ABSTRACT

This volume examines the nineteenth century not only through episodes, institutions, sites and representations concerned with union, concord and bonds of sympathy, but also through moments of secession, separation, discord and disjunction. Its lens extends from the local and regional, through to national and international settings in Britain, Europe and the United States. The contributors come from the fields of cultural history, literary studies, American studies and legal history.

chapter |27 pages

Introduction

part I|17 pages

Representing union and disunion in art

chapter 1|17 pages

To ‘purchase union thus cheaply’

The controversial statue of an Irish Archbishop in the United Kingdom’s Houses of Parliament

part II|24 pages

Union and disunion in Europe

chapter 3|24 pages

Popular efforts to forge union

The English visit to Paris in April 1849

part III|1 pages

The politics of union and disunion in Great Britain

chapter 6|21 pages

An ‘illegal Union of Lawyers, and Writers, and Political Baronets’

The Conservative party and Scottish governance, 1832–1868

chapter 7|18 pages

Union Street

More than simply a metaphor for the coming together of Plymouth’s Three Towns?

part IV|19 pages

Union and disunion in the United States of America

chapter 8|19 pages

The union of enslaved couples during the disunion of the nation

Love, discord and separations in US slavery and thereafter

chapter 9|18 pages

Attempting disunion

Mutable borders and the Mormon experience with the United States, 1846–1858

chapter 10|17 pages

The South Carolina jeremiad

Reinterpreting John C. Calhoun’s legacy in the 1850s