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"Legends Political aspects United States."
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Myths of the Rune Stone : Viking Martyrs and the Birthplace of America
\"What do our myths say about us? Why do we choose to believe stories that have been disproven? David M. Krueger takes an in-depth look at a legend that held tremendous power in one corner of Minnesota, helping to define both a community's and a state's identity for decades. In 1898, a Swedish immigrant farmer claimed to have discovered a large rock with writing carved into its surface in a field near Kensington, Minnesota. The writing told a North American origin story, predating Christopher Columbus's exploration, in which Viking missionaries reached what is now Minnesota in 1362 only to be massacred by Indians. The tale's credibility was quickly challenged and ultimately undermined by experts, but the myth took hold. Faith in the authenticity of the Kensington Rune Stone was a crucial part of the local Nordic identity. Accepted and proclaimed as truth, the story of the Rune Stone recast Native Americans as villains. The community used the account as the basis for civic celebrations for years, and advocates for the stone continue to promote its validity despite the overwhelming evidence that it was a hoax. Krueger puts this stubborn conviction in context and shows how confidence in the legitimacy of the stone has deep implications for a wide variety of Minnesotans who embraced it, including Scandinavian immigrants, Catholics, small-town boosters, and those who desired to commemorate the white settlers who died in the Dakota War of 1862. Krueger demonstrates how the resilient belief in the Rune Stone is a form of civil religion, with aspects that defy logic but illustrate how communities characterize themselves. He reveals something unique about America's preoccupation with divine right and its troubled way of coming to terms with the history of the continent's first residents. By considering who is included, who is left out, and how heroes and villains are created, Myths of the Rune Stone offers an enlightening perspective on not just Minnesota but the United States as well\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
The Traumatic Colonel
pIn American political fantasy, the Founding Fathers loom large, at once historical and mythical figures. In The Traumatic Colonel, Michael J. Drexler and Ed White examine the Founders as imaginative fictions, characters in the specifically literary sense, whose significance emerged from narrative elements clustered around them. From the revolutionary era through the 1790s, the Founders took shape as a significant cultural system for thinking about politics, race, and sexuality. Yet after 1800, amid the pressures of the Louisiana Purchase and the Haitian Revolution, this system could no longer accommodate the deep anxieties about the United States as a slave nation. Drexler and White assert that the most emblematic of the political tensions of the time is the figure of Aaron Burr, whose rise and fall were detailed in the literature of his time: his electoral tie with Thomas Jefferson in 1800, the accusations of seduction, the notorious duel with Alexander Hamilton, his machinations as the schemer of a breakaway empire, and his spectacular treason trial. The authors venture a psychoanalytically-informed exploration of post-revolutionary America to suggest that the figure of \"Burr\" was fundamentally a displaced fantasy for addressing the Haitian Revolution. Drexler and White expose how the historical and literary fictions of the nation's founding served to repress the larger issue of the slave system and uncover the Burr myth as the crux of that repression. Exploring early American novels, such as the works of Charles Brockden Brown and Tabitha Gilman Tenney, as well as the pamphlets, polemics, tracts, and biographies of the early republican period, the authors speculate that this flourishing of political writing illuminates the notorious gap in U.S. literary history between 1800 and 1820./p
eBook
Postapocalyptic fiction and the social contract
Postapocalyptic Fiction and the Social Contract: 'We'll Not Go Home Again' provides a framework for our fascination with the apocalyptic events. The popular appeal of the end of the world genre is clear in movies, novels, and television shows. Even our political debates over global warming, nuclear threats, and pandemic disease reflect a concern about the possibility of such events. This popular fascination is really a fascination with survival: how can we come out alive? And what would we do next? The end of the world is not about species death, but about beginning again. This book uses postapocalyptic fiction as a terrain for thinking about the state of nature: the hypothetical fiction that is the driving force behind the social contract. The first half of the book examines novels that tell the story of the move from the state of nature to civil society through a Hobbesian, a Lockean, or a Rousseauian lens, including Lucifer's Hammer by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank, Malevil by Robert Merle, and Into the Forest by Jean Hegland. The latter half of the book examines Octavia Butler's postapocalyptic Parable series in which a new kind of social contract emerges, one built on the fact of human dependence and vulnerability.
eBook
A Moroccan Kabbalist in the White House: Understanding the Relationship between Jared Kushner and Moroccan Jewish Mysticism
Few political pundits believed that Donald J Trump would defeat a political giant like Hillary R Clinton in the 2016 American elections. The mere image of Trump, a reality-television personality who found huge and unquestionable support among Christian evangelicals, in the White House excited derision in many liberal and conservative circles during the early days of the Republican nomination process. Here, Boum reflects on the reasons that have driven Jared Kushner, the president's Orthodox Jewish son-in-law, a Modern Orthodox American Jew, to seek a blessing at the Ohel without being an openly declared follower follower of the Lubavitch movement and its mystical version of Judaism and a believer that miracles happen through prayers mediated through a rebbe. He also discuss the larger religious context that makes it possible for a modern Jewish New Yorker like Kushner to believe in modern Jewish Orthodox theology and at the same time support Jewish mystics such as David Pinto, a descendant of Rabbi Haim Pinto of Essaouira, Morocco, in return for their blessings.
Journal Article
A Postcolonial Woman's Encounter with Moses and Miriam
This book is grounded in a theorization of the author's personal story including growing up as a female adoptee of a single parent in a patriarchal context, and current material context as an immigrant in New Zealand.
eBook
THE LAST WORD WITH LAWRENCE O'DONNELL for February 08, 2023, MSNBC
Donald Trump's presidential candidacy appears to be sinking. A new poll by the University of New Hampshire shows Florida Governor Ron DeSantis running 12 points ahead of Donald Trump with 42 percent, Donald Trump running at only 30 percent. GUESTS: Jamelle Bouie, Stewart Stevens, Saria Gwin-Maye, Gerry Connolly, Maxwell Frost, David Bouie
Transcript
Haunted Memories: Disruptive Ghosts in the Poems of Brenda Marie Osbey and Joy Harjo
In her poem, Harjo spies the ghost of Hernando de Soto dancing on modern day Bourbon Street, where his appearance signals, as Osbey's ghosts do, the poet's confrontation with a troubling legacy that forgets the \"ancestors and future children / buried beneath the currents.\" [...]New Orleans becomes a lieu de mémoire, a dense site made sacred to specific communities held together in currents of memory that resist the grip of history.
Journal Article
