The woman suffrage movement sought to capture Congressional Reconstruction for its own agenda. Having unsuccessfully opposed the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments for creating what Elizabeth Cady Stanton called an “aristocracy of sex,” the woman suffragists now declared that women as well as black men were enfranchised under the Reconstruction amendments. This New Departure did not survive Supreme Court scrutiny. In fact, women who voted were tried under the Enforcement Acts passed to protect black men’s suffrage rights. As the federal government proved unable to protect black male suffrage, woman suffragists argued that Congressional Reconstruction had failed because it had been incomplete. Because Congressional Reconstruction had not enfranchised women, it had betrayed the natural rights tradition on which suffrage rights were based. The failure to include women had doomed universal manhood suffrage.

Having wrested control over Reconstruction policy from President Andrew Johnson, Congressional Republicans wrote their own Reconstruction Act. In addition to considerable confusion over who was eligible to vote, white Southerners often refused to participate in the elections and constitutional convention process. Border South states were seeing the erosion of their proscriptive measures. Former Confederate states varied in the severity of the political disabilities they imposed on former Confederates. Like blacks and women, former Confederates claimed they needed the vote to protect themselves and the Union from a centralizing and oppressive federal government. At the same time, Congress was relieving many former Confederates of their Fourteenth Amendment-imposed inability to hold office. Despite much white southern rhetoric about the horrors of bayonet rule under the Reconstruction and Enforcement Acts, white Southerners used violence and fraud to regain control of the former Confederate states.

Congressional Reconstruction enfranchised black men in the former Confederate states. The Fifteenth Amendment made that enfranchisement national, but stopped short of granting suffrage as a positive right. While black men’s enfranchisement had been premised on their loyalty, military service, and ability to use the vote to protect themselves and the Union, anti-black violence made it increasingly impossible to exercise their political rights. The memory of black men’s military service waned and increasingly the federal government was expected to protect black voters. Voting proved not to be self-enforcing, but to need the power of the federal government to protect voters. With diminishing northern support and increasing desire for reconciliation, federal government interference became politically untenable. African Americans and Republicans proved unable to preserve black suffrage.

Having regained political power, white southern Democrats moved to replace their Reconstruction-era state constitutions although they did not yet dare to repeal black suffrage. Republican politicians protested the disfranchisement of black southern Republicans, but they were unable to revive enforcement. The woman’s movement lobbied unsuccessfully for a woman suffrage constitutional amendment and campaigned – with only limited success – for changes to state laws and constitutions. In 1890, Mississippi wrote a new state constitution that imposed literacy and poll taxes to explicitly disfranchise blacks. At the same time, Republicans failed to pass a new Enforcement Bill, effectively ending federal attempts to protect black suffrage. The woman’s movement recovered from its Reconstruction-era division to form a unified movement, but woman suffrage was still a generation in the future. In 1890, with black men and all women largely disfranchised, only former Confederates could claim the suffrage as a right.

I begin here to articulate Rorty’s alternative understanding of hope. Rorty’s understanding has been ignored both by those scholars interested in hope and by those concerned with his intellectual legacy and political identity. I argue that hope, for Rorty, involves the yearning for a future that is contingent and the commitment to redescribing – and thereby contesting – the identity of a fragile social world and political inheritance in the name of its betterment. I suggest that Rorty’s understanding of hope stems from his reading of Hegel’s account of philosophy in The Philosophy of Right. I then unpack Rorty’s enigmatic claim – advanced in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity – that ‘common hopes’ are necessary for sustaining liberal community, which I suggest is given revealing illustration in his infamous Achieving Our Country. I argue that Achieving Our Country is a much-misunderstood text and suggest that we should not regard it as a kind of prediction, but rather as the articulation of hope for his own community and a contestation of its political future through a narrative of redemption.

This concluding chapter draws together several strands and original dimensions of Leroi-Gourhan’s technology. Alongside his palaeontological and archaeological research, Leroi-Gourhan also addressed two seemingly contradictory dimensions of techniques: the machine and the artisan. Given his long-standing interest in machines and mechanical devices, including photography, film and also computers, Leroi-Gourhan’s quasi-cybernetic understanding of prehistoric flintknapping is less surprising. Moreover, such a broadly positive attitude towards modern techniques needs to be understood in relation to philosophical and intellectual debates emerging during the post-war years of economic and social reconstruction. While thinkers like Jacques Ellul emphasized the risks of disruption and loss of control associated with modern techniques, Leroi-Gourhan retained, on the whole, his technophile confidence in the cumulative and incremental continuity of techniques, as demonstrated (in his view) across prehistory. This approach also derived from his distinctive Catholic faith and his affinities with the thoughts of Jesuit-palaeontologist Teilhard de Chardin. It embodied his belief in the long-term redemptive capacities of techniques, as evidenced by the plenitude achieved by the artisan of all times who ‘thinks with his fingers’, a crafting Homo faber present in each and every one of us.

This chapter traces basic contours of early scholastic Atonement theories from 1150 to 1250, which integrated insights from Augustine and Anselm on the objective work of Atonement with Abelard's attention to the subjective dimensions of Atonement.

