Jefferson, Nationalism, and the Enlightenment

Jefferson, Nationalism, and the Enlightenment PDF Author: Henry Steele Commager
Publisher: ACLS History E-Book Project
ISBN: 9781628200966
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 220

Get Book

Book Description
A collection of essays and lectures from Henry Steele Commager, one of America's eminent historians. The focus is on the age of enlightenment, with particular attention to Thomas Jefferson, and how enlightenment philosophy shaped the birth of the United States.

Jefferson, Nationalism, and the Enlightenment

Jefferson, Nationalism, and the Enlightenment PDF Author: Henry Steele Commager
Publisher: ACLS History E-Book Project
ISBN: 9781628200966
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 220

Get Book

Book Description
A collection of essays and lectures from Henry Steele Commager, one of America's eminent historians. The focus is on the age of enlightenment, with particular attention to Thomas Jefferson, and how enlightenment philosophy shaped the birth of the United States.

Thomas Jefferson's Image of New England

Thomas Jefferson's Image of New England PDF Author: Arthur Scherr
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786475374
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 391

Get Book

Book Description
Writers often depict Thomas Jefferson as a narrow-minded defender of states' rights and Virginia's interests, despite his authorship of the Declaration of Independence and vigorous defense of the young republic's sovereignty. Some historians claim he was particularly hostile to the New England states, whose Federalist electorate he regarded as enemies of his Democratic-Republican Party. This study of Jefferson's lifelong relationship with New England reveals him to be a consistent nationalist and friend of the region, from his first visit to Boston in 1784 to his recruiting of Massachusetts scholars to teach at the University of Virginia. His nationalist point of view is most evident where some historians claim to see it least: in his opinions of the people and politics of New England. He admired New Englanders' Revolutionary patriotism, especially that of his friend John Adams, and considered their direct democracy and town-meeting traditions a model for the rest of the Union.

The Origins of American Religious Nationalism

The Origins of American Religious Nationalism PDF Author: Sam Haselby
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190266503
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 352

Get Book

Book Description
Sam Haselby offers a new and persuasive account of the role of religion in the formation of American nationality, showing how a contest within Protestantism reshaped American political culture and led to the creation of an enduring religious nationalism. Following U.S. independence, the new republic faced vital challenges, including a vast and unique continental colonization project undertaken without, in the centuries-old European senses of the terms, either "a church" or "a state." Amid this crisis, two distinct Protestant movements arose: a popular and rambunctious frontier revivalism; and a nationalist, corporate missionary movement dominated by Northeastern elites. The former heralded the birth of popular American Protestantism, while the latter marked the advent of systematic Protestant missionary activity in the West. The explosive economic and territorial growth in the early American republic, and the complexity of its political life, gave both movements opportunities for innovation and influence. This book explores the competition between them in relation to major contemporary developments-political democratization, large-scale immigration and unruly migration, fears of political disintegration, the rise of American capitalism and American slavery, and the need to nationalize the frontier. Haselby traces these developments from before the American Revolution to the rise of Andrew Jackson. His approach illuminates important changes in American history, including the decline of religious distinctions and the rise of racial ones, how and why "Indian removal" happened when it did, and with Andrew Jackson, the appearance of the first full-blown expression of American religious nationalism.

Jefferson's Empire

Jefferson's Empire PDF Author: Peter S. Onuf
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 9780813922041
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 276

