Oct 28, 2016 | 1:10 PM - 2:40 PM | Loft 1

Dr. Alice Rutkowski, Ph.D.

“‘Distance Lends Enchantment’: Canonical New Yorkers and Eyewitnessing the New York City Draft Riots"

In the midst of the American Civil War in July of 1863, the U.S. government announced the institution of a draft that seemed to single out working-class men (black men were not eligible and affluent men could pay a penalty to avoid it). There was violence in a number of Northern cities over this policy, but the worst was in New York City: the targets of the mobs were wealthy New Yorkers, draft officials and, perhaps most troublingly, black New Yorkers, who were violently blamed for the war itself.   

The rioters themselves left no records of their participation or their motivations, a tantalizing lack which, I want to suggest, has encouraged writers and artists of all periods to make use of these spectacular events and fill in the blanks with fiction and conjecture. This section of the project explores both temporal and physical distance from the riots. One of the great contradictions that exists with regards to accounts of the riots is that some of the creative responses intended to comment on and shape responses to the violence were ignored (i.e. Herman Melville’s Civil War poetry) while some of the most private – Walt Whitman’s letters to his family, George Templeton Strong’s diary – have come to define what the riots meant to New York and the nation. For example, a recent popular history of the riots, The Devil’s Own Work (Schecter, 2005) takes its title from a private letter of Whitman’s, and a successful historical novel, Paradise Alley  (Baker, 2002) makes liberal use of Strong’s diary. Though no particular group has been willing to claim the riots as part of their “usable past,” these riots are the opposite of an untold story, repeatedly narrated and re-narrated by writers, artists, and historians.

Dr. Manfred Posani Löwenstein, PhD

Louvre on fire. History of a False Report

During the Semaine sanglante, in the end of May 1871, a rumour spread among the troops of Versailles: the Communards had filled the city with bombs. After the Louvre had been taken over, a patrolling soldier saw something, which had him sound the alarm: he had found a long copper wire that cut through the great halls of the palace; surely the fuse of a land mine! It was actually the telegraph cable, an innovation introduced by Napoleon III to facilitate communications within the palace. On May 23rd 1871 the newspapers of the major cities in the world cried out the destruction of the Louvre. It was not true (although a fire had destroyed its valuable library); all that is clear is the role the telegraph wires played in this story.

My paper, that anticipates some of the results of my actual research, will be divided into two parts: 1) an overview of the newspapers (both American and European) and 2) a series of case studies on major intellectuals of the time  and the degree to which they reflected on the implications of the report.

Biographies

Dr. Alice Rutkowski

Currently Associate Prof of English; B.A. 1996, Binghamton University, M.A. (1998) and Ph.D. (2004) University of Virginia. Teaching: 19th  and 20th-century American literature; literature of the Civil War and Reconstruction; American Studies Course on the Civil War and Memory; Women's and Gender Studies course including Intro to Trans* Studies. Recent publications: “‘It’s a….Penis!’ Epistemology of the Ultrasound.” In Mothers and Sons eds. Demeter Press, 2016;  “Leaving the Good Mother: Frances E. W. Harper, Lydia Maria Child and the Literary Politics of Reconstruction.” Legacy:  A Journal of American Women Writers. 25 (Spring 2008). 83-104;  “Gender, Genre, Race and Nation: the 1863 New York City Draft Riots.” Studies in the Literary Imagination.  Special issue on “Women and Race Riots.”  40.2 (Fall 2007). 111-132.

Dr. Manfred Posani Löwenstein

I was born in Rome in 1986. I have studied at the Scuola Normale di Pisa (Italy), where I also discussed my PhD thesis (July 2015). In 2012, I published a critical edition of Nietzsche's lessons: 'The Divine Cult of the Greeks' for Adelphi, and I am currently working on the French edition of the same text (to be published fall 2016 for Les Belles Lettres). I have also published various articles on peer-reviewed journals such as Hegel-Jahrbücher, Rinascimento, Nietzsche-Studien. My research is mainly focused on 19th century intellectual history and I am actually applying for a Postdoc position with a research project on the false report of the burning of the Louvre during the Paris Commune (1871).