So Conceived and So Dedicated

So Conceived and So Dedicated

Intellectual Life in the Civil War–Era North

  • Author: Foote, Lorien; Wongsrichanalai, Kanisorn
  • Publisher: Fordham University Press
  • Serie: The North's Civil War
  • ISBN: 9780823264476
  • eISBN Pdf: 9780823264506
  • eISBN Epub: 9780823264490
  • Place of publication:  New York , United States
  • Year of publication: 2015
  • Year of digital publication: 2015
  • Month: April
  • Language: English

Highlighting recent and new directions in contemporary research in the field, So Conceived and So Dedicated offers a complete and updated picture of intellectual life in the Civil War–era Union. Compiling essays from both established and young historians, this volume addresses the role intellectuals played in framing the conflict and implementing their vision of a victorious Union.

Broadly defining “intellectuals” to encompass doctors, lawyers, sketch artists, college professors, health reformers, and religious leaders, the essays address how these thinkers disseminated their ideas, sometimes using commercial or popular venues and organizations to implement what they believed.

Offering a vast range of perspectives on how northerners thought about,experienced, and responded to the Civil War, So Conceived and So Dedicated is organized around three questions: To what extent did educated Americans believe that the Civil War exposed the failure of old ideas? Did the Civil War promote new strains of authoritarianism in northern intellectual life or did the war reinforce democratic individualism? How did the Civil War affect northerners’ conception of nationalism and their understanding of their relationship to the state?

Essays explore myriad topics, including: how antebellum ideas about the environment and the body influenced conceptions of democratic health; how leaders of the Irish American community reconciled their support of the United States and the Republican Party with their allegiances to Ireland and their fellow Irish immigrants; how intellectual leaders of the northern African American community explained secession, civil war, and emancipation; the influence of southern ideals on northern intellectuals; wartime and postwar views from college and university campuses; the ideological acrobatics that professors at midwestern universities had to perform in order to keep their students from leaving the classroom; and how northern sketch artists helped influence the changing perceptions of African American soldiers over the course of the war.

Collectively, So Conceived and So Dedicated offers relevant and fruitful answers to the nation’s intellectual history and suggests that antebellum modes of thinking remained vital and tenacious well after the Civil War.

  • Cover
  • Contents
  • Foreword
  • Acknowledgments
  • Historians and Intellectual Life in the Civil War Era
  • U.S. Sanitary Commission Physicians and the Transformation of American Health Care
  • Civil War Cybernetics: Medicine, Modernity, and the Intellectual Mechanics of Union
  • To Save the Afflicted Union: Race, Civic Health, and the Sanitary Front
  • John Codman Ropes: A Lawyer’s Historian
  • Save a School to Save a Nation: Faculty Responses to the Civil War at Midwestern Universities
  • Lessons of War: Three Civil War Veterans and the Goals of Postwar Education
  • “The Rebels’ Last Device”: Theodore R. Davis and Faithful Representations of Black Soldiers during the Civil War
  • For Their Adopted Home: Native Northerners in the South during the Secession Crisis
  • Thomas F. Meagher, Patrick R. Guiney, and the Meaning of the Civil War for Irish America: The Questions of Nationalism, Citizenship, and Human Rights
  • “This Most Unholy and Destructive War”: Catholic Intellectuals and the Limits of Catholic Patriotism
  • Notes
  • List of Contributors
  • Index
    • A
    • B
    • C
    • D
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    • F
    • G
    • H
    • I
    • J
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    • M
    • N
    • O
    • P
    • Q
    • R
    • S
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