Finnegans Wake and confession, in both secular and religious contexts, are each examined through the lens of the other. The aim is to ‘de-confuse’ the fusion, thrice repeated in the Wake, of ‘confession’ and ‘confusion’. Eight observations are illustrated through close reading: i) confession directs the text in two chapters, Shem’s in I.7 and HCE’s in II.3; ii) both present as public not private confessions; iii) there is no auricular confession; iv) widespread inadvertent confessions found in the Wake’s ‘fallen’ language, supposedly Freudian slips, are a source of sense-making power; v) any confession is always a qualified confession – blame is always dispersed; vi) there is no torture leading to involuntary confession; vii) the book doesn’t operate within the tradition of classical confessional texts; viii) it knows that confession split Christianity and projects that split onto the dialectical operations of the narrative. The chapter argues for the productive and overlooked potential of ‘syntagmatic’ or narrative approaches that read the text as sequential form, and it suggests that the plurality of narratives undermines theoretical generalizations of the human as ‘a confessing animal’.

Two younger sons of two fathers, one in the Prodigal Son parable and the other, Jacob, son of Isaac, each acquires his inheritance before the father’s death and is resented by an older brother. In both instances, heaven so directs events as to mitigate fraternal discord.

This chapter offers an intersectional feminist reading of West Side Story that shows how women of color and the gender non-conforming character Anybodys are central to the (partial) redemptive arc of the musical. The narrative and characterizations—as expressed through songs, dances, and score—suggest a path to a better “Somewhere” that requires us to step outside the confines of normative masculinity and femininity which reinforce the boundaries of race and class. Throughout the musical, Anita and Maria must navigate the tensions within the concepts of assimilation and multiculturalism, as well as a social landscape dominated by an anxious and often violent masculinity. Careful attention to performances of these roles, and the character Anybodys, make clear that the belonging they (and we the audience) seek might be found somewhere beyond the reductive and destructive strictures of the gender binary.

This chapter charts how Paul et Virginie manifests the degradation in the human – thing relationship from intimacy to estrangement; I further show how later artists and writers reincarnate the novel in “after-books” and in “after-art”—wallpaper, paintings, fans and plates. The novel’s insistence on splitting body from spirit, sexuality from virtue, and human from nonhuman leads to sacrificing the heroine’s life to reinforce the illusion of female purity. This sacrifice reinstates binaries partially transcended in the novel’s earlier sections when the characters’ respect for and kinesthetic engagement with the environment intensifies love and gives them the right to belong with each other and with the nonhuman. The chapter argues that after-things reimagine Bernardin’s novel in fresh ways, all of them contending with Paul et Virginie’s ultimate dualism: some recapitulate or complicate that binary thinking; some obliterate Bernardin’s protest against enslavement; and others forge a belonging with between human and nonhuman by restoring Paul and Virginie to life and happiness.

The Tempest throws us into the midst of a world of tragic repetition, in which usurpation, oppression, and the drive for mastery repeat themselves again and again. The chapter argues that it also offers a precious, if tenuous, escape from tragic history, by calling for a politics of humble disappointment. This tentative path runs through abjuration or negation. The play consistently stages violent and intrusive spectacles that break the characters (and the audience) out of their initial subject positions and into a more outward-looking mode. Such interruptions connect to the tradition of negative theology, in which poorness or nothingness “is the ultimate state of receptivity” (Meister Eckhart). They offer a breath of air from outside the masterful self, a sliver of distance from the tragic past. In particular, the play institutes a theatrical form of collectivity through the isle’s inclusive dramatic “air”. It draws us, as well as the sovereign figure of Prospero, into a broader dramatic life-force or “intersubjective phenomenology” (Schalkwyk). Indeed, in the Epilogue, the sovereign power is subject to the many; subject to audience’s judgment, pleasure, and approval. It is this recognition of mutual need (Plato) that opens the vision of a renewed political community.

Life interviews can take many forms. Their purpose is to provide a biography of a person's life or, more commonly, a part of a person's life. This chapter focuses on two forms of life interview, McAdams' life story interview and the narrative life interview. McAdams' approach is to consider the whole of life, split into chapters, and examining key elements such as important memories, events, stressors and the person's world view. McAdams explores key issues such as redemption and contamination. The narrative life interview is designed to focus on specific key transitions in a person's life and to explore the impact of these transitions on people's behaviour, thoughts and feelings. Examples are provided.

In Chapter 8, we provide frequencies of narrative identity themes concerning negative and positive consequences of mental illness as well as sources of well-being. We find that costs to relationships, self, and identity are widespread themes and that many participants story their illness as an obstacle to educational and vocational success. Furthermore, about half of our participants narrate negative aspects of treatment into their identity. Some participants evidence positive themes when they interpreted their mental illness as leading to helpful changes in terms of heightened insight, showing strength, and increased care for others. In terms of narrative identity as a source of well-being, relationship themes rank high as do themes concerning self and identity. In addition, participants narrate well-being into their identities through the themes revolving around education, vocation, and leisure activities. Finally, some experiences from psychiatric treatment and care were storied with well-being when constructing identity.