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Law's Imagined Republic shows how the American Revolution was marked by the rapid proliferation of law talk across the colonies. This legal language was both elite and popular, spanned different forms of expression from words to rituals, and included simultaneously real and imagined law. Since it was employed to mobilize resistance against England, the proliferation of revolutionary legal language became intimately intertwined with politics. Drawing on a wealth of material from criminal cases, Steven Wilf reconstructs the intertextual ways Americans from the 1760s through the 1790s read law: reading one case against another and often self-consciously comparing transatlantic legal systems as they thought about how they might construct their own legal system in a new republic. What transformed extraordinary tales of crime into a political forum? How did different ways of reading or speaking about law shape our legal origins? And, ultimately, how might excavating innovative approaches to law in this formative period, which were constructed in the street as well as in the courtroom, alter our usual understanding of contemporary American legal institutions? Law's Imagined Republic tells the story of the untidy beginnings of American law.
"In America's Imagined Revolution, Tomos Wallbank-Hughes explores late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century novels about Reconstruction in the American South, identifying a subgenre of the historical novel dedicated to narrating Reconstruction as revolutionary history. Operating at the margins of political and historical fiction, the writers studied here excavate generic and temporal registers in the historical novel that enable them to imagine revolution in ways that eschew narratives of transition designed to describe the bourgeois-democratic nation-state to the exclusion of plantation societies. Despite being guided in recent years by critical paradigms focused on recovering neglected moments, spaces, and voices, literary historians have struggled to fit Reconstruction's revolutionary upheavals into their transformed narratives of the long nineteenth century. This book makes the case for the novel form as a vital source in reconstructing the historical consciousness of Reconstruction as a revolutionary experience. Arguing that the historical novel of Reconstruction gains formal coherence from the conscious attempt to theorize Reconstruction as revolution-and revolution as an anachronous experience-the book offers the first formal and historical account presenting novels about the Reconstruction period as constitutive of a coherent, if evanescent, aesthetic genre. By analyzing works by George Washington Cable, Albion Tourgée, Frances Harper, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Charles Chesnutt, among others, Wallbank-Hughes details how these authors experimented with narrative forms and subverted the epic conventions of the historical novel to reimagine the period's historiographical significance. By recovering a literary genre and intellectual tradition through their complex forms of time-consciousness, America's Imagined Revolution argues that these novels provide a window onto the literary culture of the South's long nineteenth century in which the region became a terrain for interpreting that most un-American of phenomena: revolution. Taking seriously literary attempts to decipher revolutionary change amid the postbellum South's retrenched regimes of race and class oppression, therefore, enables a reexamination of Reconstruction's pull on the contemporary imagination, encouraging us to think anew about the cultural afterlives of slavery in relation to the idea of revolution"--
What are the imagined communities that compel men to kill or to die for an idea of a nation? This notion of nationhood had its origins in the founding of the Americas, but was then adopted and transformed by populist movements in nineteenth-century Europe. It became the rallying cry for anti-Imperialism as well as the abiding explanation for colonialism. In this scintillating, groundbreaking work of intellectual history Anderson explores how ideas are formed and reformulated at every level, from high politics to popular culture, and the way that they can make people do extraordinary things. In the twenty-first century, these debates on the nature of the nation state are even more urgent. As new nations rise, vying for influence, and old empires decline, we must understand who we are as a community in the face of history, and change.
Following the American Revolution, French observers often viewed the United States as a laboratory for the forging of new practices of liberté and égalité, in affinity with and divergence from France's own Revolutionary ideals and experiences. The volume examines French views through musical/theatrical portrayals of the American Revolution and Republic, soundscapes of the Statue of Liberty, and homages to the glorified figures of Washington, Franklin and Lafayette. Essays investigate paradoxical depictions of slavery in the United States and French Caribbean colonies of 'Amérique'. French critiques of American music and musicians, including the reception of Americanized or Creolized adaptations of European art traditions as well as American popular music and dance, are also presented. The subject of race features prominently in French interpretations of American music and identity. These interpretations see French constructions of the Indigenous American and African American "exotic" that intersect with tropes of noble, pastoral savagery, menacing barbarism, and the "civilizing" potency of French culture. The French reinterpretation of African American music and dance reveals both a revulsion of Black alterity and an attraction to the expressive freedom, and even subversiveness, of these "foreign" forms of music and dance. Contributions include essays by music, dance, theatre and opera scholars, and the volume will be essential reading for students and scholars of these disciplines.
In The Revolutionary Imagination in the Americas and the Age of Development, María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo boldly argues that crucial twentieth-century revolutionary challenges to colonialism and capitalism in the Americas have failed to resist—and in fact have been constitutively related to—the very developmentalist narratives that have justified and naturalized postwar capitalism. Saldaña-Portillo brings the critique of development discourse to bear on such exemplars of revolutionary and resistant political thought and practice as Ernesto “Che” Guevara, Malcolm X, the Sandinista government of Nicaragua, and the Guatemalan guerrilla resistance. She suggests that for each of these, developmentalist constructions frame the struggle as a heroic movement from unconsciousness to consciousness, from a childlike backwardness toward a disciplined and self-aware maturity. Reading governmental reports, memos, and policies, Saldaña-Portillo traces the arc of development narratives from its beginnings in the 1944 Bretton Woods conference through its apex during Robert S. McNamara's reign at the World Bank (1968–1981). She compares these narratives with models of subjectivity and agency embedded in the autobiographical texts of three revolutionary icons of the 1960s and 1970s—those of Che Guevara, Guatemalan insurgent Mario Payeras, and Malcolm X—and the agricultural policy of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN). Saldaña-Portillo highlights a shared paradigm of a masculinist transformation of the individual requiring the "transcendence" of ethnic particularity for the good of the nation. While she argues that this model of progress often alienated the very communities targeted by the revolutionaries, she shows how contemporary insurgents such as Rigoberta Menchú, the Zapatista movement, and queer Aztlán have taken up the radicalism of their predecessors to retheorize revolutionary subjectivity for the twenty-first century.
