Academic literature on the topic 'White Fathers. Archives'

This chapter explores how white evangelicals come to imagine themselves as heirs to the American founding fathers, and how they find material evidence to support their claims about the nation’s Christian heritage at key sites in Washington, D.C. It discusses Christian tourists’ experiences at the U.S. Capitol, the National Archives, and the Library of Congress, and the stories they tell about George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and other famous white men they depict as proto-evangelical Christians. This chapter also introduces the Christian heritage industry, including early proponents such as Jerry Falwell Sr. and more recent advocates such as David Barton. It argues that white evangelicals employ a nostalgic view of the American past to justify their participation in politics and their efforts to impose their moral code on the nation.

Chapter 2 looks at the underworld theme in two postmodern works of fiction: John Barth’s 1968 Lost in the Funhouse, which adapts Homer’s Odyssey, and Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman comic series (1989–93), which features a version of Orpheus’ descent. Both authors tap into the tradition of Hades as an intertextual archive and confront the canon by writing fiction that symbolically stages a conflict between fathers and sons. The mythical descent story becomes a metafictional device that pays homage to literary tradition while also critiquing literary forefathers, Milton and James Joyce. The polemical stances of Barth and Gaiman epitomize postmodern literary practices by setting the heroic paradigm in culturally marginal contexts or by using media not conventionally associated with high culture.

This chapter debunks the myth that President Kennedy was the ‘father’ of the American alliance. Once he became predident he had to bow before the constraints of the state department, the Pentagon and the professional staff at the White House. he accepted the beliefs and assessments of Dean Rusk, the secretary of state and Robert McNamara, the secretary of defence. The US national archives show that American diplomats in the Middle East killed Kennedy’s idea of granting an American security guarantee to Israel. Any security they warned, would be followed by deeper Soviet involvement in the region. American commitment was limited to a presidential declaration of territorial integrity of al the regional states. Thus it was no surprise chief-of-staff Rabin failed to convince the US administration to provide a more cogent commitment to Israel.

The chapter outlines the posthumous constellations that led to the making of Thomas Elsaesser’s essay film The Sun Island, about his grandfather, Martin Elsaesser, chief city architect in Frankfurt during the Weimar Republic. It reflects on the migration of non-theatrical film material into archives and art spaces, encouraging the emergence of found footage as essay film, but it also makes a case for The Sun Island as ‘home movies re-purposed’ in order to highlight the specifics of home movies as a historically and politically important practice. While acknowledging his father as ‘author’, whose images the film ‘appropriates’, The Sun Island also revisits topics associated with Thomas’s own film historical writings: family melodrama; German cinema; media archaeology; history, memory, and trauma.

Beginning with Elsie Leach’s commitment to the Bristol Lunatic Asylum, this chapter explores his mother’s medical records and the nature of her illness. It considers the idea that his father may have had his mother committed as a means of freeing himself from marriage. It also considers the impact that her disappearance had on Archie, who was told that she was dead but suspected that she had deserted him. Drawing on his own diary, from 1918, the chapter recounts his daily life at age 14, revealing that he was a frequent truant and that, while working as a backstage “runner” at Bristol’s Empire and Hippodrome theaters, he became fascinated with show business and especially music hall.

This chapter recovers the transnational and hemispheric interests and influences of the Catholic priest Félix Varela (1788–1853), who lived for almost thirty years in the US and was nicknamed the “Father of the Irish” during his lifetime. It challenges the fractured reading of Varela’s archive in the scholarly literature, where he is normally studied only as an influential Cuban philosopher, his impact on US history having passed almost without note, and fills this lacuna by illustrating the manner in which Varela played a key role in the Protestant-Catholic debates of the 1830s–1840s and in the secularization of the public school system of New York City. Varela’s religious-ethical works Cartas a Elpidio (1835, 1838) demonstrate how these debates facilitated the emergence of minority politics in the US and the important role of Latina/os to that emergence. Nowhere is this more evident than in Varela’s annotated translation of Thomas Jefferson’s Manual of Parliamentary Practice, which exhibits a hemispheric reach and significance. It was intended for Spanish-speaking residents of the US, for readers in the nascent republics of Latin America and in colonial Cuba. An examination of Varela’s US archive, beyond his supposed authorship of Jicoténcatl (1826), locates Varela, on a Latino Continuum that reveals these early Latina/o writers as cultural actors shaping the very foundation of US history while also engaging broader ideas in Latin American political and cultural life. It thereby fundamentally challenges contemporary scholars to rethink the still existing divides between American, Latin American, Cuban, and Latinx studies.

Resumen: Este trabajo analiza, por diversos medios, el proyecto de la capilla mortuoria con dos tumbas para el expresidente militar Carlos Delgado-Chalbaud y su padre. El encargo, no realizado, fue el único que, tras varias tentativas, pudo ejecutarse en Caracas, Venezuela. Le Corbusier archivó este proyecto como un “Monument”, y dentro de su trayectoria solo estuvo precedido por otro de carácter funerario dedicado al Mariscal F. Foch en la Porte Maillot de París y, posteriormente, diseñará su propia tumba en Cap Martin. Esto convierte al proyecto de Caracas, prácticamente desconocido, en un c