Questions for Fallen Founder: The Life of Aron Burr by Isenberg

1. Isenberg actually takes a very traditional approach to writing the history of the founders. However, what does her style add and how is she different from more recent studies of founders: for instance, George Washington's life?

2. Isenberg asserts that historians who mentioned Burr had “failed to do the legwork” and thus “have unconsciously mimicked fictional portrayals.” What was different about Isenberg’s research?

3. How does Isengard portray Burr, and in doing so, how does she dispel stereotypes of the day and recreate people?

Thanks,
Nathan

In The Midst of Perpetual Fetes

Waldstreicher, opposite of what previous historians such as Wood and Appleby did not quite account for according to Beyond the Founders, attempted to explain the dissent that occurred in the early republic. In doing so politics, ideology, nationalism and society were intimately linked to one another. This was summed up, and rightly so, in the very last sentence: "their willingness not just to observe holidays but to invent them."

Since that time, and perhaps it is another generational split, the meaning and purpose of holidays have changed. We just celebrated Thanksgiving and it had nothing to do with politics to me. Rather, it was just a chance to meet with family, and get good discounts on Black Friday. But to George Washington and the Federalist, it was very much political.

This change in meanings of holidays is not new. Waldstreicher pointed out numerous different uses of the Fourth of July. Ultimately, though, it was taken up by African Americans. Originally, the Fourth was a time of celebration, but as Waldstreicher demonstrated, the counterbalance of mourning went hand in hand. Whites celebrated the freedom of all men while the blacks vainly tried to gain admittance to the ceremonies which only reiterated their point that the Revolution had not made all men equal. So, they invented their own ceremonies of celebration to accomplish their political goal and so “Free blacks, the greatest critics of American political culture, paid that culture its greatest compliment: they used it to forge their own structures of celebration and mourning.” (347)

Nationalism through celebration

            Every Memorial Day, the roar of motorcycles can be heard in the nation’s capital as veteran’s and civilians alike ride from across the country to the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial, in what started out as an attempt to focus attention on those unaccounted for after Vietnam, but has become a way to honor and give very public thanks for the sacrifices of veterans. It’s called Rolling Thunder and originators of the rally named it as they envisioned the sound of bikers, clad in leather and jeans, crossing the Memorial Bridge in Washington D.C. But ironically Operation Rolling Thunder was also the name given the sustained 3-year bombardment of North Vietnam. One is meant to honor and the other was meant to instill fear.

            The veteran’s from Vietnam were not honored when they came home. Initially there was a great deal of controversy over the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial because it was not a statue and was designed by a young Asian woman. The founders of Rolling Thunder were angry at the administration because they thought not enough attention was being paid to those Missing in Action and to Prisoners of War. Over the years, this anti-rally gained legitimacy and strength as it grew from the initial run of 2,500 bikers to more a half million.

            While reading Waldstreicher’s In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes, my mind kept wandering to Rolling Thunder as he described various celebrations throughout the revolution. Not everyone celebrated the same thing and not everyone saw the benefits. But what the celebrations did accomplish was a political statement of nationalism from various points of view.

Mike Martinez

Office hours rescheduled Friday 11/30

I have a family commitment Friday afternoon, so office hours that day will be 10:30AM-12:30PM instead of the usual 2-5PM.

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Analysis of The Federalists Reconsidered

It is certain that viewing the political climate of the Early American Republic can be altered by looking at certain trends of the time. Federalists Reconsidered, an edited work put together Doron Ben-Atar and Barbara Oberg, looks solely at cultural factors to explain the behavior of the Federalists during this era. Through this collection of essays, Den-Atar and Oberg conclude that the Federalists encouraged broader political participation than their Jeffersonian counterparts did. That is, according to these editors, the Federalist measures entailed a platform that was anti-slavery, in favor of women voting rights, and kind to Native Americans. Jeffersonians, on the other hand, are portrayed as merely the white man’s party with a far more limited set of interests in mind. Furthermore, this book asserts that the critics of Federalism interpreted Federalists as concerned about the excesses of capitalism only after their individual wealth was secured. This book represents an attempt to discount the shortcomings noted by such critics and support the actions of the Federalists on account of them being politically necessary.

These authors insist that their interpretation of Federalism is unique given the scope of their research. Contrasting the typical views of historians with their own, these authors argue that the Federalists were not merely guilty as “fallen heroes innocently gone astray or traitors guilty of ruthless apostasy” but instead “victims of their own success” (Atar and Oberg 2). In other words, it is the case that they compromised central ideals in order to fit the political climate before them. This required them to avoid confrontation on various cultural issues. However, despite the reason for their political impotence, Federalists embodied noble ethics in the cultural realm that require the admiration and respect of historians.

