Constituting Americans

Constituting Americans PDF Author: Priscilla Wald
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822315476
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 418

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Book Description
"Constituting Americans" rethinks the way that certain writers of the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth century contributed to fixing the words precisely of what it means to be an American

Constituting Americans

Constituting Americans PDF Author: Priscilla Wald
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822315476
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 418

Get Book Here

Book Description
"Constituting Americans" rethinks the way that certain writers of the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth century contributed to fixing the words precisely of what it means to be an American

Constituting Americanness

Constituting Americanness PDF Author: Iulian Cananau
Publisher: Peter Lang Edition
ISBN: 9783631657690
Category : American literature
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Following Koselleck's history of concepts, Americanness is approached as a semantic field at the intersection of several antebellum concepts (nation, representation, sympathy, race, and womanhood, among others), in the various stages of their respective histories. The book is also a period study of major American writers of the antebellum era.

The Meaning of Democracy and the Vulnerability of Democracies

The Meaning of Democracy and the Vulnerability of Democracies PDF Author: Vincent Ostrom
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 9780472084562
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 358

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Book Description
Considers the social requirements for a thriving democracy

Constituting Central American–Americans

Constituting Central American–Americans PDF Author: Maritza E. Cárdenas
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813592860
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 213

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Book Description
Central Americans are the third largest and fastest growing Latino population in the United States. And yet, despite their demographic presence, there has been little scholarship focused on this group. Constituting Central American-Americans is an exploration of the historical and disciplinary conditions that have structured U.S. Central American identity and of the ways in which this identity challenges how we frame current discussions of Latina/o, American ethnic, and diasporic identities. By focusing on the formation of Central American identity in the U.S., Maritza E. Cárdenas challenges us to think about Central America and its diaspora in relation to other U.S. ethno-racial identities.

Constituting Empire

Constituting Empire PDF Author: Daniel J. Hulsebosch
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807876879
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 505

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Book Description
According to the traditional understanding of American constitutional law, the Revolution produced a new conception of the constitution as a set of restrictions on the power of the state rather than a mere description of governmental roles. Daniel J. Hulsebosch complicates this viewpoint by arguing that American ideas of constitutions were based on British ones and that, in New York, those ideas evolved over the long eighteenth century as New York moved from the periphery of the British Atlantic empire to the center of a new continental empire. Hulsebosch explains how colonists and administrators reconfigured British legal sources to suit their needs in an expanding empire. In this story, familiar characters such as Alexander Hamilton and James Kent appear in a new light as among the nation's most important framers, and forgotten loyalists such as Superintendent of Indian Affairs Sir William Johnson and lawyer William Smith Jr. are rightly returned to places of prominence. In his paradigm-shifting analysis, Hulsebosch captures the essential paradox at the heart of American constitutional history: the Revolution, which brought political independence and substituted the people for the British crown as the source of legitimate authority, also led to the establishment of a newly powerful constitution and a new postcolonial genre of constitutional law that would have been the envy of the British imperial agents who had struggled to govern the colonies before the Revolution.

Our America

Our America PDF Author: Walter Benn Michaels
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822320647
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
Arguing that the contemporary commitment to the importance of cultural identity has renovated rather than replaced an earlier commitment to racial identity, Walter Benn Michaels asserts that the idea of culture, far from constituting a challenge to racism, is actually a form of racism. Our America offers both a provocative reinterpretation of the role of identity in modernism and a sustained critique of the role of identity in postmodernism. "We have a great desire to be supremely American," Calvin Coolidge wrote in 1924. That desire, Michaels tells us, is at the very heart of American modernism, giving form and substance to a cultural movement that would in turn redefine America's cultural and collective identity--ultimately along racial lines. A provocative reinterpretation of American modernism, Our America also offers a new way of understanding current debates over the meaning of race, identity, multiculturalism, and pluralism. Michaels contends that the aesthetic movement of modernism and the social movement of nativism came together in the 1920s in their commitment to resolve the meaning of identity--linguistic, national, cultural, and racial. Just as the Johnson Immigration Act of 1924, which excluded aliens, and the Indian Citizenship Act of the same year, which honored the truly native, reconceptualized national identity, so the major texts of American writers such as Cather, Faulkner, Hurston, and Williams reinvented identity as an object of pathos--something that can be lost or found, defended or betrayed. Our America is both a history and a critique of this invention, tracing its development from the white supremacism of the Progressive period through the cultural pluralism of the Twenties. Michaels's sustained rereading of the texts of the period--the canonical, the popular, and the less familiar--exposes recurring concerns such as the reconception of the image of the Indian as a symbol of racial purity and national origins, the relation between World War I and race, contradictory appeals to the family as a model for the nation, and anxieties about reproduction that subliminally tie whiteness and national identity to incest, sterility, and impotence.

Colonial Entanglement

Colonial Entanglement PDF Author: Jean Dennison
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807835803
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
Colonial Entanglement

The Founders and the Idea of a National University

The Founders and the Idea of a National University PDF Author: George Thomas
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107083435
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
"Constituting the American Mind is about early efforts to establish a national university and what those efforts say about the nature and logic of American Constitutionalism. This book offers the first in depth study of the efforts to establish a national university from a constitutional perspective. While mostly noted in passing, the national university was put forward by every president from Washington to John Quincy Adams as a necessary supplement to the formal institutions of government; it would help constitute the American mind in a manner that carried forward the ideas the constitution rested on including, for example, the separation of the "civic" from the "theological.""--

Our Conrad

Our Conrad PDF Author: Peter Mallios
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804775710
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 485

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Book Description
Our Conrad is about the American reception of Joseph Conrad and its crucial role in the formation of American modernism. Although Conrad did not visit the country until a year before his death, his fiction served as both foil and mirror to America's conception of itself and its place in the world. Peter Mallios reveals the historical and political factors that made Conrad's work valuable to a range of prominent figures—including Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Richard Wright, Woodrow Wilson, and Theodore and Edith Roosevelt—and explores regional differences in Conrad's reception. He proves that foreign-authored writing can be as integral a part of United States culture as that of any native. Arguing that an individual writer's apparent (national, gendered, racial, political) identity is not always a good predictor of the diversity of voices and dialogues to which he gives rise, this exercise in transnational comparativism participates in post-Americanist efforts to render American Studies less insular and parochial.

The Paranoid Style in American Politics

The Paranoid Style in American Politics PDF Author: Richard Hofstadter
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307388441
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
This timely reissue of Richard Hofstadter's classic work on the fringe groups that influence American electoral politics offers an invaluable perspective on contemporary domestic affairs.In The Paranoid Style in American Politics, acclaimed historian Richard Hofstadter examines the competing forces in American political discourse and how fringe groups can influence — and derail — the larger agendas of a political party. He investigates the politics of the irrational, shedding light on how the behavior of individuals can seem out of proportion with actual political issues, and how such behavior impacts larger groups. With such other classic essays as “Free Silver and the Mind of 'Coin' Harvey” and “What Happened to the Antitrust Movement?, ” The Paranoid Style in American Politics remains both a seminal text of political history and a vital analysis of the ways in which political groups function in the United States.