Post Civil War Period

„Aber es hilft nicht, Heintz, ... du verstockter, gottloser, vermaledeiter, verfluchter Ehrenschänder, böstätiger Barrabas, auch hurensüchtiger Holofernes zu Braunschweig ... du schreist vergeblich, und wenn du wettern und donnern könntest, wie Gott selbst, dieses unzählige, unschuldige Blut zu Einbeck und anderswo durch deinen Mordbrand vergossen, schreit gen Himmel so stark, daß es dich samt deinen Gesellen gar bald (so Gott will) in den Abgrund der Hölle schreien soll (...). Denn darum sind die gefangenen Mordbrenner geschmeucht mit Feuer, weil sie solche Bösewichter und Schälcke gewesen sind, die ihrem Anführer und Erzmordbrenner gedient haben. Und der Henker, der sie gerichtet hat, hat damit vorgezeichnet, was du verdient hättest, wenn man dich richten sollte.“

Martin Luther 1541 über den katholischen Herzog Heinrich den Jüngeren von Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel, den militärischen Führer des Nürnberger Bundes und radikalsten Gegner der Protestanten in Norddeutschland.

Wüste, grobianische Beschimpfungen aus dem Mund eines gelehrten Theologen und Reformators. Es bleibt zu fragen, was genau Luther dazu bewogen hat.

On October 3, 1865 a special representative of the Bey of Tunis arrived at the port of New York by the steamship RMS Persia. This was the second time in the history of Tunisian–U.S. relations since 1805–1806 that a Tunisian diplomat and his suite visited the United States. The Tunisian embassy,  led by General Otman Hashem consisted four member. The Bey sent his envoys with a portrait of him and an official letter to congratulate President Andrew Johnson on the termination of the Civil War. Hashem also brought another letter for Mary Todd Lincoln in which the Bey expressed his condolences over the death of her husband. The representative visited several cities of the East Coast from October 3 to November 22. The American press reported extensively and on the daily basis that the Tunisians met several local and federal leaders, military and naval officers, and ordinary citizens during this time period.

Henry James' The Bostonians is one of those literary works whose nature tends towards ambiguity and resistance to reductionist interpretations. Today, the gender studies' perspective allows us to surpass such interpretations and to access the text's core-what holds it together-so as to explain its mainopacities. Thus, the first part of this article is dedicated to the analysis of the story's main character, Verena, as a figure void of the extraordinary and trapped in an unending number of ideological discourses which, in turn, shape her as a constructed identity. Consequently, Verena's self is left silenced; paradoxically, her voice, her gift, is exclusively used to communicate the wishes projected by other characters. The second part of the article, which moves from the private to the public sphere, is an attempt to allegorically interpret Verena and the dynamics of desire which surround her. This second level of analysis will facilitate a reading of the text as less ambiguous, offering an interpretative key based on the notion of character as the spokesperson of a given ideology or set of values.

Scholars have discussed the meaning behind the popularity of German music in the US in the latter half of the nineteenth century for some time. From Michael Broyles’s Beethoven in America to Molly Barnes’s “The rhetoric of democracy in American musical discourse, 1842-1861,” the seeming takeover of American concert halls by German music and musicians has occupied scholars from diverse perspectives. My interest is in why southern amateur women abruptly took on a new repertory in the years immediately following the Civil War—why the piano music of Beethoven and Chopin became integral parts of a repertory that had neglected it for so long. Methodologically, I offer an alternative by not concentrating on the concert hall and the men who dictated the music performed there. Instead, I come at this question from the standpoint of the average musically literate people in the South: amateur women and those who taught or led them. This approach has the advantage of gauging Beethoven’s meaning across a much broader geographic area than most writers have considered and enriches earlier research with its emphasis on gender and musicking in private or semi-public spaces.

Three essential elements of modernism consolidated through war: a centralised welfare state, a serial industrial apparatus and, often, a territorial tabula rasa. Hence, for many modernist architects and urban planners, post-war Europe became the ideal ground to put their ideas to the test. However, there is a genuine discrepancy between the proposals of the first four Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) and what was massively implemented throughout Europe after 1945. To explore this divergence, Brussels proves to be an interesting case study for two main reasons. First, it hosted the third CIAM in November 1930, where Victor Bourgeois presented his views on housing and cities, in line with the ideals of the time. Second, after the war, Belgium, like many Western countries, experienced a period of euphoria, during which the modernist ideology attained a sudden and broad consensus. In the capital over the following three decades new infrastructure was built, as well a...