Nationalism Vs Sectionalism Essay

The book has an optimistic tone with regard to this rise of a centralized and urban civilization that later developments hardly seem to warrant. Schlesinger records all the educational advances, for instance, and assumes that this I popularization was entirely good; he does not consider that in this process we lost much (perhaps more than we gained) that could not be replaced in this new system.Throughout, all that the city represents is good; all that the country represented was bad. Schlesinger has painstakingly pointed out all our profits, but it would require an equally large, and perhaps more valuable, book to point out our corresponding losses. Turner is never guilty of this over-simplification of values.

Professor Schlesinger’s book deals with the period when nationalism and standardization seemed inevitable, when the rise of the city seemed to carry with it the knell of sectionalism.

He closes on a high note of unity, after the Spanish-American War, when “the foemen of 1861 had become comrades in spirit as well as in arms.” But Mr.

After the war of 1812, from 1815 to 1825, some Historians claimed that the nation embraced an Era of Good Feelings due to the destruction of the Federalist Party (but not its ideas) and the numerous nationalistic improvements. Undoubtedly, the compromise damaged the nationalistic feelings of the nation and created sectionalism since the North and the South refused to give up political power that would put their region’s interests at stake. As run by William Jones who issued more banknotes than there were species and allowed employees to steal from the bank.

However, a better name for the post war years of 1815 to 1825 is an Era Of Mixed Feelings because although there Were improvements stimulated by nationalism, there were also conflicts created by sectionalism. Acquired Florida from Spain for $5 million, which basically secured U. Economically, the nation’s wealth did increase but the issue Of protective tariffs brought disunion because the North supported it while the South opposed it. When Jones was replaced by Speeches, Speeches stopped issuing bank notes so he could stop the distressing inflation.

“We can write history that implicitly denies or ignores the nation-state, but it would be a history that flew in the face of what people who live in a nation-state require and demand,” Degler said that night in Chicago. Nationalism, an infant in the nineteenth century, had become, in the first half of the twentieth, a monster.

He issued a warning: “If we historians fail to provide a nationally defined history, others less critical and less informed will take over the job for us.” The nation-state was in decline, said the wise men of the time. But in the second half, it was nearly dead—a stumbling, ghastly wraith, at least outside postcolonial states.

Schlesinger sticks perhaps too closely to the narrow span of years that he treats; the apparent homogeneity has, somehow, never occurred, and the cities have in many cases become only another one of the sections that Mr. Unfortunately, Professor Schlesinger does not consider the economic aspects of the years 1878-1898. But one doubts if the true significance of the rise of the city can be discussed in any other terms. Undoubtedly, the new domination of city over country represented the triumph of organized man in a collectivistic state over individual man in a democratic state; but that triumph, essentially, was an economic one.

After 1865, the country changed, first slowly but by 1878 with an ever-increasing rapidity, from an agrarian and localized economy to an in-dustrialistic and highly centralized economy.

In 1986, the Pulitzer Prize–winning, bowtie-wearing Stanford historian Carl Degler delivered something other than the usual pipe-smoking, scotch-on-the-rocks, after-dinner disquisition that had plagued the evening program of the annual meeting of the American Historical Association for nearly all of its centurylong history.

Instead, Degler, a gentle and quietly heroic man, accused his colleagues of nothing short of dereliction of duty: appalled by nationalism, they had abandoned the study of the nation.