English Ethnicity and Culture in North America
158 pages
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158 pages
English

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Description

Ten scholars examine English identity, what makes it distinct, and its role in shaping American culture

To many, English immigrants contributed nothing substantial to the varied palette of ethnicity in North America. While there is wide recognition of German American, French American, African American, and Native American cultures, discussion of English Americans as a distinct ethnic group is rare. Yet the historians writing in English Ethnicity and Culture in North America show that the English were clearly immigrants too in a strange land, adding their own hues to the American and Canadian characters.

In this collection, editor David T. Gleeson and other contributors explore some of the continued links between England, its people, and its culture with North America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These essays challenge the established view of the English having no "ethnicity," highlighting the vibrancy of the English and their culture in North America. The selections also challenge the prevailing notion of the English as "invisible immigrants." Recognizing the English as a distinct ethnic group, similar to the Irish, Scots, and Germans, also has implications for understanding American identity by providing a clearer picture of how Americans often have defined themselves in the context of Old World cultural traditions.

Several contributors to English Ethnicity and Culture in North America track the English in North America from Episcopal pulpits to cricket fields and dance floors. For example Donald M. MacRaild and Tanja Bueltmann explore the role of St. George societies before and after the American Revolution in asserting a separate English identity across class boundaries. In addition Kathryn Lamontagne looks at English ethnicity in the working-class culture and labor union activities of workers in Fall River, Massachusetts. Ultimately all the work included here challenges the idea of a coherent, comfortable Anglo-cultural mainstream and indicates the fluid and adaptable nature of what it meant and means to be English in North America.


Contributors:

Dean Allen
Tanja Bueltmann
David T. Gleeson
Joseph Hardwick
Kathryn G. Lamontagne
Donald M. MacRaild
James McConnel
Monika Smialkowska
Mike Sutton
William Van Vugt

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Publié par
Date de parution 03 octobre 2017
Nombre de lectures 2
EAN13 9781611177879
Langue English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,2650€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

English Ethnicity Culture in North America
English Ethnicity Culture in North America
Edited by DAVID T. GLEESON

