‘I killed him for money – and a woman - I didn’t get the money and I didn’t get the woman. Pretty isn’t it?’ (Wilder 1944). So begins Walter Neff’s (Fred MacMurray) confession in Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity, a confession that tells how he fell for femme fatale Phyllis Dietrichson, how he planned and undertook the murder of her husband, and attempted to claim the life insurance he had himself sold to the dead man. The audience also hears that Neff’s actions aroused the suspicions of his boss and mentor, Keyes, and led to a shoot out with Phyllis that proves fatal for both. Hence that famous opening line. More than just an example of Raymond Chandler’s and Wilder’s pithy dialogue, the line encapsulates the film’s criticism of the American ideal. Neff’s future of upward mobility and a loving wife is gone. Furthermore, in the course of pursuing this dream, he has destroyed a family, attempted to cheat his employer and murdered a typical hard-working citizen. With this statement comes the verbal proof of what the plot goes on to demonstrate: the American Dream is dead
In August 1831, around sixty enslaved people fought a war against enslavers in Southampton County, Virginia. It became known as the “Nat Turner Revolt.” Four months later, perhaps sixty thousand enslaved people fought their own emancipation war, commonly known as the “Baptist War,” throughout much of Jamaica. These uprisings differed in size, strategy, and outcome. The Virginian episode allowed slaveholders to strengthen their grip on slavery, while the Jamaican one catalyzed Britain’s capitulation to abolition. Historians have detailed the significant role kinship played in the more localized Virginian example. Comparing both emancipation wars, this paper extends analysis to the Jamaican case. It argues that kinship shaped both uprisings in remarkably similar ways, influencing radicalization and recruitment beforehand, support or opposition during war, and vulnerability to or evasion of white retaliation afterward. The similar function of kinship in such different events suggests a possible larger pattern that shaped other uprisings.
[In speeches, Robert Barnwell Rhett and Abraham lincoln espouse the] views of a Union leader and an outspoken and extreme proponent of the Confederate cause. Both cite the memory and philosophy of the founding fathers, both use rhetoric from the Revolution, and both refer to the doctrines of the government they created. Two politicians, fundamentally opposed and at war, evoked the same brand of American patriotism to justify their beliefs. This was by no means a unique occurrence; men on both sides of the conflict, from foot soldiers to Presidents, believed that their cause was the true defence of American ideals and that their opponents’ viewpoint would only corrupt their country’s ideology. Even when the South formed its own nation, it did so not to separate itself from the ideals of the United States, but to return to them, feeling they had been lost in the North. The Confederate Constitution, with few exceptions (most notably the legitimisation of slavery) reflected verbatim the original (Rable 1994, 44). As Anne Sarah Rubin states, ‘new Confederates created a national culture in a large part by drawing on the usable American past’ (Rubin 2005, 11). The first paradox is: two sides, bitterly opposed fought a violent war, but with matching adoration for the same country and the same confidence in their righteousness
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