irish community at Saint Croix in the Danish West Indies, and other topics. These multidisciplinary essays offer fruitful explanations of how ideas and experiences from around the Atlantic influenced the politics, economics, and culture of Ireland, the Irish people, and the societies where Irish people settled. Taken collectively, these pieces map the web of connectivity between Irish communities at home and abroad as sites of ongoing negotiation in the development of a transatlantic Irish identity.
A native of Ireland, David T. Gleeson is a reader in history in the School of Arts and Social Sciences at Northumbria University in Newcastle upon Tyne. He is a former director of the College of Charleston’s Carolina Lowcountry and Atlantic World program. His first book, The Irish in the South, 1815–1877, won the Donald Murphy Prize of the American Conference for Irish Studies.