The University of South Carolina Press
2017 University of South Carolina
Published by the University of South Carolina Press
Columbia, South Carolina 29208
www.sc.edu/uscpress
25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/
ISBN 978-1-61117-786-2 (cloth)
ISBN 978-1-61117-787-9 (ebook)
FRONT COVER PHOTOGRAPHS : Washington cricket club, July 4, 1913, and May pole dance on the Ellipse, May 1, 1925, courtesy of the Library of Congress
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction: England in America
Relocating the English Diaspora in America
William Van Vugt
Ethnic Conflict and English Associational Culture in America: The Benevolent Order of the Society of St. George, 1870-1920
Donald M. MacRaild
Mutual, Ethnic, and Diasporic: The Sons of England in Canada, c. 1880 to 1910
Tanja Bueltmann
Lancashire in America : The Culture of English Textile Mill Operatives in Fall River, Massachusetts, 1875-1904
Kathryn G. Lamontagne
The Church of England and English Clergymen in the United States, 1783-1861
Joseph Hardwick
England and the Antebellum South
David T. Gleeson
Time and circumstance work great changes in public sentiment : Royal Statues and Monuments in the United States of America, 1770-2010
James McConnel
The Game of the English : Cricket and the Spread of English Culture in North America, 1830-1900
Dean Allen
Reviving English Folk Customs in America in the Early Twentieth Century
Monika Smialkowska
The Morris Diaspora: Transplanting an Old English Tradition or Inventing a New American One?
Mike Sutton
Contributors
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First, thanks must go to my fellow collaborators Don MacRaild of Ulster University and Tanja Bueltmann of Northumbria University. They have been great colleagues and friends throughout our larger project, of which this collection is a part. The project is Locating the Hidden Diaspora: The English in North America in Transatlantic Perspective, 1760-1950, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) of the United Kingdom (project grant AH/1001042/1), and it facilitated a lot of the research in this book. I am grateful to the AHRC for this support.
All of the authors included in this work have been a pleasure to work with, and I thank them for their promptness in responding to edits and deadlines. I am also grateful for the support of the staff members at USC Press who have guided this project to publication, especially Alex Moore, Lynne Parker, and Linda Fogle. Some elements of this book were presented in an exhibition to the public at the College of Charleston in the summer of 2013. Dean of Libraries John White and the archivist Anne Bennett were vital in putting that together. So too were my colleagues MacRaild and Bueltmann as well as Monika Smialkowska and Lesley Robinson from Northumbria University and Sally-Ann Huxtable from the National Museum of Scotland. Thanks also to Mary Battle of the Avery Research Center for her logistical support. While guiding this project I have also had lots of encouragement from my colleagues at Northumbria, especially Mike Cullinane, Brian Ward, and Sylvia Ellis.
My wife, Amy, and my daughter, Emma, are now used to me working at strange times on various research projects, and my son, Aidan, born in England, who came along appropriately enough during this one, is getting into the swing of my routines. As always, I thank them for their love, support, and patience.
Introduction
England in America
A s the purveyor of populist American politics, the candidate Andrew Jackson of the newly formed Democratic Party had a biography written for his presidential run in 1828. The book told of his exploits on the frontier, his fights against Indians, but also his hatred for the English. He had apparently first felt this abhorrence in the stories from his Irish-born mother. His despising of England only increased after his violent confrontation with a British army officer during the American Revolution when the young Jackson had refused to clean the officer s boots. 1 Later he rose to heroic stature for his defense of the Mississippi River during the War of 1812 at the Battle of New Orleans when he halted the assault of British forces. Indeed, according to one rival, it seemed that his killing 2,500 Englishmen at N[ew] Orleans was his only qualification put forward for the complicated duties of the Chief Magistracy of the United States. 2
Of course Andrew Jackson s issues had been with Great Britain and the British government, and yet he and most Americans referred to their old enemy as England. This conflating of England with Britain was and is common in the United States. The Britain against which the new United States defined itself was the English version, not the Scottish, Welsh, or Irish ones. Jackson, for example, did not consider his Scots-Irish parents as British even though this was their and his, until 1783, legal status. The non-English could when they chose to, it seems, define themselves as not British. This focus of hatred for England over Britain seemed to permeate the American social classes. During the Civil War, for example, the British consul in New York, a time of high tension between his government and that of the United States, noted that in the city it was safe to describe oneself as Scots, Irish, or Welsh, but not British or English. 3
Despite this long pedigree of Anglophobia among postcolonial Americans, historians of ethnicity believe that the English, for social and cultural reasons, fit easily into the United States. Indeed leading scholars of immigrants in America have declared that in Americans eyes, the English had no ethnicity at all. 4 The issue of Englishness was, on the face of it, even less present in British Canada. Anglo-Canadians, many of them American Tories or their descendants, remained loyal to king and country. But as Canada matured through the nineteenth century, to the point of becoming a dominion with some semblance of independence in 1867, the English and Englishness became more problematic. French Canadians in Quebec had rejected it, but even in Anglo-dominated Ontario, an increasing antagonism toward the English definition of Britishness grew. Canadians were still proud members of the British Empire, but they saw their western/frontier version of it as stronger than the more effete version back in the mother country. In Saskatchewan, for example, many British Canadians rejected the hegemonic conflation of English with British. 5 The fact that a number of English arriving in Canada saw themselves as Gentleman Emigrants and the reality that many Canadians British roots were Scottish or Irish only exacerbated differences, leading one immigrant to declare that the Englishmen here [in Toronto] are much disliked. 6
Admiration, however, for England and English culture remained. Indeed one literary scholar believed that in the United States it rose to the level of Anglophilia. It was particularly strong in the burgeoning colleges of post-Civil War America. According to Henry Adams, Bostonians, for example, always knelt in self-abasement before the majesty of English standards. 7 Shakespeare remained the paragon of literature for many North Americans, and the Magna Carta was the basis of American and Canadian liberty. 8 In addition economic connections were vital in taming U.S. Anglophobia. The United States needed loans from London to further its own growth and development. Leading businessmen and politicians sought to influence foreign policy in ways that emphasized understanding over prejudice and compromise over conflict. 9 This continued cultural appreciation and strong economic relationship had political consequences, including general American acceptance of the Canadian Confederation in 1867 and the Treaty of Washington in 1871, the latter settling disputes from the Civil War. This easing of tensions on the continent ushered in an era of better relations between Britain and the United States. There remained attempts to to twist the lion s tail, especially in pursuit of Irish American voters, but respect for England and Britain remained and even extended to cooperation on mutually beneficial foreign policy issues. The diplomatic historian Bradford Perkins described a Great Rapprochement from 1895 to 1914 between England (Britain) and the United States that laid the foundation of what eventually became known as the Special Relationship. 10
Yet history rarely moves in straight lines. The course of Anglo-American diplomatic relations did not glide inexorably toward a special relationship, and neither were Anglo-American cultural connections accepted unequivocally as just new versions of England in North America. This collection explores some of these continued complicated links between England, its people, and its culture with North America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In general these essays challenge the established view of the English as having no ethnicity and highlight the vibrancy of the English and their culture in North America. 11 This collection also challenges the prevailing notion of the English as invisible immigrants. 12 Recognizing the English as a distinct ethnic group, as are the Irish, Scots, and Germans, has implications for understanding American identity too, providing a clearer picture of how Americans often defined themselves in the context of Old World cultural traditions. Ultimately all of the work included here upsets the idea of a coherent, comfortab

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