Few Americans understand the Constitution’s workings. Its real importance for the average citizen is as an enduring reminder of the moral vision that shaped the nation's founding. Maxwell Bloomfield looks at the broader appeal that constitutional idealism has always made to the American imagination through publications and films.
In this comprehensive history of the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR), one of the oldest and most important women’s organizations in United States history, Simon Wendt shows how the DAR’s efforts to keep alive the memory of the nation’s past were entangled with and strengthened the nation’s racial and gender boundaries. Taking a close look at the DAR’s mission of bolstering national loyalty, Wendt reveals paradoxes and ambiguities in its activism. While the Daughters engaged in patriotic actions long believed to be the domain of men and challenged male-centered accounts of US nation-building, their tales about the past reinforced traditional notions of femininity and masculinity, reflecting a belief that any challenge to these conventions would jeopardize the country’s stability. Similarly, they frequently voiced support for inclusive civic nationalism but deliberately shaped historical memory to consolidate white supremacy. Using archival sources from across the country, Wendt focuses on the DAR’s most visible work after its founding in 1890—its commemorations of the American Revolution, western expansion, and Native Americans. He also explores the organization’s post–World War II history, a time that saw major challenges to its conservative vision of America’s “imagined community.” This book sheds new light on the remarkable agency and cultural authority of conservative white women in the twentieth century.
In The Revolutionary Imagination in the Americas and the Age of Development, María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo boldly argues that crucial twentieth-century revolutionary challenges to colonialism and capitalism in the Americas have failed to resist—and in fact have been constitutively related to—the very developmentalist narratives that have justified and naturalized postwar capitalism. Saldaña-Portillo brings the critique of development discourse to bear on such exemplars of revolutionary and resistant political thought and practice as Ernesto “Che” Guevara, Malcolm X, the Sandinista government of Nicaragua, and the Guatemalan guerrilla resistance. She suggests that for each of these, developmentalist constructions frame the struggle as a heroic movement from unconsciousness to consciousness, from a childlike backwardness toward a disciplined and self-aware maturity. Reading governmental reports, memos, and policies, Saldaña-Portillo traces the arc of development narratives from its beginnings in the 1944 Bretton Woods conference through its apex during Robert S. McNamara's reign at the World Bank (1968–1981). She compares these narratives with models of subjectivity and agency embedded in the autobiographical texts of three revolutionary icons of the 1960s and 1970s—those of Che Guevara, Guatemalan insurgent Mario Payeras, and Malcolm X—and the agricultural policy of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN). Saldaña-Portillo highlights a shared paradigm of a masculinist transformation of the individual requiring the "transcendence" of ethnic particularity for the good of the nation. While she argues that this model of progress often alienated the very communities targeted by the revolutionaries, she shows how contemporary insurgents such as Rigoberta Menchú, the Zapatista movement, and queer Aztlán have taken up the radicalism of their predecessors to retheorize revolutionary subjectivity for the twenty-first century.
Between 1750 and 1820, tides of revolution swept the Atlantic world. From the new industrial towns of Great Britain to the plantations of Haiti, they heralded both the rise of democratic nationalism and the subsequent surge of imperial reaction. In Imagining the British Atlantic after the American Revolution, nine essays consider these revolutionary transformations from a variety of literary, visual, and historical perspectives. On topics ranging from painting and poetry to prison reform, the essays challenge and complicate our understandings of revolution and reaction within the transatlantic imagination. Drawing on examples from different local and regional contexts, they demonstrate the many remarkably local ways that revolution and empire were experienced in London, Pennsylvania, Pitcairn Island, and points in between. Published by the University of Toronto Press in association with the UCLA Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies and the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library.
Re-imagining Democracy in the Age of Revolutions charts a transformation in the way people thought about democracy in the North Atlantic region in the years between the American Revolution and the revolutions of 1848. In the mid-eighteenth century, 'democracy' was a word known only to the literate. It was associated primarily with the ancient world and had negative connotations: democracies were conceived to be unstable, warlike, and prone to mutate into despotisms. By the mid-nineteenth century, however, the word had passed into general use, although it was still not necessarily an approving term. In fact, there was much debate about whether democracy could achieve robust institutional form in advanced societies. In this volume, a cast of internationally-renowned contributors shows how common trends developed throughout the United States, France, Britain, and Ireland, particularly focussing on the era of the American, French, and subsequent European revolutions. Re-imagining Democracy in the Age of Revolutions argues that 'modern democracy' was not invented in one place and then diffused elsewhere, but instead was the subject of parallel re-imaginings, as ancient ideas and examples were selectively invoked and reworked for modern use. The contributions significantly enhance our understanding of the diversity and complexity of our democratic inheritance.