The Peculiar State

A Vintage Shorts “Short Story Month” Original Selection Hamburg: home of a lapsed writer and his statistician girlfriend. He is part of the 41 percent of the German population that hasn’t read a single book in the last three months; she decides to make up a game. The rules of the game are these: the two of them travel to a European city, separately, and try to find each other. They make no calls, leave no messages. They wander through Madrid, Munich, Coimbra. When they meet, they return home. But what happens if they don’t? “The Peculiar State” is a haunting, mischievous new story from Patricio Pron, one of Granta’s Best Young Spanish-Language Novelists and the author of My Fathers’ Ghost Is Climbing in the Rain. A thought-provoking, city-hopping story from one of South America’s most important new writers. An eBook short.

Too often, Wallace Hettle points out, studies of politics in the nineteenth-century South reinforce a view of the Democratic Party that is frozen in time on the eve of Fort Sumter--a deceptively high point of white racial solidarity. Avoiding such a "Civil War synthesis," The Peculiar Democracy illuminates the link between the Jacksonian political culture that dominated antebellum debate and the notorious infighting of the Confederacy. Hettle shows that war was the greatest test of populist Democratic Party rhetoric that emphasized the shared interests of white men, slaveholder and nonslaveholder alike. The Peculiar Democracy analyzes antebellum politics in terms of the connections between slavery, manhood, and the legacies of Jefferson and Jackson. It then looks at the secession crisis through the anxieties felt by Democratic politicians who claimed concern for the interests of both slaveholders and nonslaveholders. At the heart of the book is a collective biography of five individuals whose stories highlight the limitations of democratic political culture in a society dominated by the "peculiar institution." Through narratives informed by recent scholarship on gender, honor, class, and the law, Hettle profiles South Carolina's Francis W. Pickens, Georgia's Joseph Brown, Alabama's Jeremiah Clemens, Virginia's John Rutherfoord, and Mississippi's Jefferson Davis. The Civil War stories presented in The Peculiar Democracy illuminate the political and sometimes personal tragedy of men torn between a political culture based on egalitarian rhetoric and the wartime imperatives to defend slavery.

Though the origins of asylums can be traced to Europe, the systematic segregation of the mentally ill into specialized institutions occurred in the United States only after 1800, just as the struggle to end slavery took hold. In this book, Wendy Gonaver examines the relationship between these two historical developments, showing how slavery and ideas about race shaped early mental health treatment in the United States, especially in the South. She reveals these connections through the histories of two asylums in Virginia: the Eastern Lunatic Asylum in Williamsburg, the first in the nation; and the Central Lunatic Asylum in Petersburg, the first created specifically for African Americans. Eastern Lunatic Asylum was the only institution to accept both slaves and free blacks as patients and to employ slaves as attendants. Drawing from these institutions' untapped archives, Gonaver reveals how slavery influenced ideas about patient liberty, about the proper relationship between caregiver and patient, about what constituted healthy religious belief and unhealthy fanaticism, and about gender. This early form of psychiatric care acted as a precursor to public health policy for generations, and Gonaver's book fills an important gap in the historiography of mental health and race in the nineteenth century.

Through innovative interdisciplinary methodologies and fresh avenues of inquiry, the nine essays collected in A Peculiar Mixture endeavor to transform how we understand the bewildering multiplicity and complexity that characterized the experience of German-speaking people in the middle colonies. They explore how the various cultural expressions of German speakers helped them bridge regional, religious, and denominational divides and eventually find a way to partake in America’s emerging national identity. Instead of thinking about early American culture and literature as evolving continuously as a singular entity, the contributions to this volume conceive of it as an ever-shifting and tangled “web of contact zones.” They present a society with a plurality of different native and colonial cultures interacting not only with one another but also with cultures and traditions from outside the colonies, in a “peculiar mixture” of Old World practices and New World influences. Aside from the editors, the contributors are Rosalind J. Beiler, Patrick M. Erben, Cynthia G. Falk, Marie Basile McDaniel, Philip Otterness, Liam Riordan, Matthias Schönhofer, and Marianne S. Wokeck.

Biblical utterance, in contrast to the sounds of power and certitude, offers imaginative probes into the mystery of God’s creation and into the hidden complexities of human hurt and human hope. Thus the dialect of the Bible is offered in relational terms, so that the key ingredients to lived reality characteristically concern justice and righteousness, steadfast love, faithfulness, and compassion. Insofar as the church relies upon and attests to this dialect, we may expect that in church we will speak in a different rhetoric, and consequently we will speak about different subject matter. To be sure, the church is sometimes seduced away from this relational dialect to speak in cadences that are elementally alien to the Bible and to the claims of the gospel. Such seduction of the church takes place, for example, when our nation is at war and the church is tempted to reflect and reiterate the force of that social reality. Or such seduction occurs when the church is captured by any ism, notably in our time, racism or nationalism. Or alternatively, ideological conservatism that craves the language of certitude or ideological liberalism that is easily bewitched by the rhetoric of psychology or the market. When the church is domesticated to such alien claims, it loses its distinctiveness, and consequently loses its nerve and its courage for serious mission. Thus attentiveness to our peculiar dialect is an important investment. —from the Preface

The five volumes furnish a collection of the Debates and Proceedings which took place in the different states, on the adoption of the Federal Constitution, as submitted by the General Convention, on the 17th of September, 1787. In the compilation, care has been taken to search into contemporary publications, in order to make the work as perfect as possible. Still, however, the sentiments they contain may, in some instances, have been inaccurately taken down, and, in others, probably, too faintly sketched, fully to gratify the inquisitive politician; but they nevertheless disclose the opinions of many of the most distinguished revolutionary patriots and statesmen, in relation to the powers intended to be granted to the Congress of the United States under the Constitution, and certainly may form an excellent guide in expounding many doubtful points in that instrument. In forming a History of the Constitution, the materials they furnish must be also considered of the greatest importance. The lights, too, which they throw on the character and the men of those extraordinary times, will always give them a sufficient interest, in the eyes of an intelligent community, to confer a peculiar value on their publication, rescued from the ephemeral prints of that day.

From Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, to Intercourse, Pennsylvania, and Bug Tussle, Alabama, this pop-culture history offers a well-written and highly entertaining survey of America's most unusual place-names and their often-humorous origins.