Get Book

Book Description
Thomas Jefferson believed that the American revolution was atransformative moment in the history of political civilization. He hoped that hisown efforts as a founding statesman and theorist would help construct a progressiveand enlightened order for the new American nation that would be a model andinspiration for the world. Peter S. Onuf's new book traces Jefferson's vision of theAmerican future to its roots in his idealized notions of nationhood and empire.Onuf's unsettling recognition that Jefferson's famed egalitarianism was elaboratedin an imperial context yields strikingly original interpretations of our nationalidentity and our ideas of race, of westward expansion and the Civil War, and ofAmerican global dominance in the twentiethcentury. Jefferson's vision of an American "empirefor liberty" was modeled on a British prototype. But as a consensual union ofself-governing republics without a metropolis, Jefferson's American empire would befree of exploitation by a corrupt imperial ruling class. It would avoid the cycle ofwar and destruction that had characterized the European balance ofpower. The Civil War cast in high relief thetragic limitations of Jefferson's political vision. After the Union victory, as thereconstructed nation-state developed into a world power, dreams of the United Statesas an ever-expanding empire of peacefully coexisting states quickly faded frommemory. Yet even as the antebellum federal union disintegrated, a Jeffersoniannationalism, proudly conscious of America's historic revolution against imperialdomination, grew up in its place. In Onuf's view, Jefferson's quest to define a new American identity also shaped his ambivalentconceptions of slavery and Native American rights. His revolutionary fervor led himto see Indians as "merciless savages" who ravaged the frontiers at the Britishking's direction, but when those frontiers were pacified, a more benevolentJefferson encouraged these same Indians to embrace republican values. AfricanAmerican slaves, by contrast, constituted an unassimilable captive nation, unjustlywrenched from its African homeland. His great panacea: colonization. Jefferson's ideas about race revealthe limitations of his conception of American nationhood. Yet, as Onuf strikinglydocuments, Jefferson's vision of a republican empire--a regime of peace, prosperity, and union without coercion--continues to define and expand the boundaries ofAmerican national identity.

The Long Affair

The Long Affair PDF Author: Conor Cruise O'Brien
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226616568
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 390

Get Book

Book Description
As controversial and explosive as it is elegant and learned, this examination of Thomas Jefferson, as man and icon, through the critical lens of the French Revolution, offers a provocative analysis of the supreme symbol of American history and political culture and challenges the traditional perceptions of both Jeffersonian history and the Jeffersonian legacy. 15 illustrations.

Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson PDF Author: Mary B. Tippen
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Enlightenment
Languages : en
Pages : 164

Get Book

Book Description


Inventing America

Inventing America PDF Author: Garry Wills
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0385542836
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 398

Get Book

Book Description
From one of America's foremost historians, Inventing America compares Thomas Jefferson's original draft of the Declaration of Independence with the final, accepted version, thereby challenging many long-cherished assumptions about both the man and the document. Although Jefferson has long been idealized as a champion of individual rights, Wills argues that in fact his vision was one in which interdependence, not self-interest, lay at the foundation of society. "No one has offered so drastic a revision or so close or convincing an analysis as Wills has . . . The results are little short of astonishing" —(Edmund S. Morgan, New York Review of Books)

Nature's Man

Nature's Man PDF Author: Maurizio Valsania
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813933579
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 303

Get Book

Book Description
Although scholars have adequately covered Thomas Jefferson's general ideas about human nature and race, this is the first book to examine what Maurizio Valsania terms Jefferson's "philosophical anthropology"--philosophical in the sense that he concerned himself not with describing how humans are, culturally or otherwise, but with the kind of human being Jefferson thought he was, wanted to become, and wished for citizens to be for the future of the United States. Valsania's exploration of this philosophical anthropology touches on Jefferson's concepts of nationalism, slavery, gender roles, modernity, affiliation, and community. More than that, Nature's Man shows how Jefferson could advocate equality and yet control and own other human beings. A humanist who asserted the right of all people to personal fulfillment, Jefferson nevertheless had a complex philosophy that also acknowledged the dynamism of nature and the limits of human imagination. Despite Jefferson's famous advocacy of apparently individualistic rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, Valsania argues that both Jefferson's yearning for the human individual to become something good and his fear that this hypothetical being would turn into something bad were rooted in a specific form of communitarianism. Absorbing and responding to certain moral-philosophical currents in Europe, Jefferson's nature-infused vision underscored the connection between the individual and the community.

Thomas Jefferson and American Nationhood

Thomas Jefferson and American Nationhood PDF Author: Brian Steele
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107020700
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 337

Get Book

Book Description
This book identifies Jefferson as an American nationalist and describes his assessment of American character and democratic promise.

Without Resolution

Without Resolution PDF Author: Joyce Oldham Appleby
Publisher: Oxford [England] : Clarendon Press
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 36

Get Book

Book Description
Thomas Jefferson is one of three presidents honoured in Washington, DC, yet the reasons for his presence there beside Washington and Lincoln are not altogether obvious. Retrospectively he appears as the personification of the Enlightenment spirit embodied in American nationalism.