Past Imperfect (Journal)
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The Spiritual Roots of Emersonian Subjectivity and the Phenomenology of Self-Reliance
No full textEmersonian self-reliance is a foundational concept for ideas about individuality in U.S. culture. However, academic commentators who overlook the significance of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s religiousness have largely misinterpreted this concept. Through a close reading of Emerson’s sermons, lectures, and essays, I argue that Emersonian self-reliance was a spiritual reaction to an emerging capitalist culture during the Jacksonian market revolution and an anticipation of psychological and existential critiques of the socially constructed ego—an ego that finds support in the phenomenology of freedom that accompanies capitalistic choice and consumption. I show how for Emerson, individuality and autonomy require the recognition of the spiritual unity of people. I explain how self-reliance functions in Emerson’s thought as an existential description of self-becoming over the course of a lifetime, as well as functioning in a phenomenological way that describes the glance of the eyes and good conversations
Du Mez, Kristin. Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation. New York: Liveright Publishing, 2020.
No full textCorey Ross, Ecology and Power in the Age of Empire: Europe and the Transformation of the Tropical World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.
No full textFemale Hooligan Youth and the Regulation of Socialist Morality in 1960s Rural Beijing
No full textThis article explores the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) efforts to regulate socialist morality and reform those seen as violating it during the Cultural Revolution through a case study of Gong Moumou, a female youth hooligan in rural Beijing between 1966 and 1968. The CCP mobilized local agents and institutions to regulate and reform female hooligans’ sexual desires, thoughts, and activities to exert social, political, and moral control over female youth. Since 1949, Mao and the CCP had promoted social reform to reshape the thoughts of the masses, including people’s ethics and morality. At the local level, the state pursued the rural peasantry’s reform and re-education via political classes centred on Mao Zedong Thought (Maoism). Although the CCP in the 1950s embraced hooligans as a part of the lumpenproletariat, by the time of the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s, hooligans became a target of government reform. In rural Haidian, local government agents attempted to regulate and reform Gong Moumou’s hooliganism (liumang xingwei) according to the CCP’s standards of socialist morality as articulated through the ideal image of the socialist woman. Documents related to Gong’s investigation and reform, including her written confessions and the report of another individual, highlight the state’s methods during the Cultural Revolution to regulate socialist morality, reform rural young women according to the standard of the ideal socialist woman, and label female sexuality as evidence of dangerous bourgeois thinking
Király, Kinga Julia. Recipes for a New Beginning: Transylvanian Jewish Stories of Life, Hunger, and Hope. Translated by Rachel Hideg. Frankfurt am Main, Germany: CEEOL Press, 2020.
No full textThe Dichotomy of Intimate Garments: Women’s Stays and Pockets in Georgian Britain
No full textIn John Collet’s 1777 print, Tight Lacing, or Fashion Before Ease a woman is depicted holding onto a bed poster as her maid and husband strain to tighten the lacing on her stays. Meanwhile, a large tie-on pocket can be seen hanging from the woman’s waist. Although they were worn closely together on the female body stays and pockets have been studied independently from each other. This is understandable, as at first glance, they appear incomparable. Stays were the precursor to nineteenth century corsets and they moulded the body into the desired and fashionable shape. Pockets on the other hand were utilitarian bags meant for carrying necessary items; separate from women’s clothing they were tied around the waist with string and were hidden under the skirts. Despite the initial differences, these garments did not function independently from each other. Using caricatures, etiquette books, and physical examples found in museum collections, this study demonstrates that when examined in tandem it becomes apparent that stays and pockets served distinct, yet overlapping functions in women’s lives. They informed women’s relationships with their surrounding environments, strengthened women’s connection to the domestic realm, yet also gave women freedom to move outside the home and participate within the public sphere. Furthermore, both items also acted as private spaces, which allowed women to actively partake in romantic courtship and sexual flirtations in a gender appropriate way. By juxtaposing stays and pockets this study contributes to the growing historical discussion surrounding these items, but also begins to piece together a larger picture of the role undergarments, as a whole, played in women’s lives
The Hungarian-Jewish Social Contract, its Rupture, and Jewish Death Rituals
No full textThis article explores the supposedly reciprocal social contract between “Greater Hungary” and its Jewish population from the “Golden Age” of the Dual Monarchy to its rupture in the Holocaust. The afterlife of this broken contract will be addressed through the upkeep and neglect of cemeteries in Subcarpathia and Hungary proper. Along the way, I present memoiristic vignettes that illustrate the challenge of loyalty to state / military authority and death rituals in the time of the 1918-1919 Hungarian-Romanian War, Jewish mourning in the context of Czechoslovakia’s loss of Subcarpathia, and the disjuncture between the normal praxis of death ritual and the spectre of Auschwitz-Birkenau, as well as the ritual contrast to Hungarian Jews who were deported, but not to Auschwitz. I also turn to the historical research of Tim Cole and Daniel Rosenthal, in conjunction with Hungarian (especially North-Transylvanian) Holocaust memoirs, to reflect on Holocaust-era suicide as a mode of victims’ resistance to their brutalization by Hungarian gendarmes -- the pinnacle of the betrayal of the erstwhile contract between Hungarian state authority and its Jewish population. 
The Age of Questions: Or, a First Attempt at an Aggregate History of the Eastern, Social, Woman, American, Jewish, Polish, Bullion, Tuberculosis, and Many Other Questions Over the Nineteenth Century, and Beyond, by Holly Case, 2018.
No full textHolly Case’s most adventurous work as of yet seeks to juxtapose patterns common to nineteenth century publicists’ questions in order to reveal the contradictions of the age. Case devotes each chapter to a particular theme or ideological quality of the querists, which are in dispute with one another, and yet feature common idioms of progress and geopolitical reconfiguration. Internal to each chapter are the oxymoronic imbrications between conceptual polarities such as nationalism and the international public sphere, war through peace, gravitas with farce, and more. Case explains the prevalence of high-stakes public policy, prospects of war and the convulsive realignment of empires and nations through the persistent bundling of many of these questions. She addresses the ebb and flow of popularity of many era-spanning questions, which strengthens her attempt to provide a genealogy for the crises and ‘questions’ of our current era, and her accounting for how queristic contradictions were perceived to be transcended. It is reasonable to suggest that Case has provided a foundational step for an emergent niche of epistemological inquiry in the historical discipline, not unlike Benedict Anderson’s contribution to the study of nationalism through his magnum opus Imagined Communities. 
ἄριστον μέν ὕδωρ: An Examination of the Public Waterworks in Athens in the Early 5thC BCE
No full textThis article examines the design and social impact of waterways in Athens in the early 5thC BCE. While the Athenian political landscape transitioned from a series of tyrannies to democracy at the end of the Archaic period (ca. 650-480 BCE), the archaeological record also shows widespread innovation in the development of public water systems, particularly in sanitation and water supply. A movement away from buildings constructed by the Athenian tyrants facilitated the development of the Classical Agora and the creation of new public-use spaces and structures, like the Southeast Fountain House and the Great Drain in the Agora. The fountain has long been identified with the famous Peisistratid Enneakrounos (“Nine Spouts”) fountain, but through investigation into the arguments of J.M. Camp and Jessica Paga, I propose that a later date ca. 500 BCE is more suitable for the historical and archaeological context of the fountain.
I investigate several Athenian waterworks built/maintained during the late Archaic period to the Classical period (~500-323 BCE): the Great Drain in the Agora, the Southeast Fountain House, the Klepsydra fountain, and the Asklepieion on the Akropolis. The works of Hippocrates, Thucydides, and—to a lesser extent—Pausanias, inform my examination of the implications of the construction of these waterworks and the development of democracy in the 5th century. These waterways show a dedicated shift from the private use of water and tyrannical building works, to a new, fully public and communal mode of engagement with the city and its resources
Love and Death in Latin Elegy
No full textLove and death is a common and shared human experience that many poets of the ancient world explored in their various poetic works. The elegists of Rome famously wrote love poems in which each pined for a specific mistress or lover, and in some of these poems, love and death were simultaneously prominent themes.
In this article I examine the relationship between the concepts of love and death in Propertius 4.7, Tibullus 1.3 and Ovid’s Amores 3.9. From this study it is evident that each poet, through means of their own style, depicted the ideal that love had the ability to overcome death. To support my analysis of these texts and the issues surrounding them, I refer to Papanghelis, Hinds and Maltby. While these authors consider many aspects of Proptertius’, Tibullus’ and Ovid’s works, the relationship and connection present between love and death has not been significantly considered. In order to establish each poet’s personal style I begin with a brief overview of elegiac poetry; then, an examination of each poem’s tone, word usage and thematic distinctions. I will begin the discussion with Propertius’ poems; Tibullus’ and Ovid’s poems will then be considered, first separately, and then as a pair. The concepts of love, death and those affected by the death in the poem will be analyzed. In addition, I will consider how love and death interact with each other in the poems. To further supplement the discussion, I will analyze how these three poets’ write in the same genre and about the same topics, but in different contexts and styles. This analysis leads to an understanding that each poet expressed their unique style in their poems, while maintaining a similar theme and genre, that love has the ability to overcome the unavoidable and inevitable force of death