An example of the flawed Federalist ideology regarding economic policies deals with Alexander Hamilton’s waffling views on technological piracy. Though a devout supporter of the free information, Hamilton saw American secrets dispersed to the rest of the world as limiting the American advantage while obtaining information from abroad was certain to further American interests. According to Ben-Atar and Oberg, critics of Federalism cite this as an example of a key Federalist who stood for a noteworthy principle (in this case that would be the free distribution of information as advocated by enlightened thinkers), who nonetheless acted in complete contradiction of this professed ideal (Ben-Atar 60). However, these authors justify the behavior on account of Hamilton’s political position and his role as a public servant to the interests of the United States.

Regarding women’s rights it appears that Federalists likewise reneged on previous platforms. After all, they seemed to support broadening involvement to women but they failed to strive for such goals incessantly. To be sure, Federalists, like most Americans of the time, saw women as guiding the nation’s morals from within the home. Politics and legal affairs, on the other hand, were logically left to men. Federalists differed from Jeffersonians primarily on the basis that the latter clause should at most remain in existence on a de facto basis. The worldview of Federalists entailed “a hierarchical society and positive rights positions” which served as the means by which Federalists could serve to more thoroughly appreciate female participation in politics (Zagarri 133).

As far as issues of dealing with other races are concerned, it appears that Federalists were more open-minded though similarly inert. Given the opportunity to take harsher measures to hinder slavery and insure more tranquil and fair-minded relations with Native Americans, Federalists forfeit an important cause in order to limit their own political casualties. Paul Finkleman sees the practice of slavery into the nineteenth century as evidence of the “incompleteness of the Revolution” (Finkleman 135). After all, a thorough revolution would be sure to entail universal freedom. However, once again, Federalists found themselves in a situation where they were up against the cultural tides of an American public that was unwilling to embrace their idealist message. Hence, much like the previous episodes discussed in this essay, the Federalists bowed to the conventions of the time.

These examples of Federalism’s unending wavering are clearly justified according to Ben-Atar and Oberg. After all, retreat on such key battlegrounds was necessary when viewed in the proper cultural context. This study sheds light on both the pragmatism of the early Federalists while likewise displaying a certain significance of cultural influences. Despite the exact extent to which each was in play during this time period, it remains noteworthy that Federalism fell prey to both despite the cultural historians attempt to save them from the first charge.

External Readings for Waldstreicher

Novels/Authors: Susan G. Davis, Parades and Power, Street Theatre in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia; Len Travers, Celebrating the Fourth, Independence Day and the Rites of Nationalism in the Early Republic.

Parades and Power, Street Theatre in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia

Davis describes the expression of culture through parades as “one of a range of urban communicative events,” including “orations, lectures, sermons, elections, riots, demonstrations, balloon ascensions, commercial promotions, charitable balls, executions, market days, dedications, concerts, and political meetings” (14). However, “unlike other art forms, street dramas do not seem to have individuated creators” (18).

Davis sees her main predecessors and contemporaries as E.P. Thompson: “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth-Century,” Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, and Eric Hobsbawm, “The Invention of Tradition.” Older expressions of culture as described by Burke, Thompson, and Davis were destroyed by “the invention of commodified recreation” including the commercialization of festivals, music halls, parades and commercial journalism.

Her thesis is fairly straightforward. For Davis, “parades, though ephemeral, were more than entertainment: As communication they were ways of influencing perceptions and ideas, and, as such, important social actions.” To study them, then is to expand our knowledge of how public events communicate, what they seek to communicate, and to whom (22). For Davis, the parade does not just reflect society, it shapes that society through symbols and transmission of meaning.

The structure of Parades and Power is also relatively straightforward. Three distinct types of parade culture are studied: the procession of volunteer militias, the Burlesque Tradition, and the later advent of labor parades. These analyses are preceded by a discussion of how public space evolved over the course of a century in Philadelphia and are followed by an analysis of the parade as a vessel for the transmission of social constructs.

In brief, the volunteer militia processions were originally an important conveyor of social hierarchy. Militias such as the “First Troop City Cavalry,” the “State Fencibles,” and “Washington Greys” were private clubs of “aspiring professionals and young men from Philadelphia’s most prominent families” (51). They were “expressions of affluence” and the display of social life “available to those with money and time (55). They essentially “made history” in a contemporary fashion by memorializing important battles of the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812 with the socially elite militia groups inserting themselves as the role of the protagonist.

The Burlesque was the expression by the poor and working classes in early 19th century Philadelphia. It “propose[d] alternatives to affluent…social styles” (73), Was perceived as “wild and irrational” by the party press and local governmental authorities (74), and utilized humorous role-reversal with social meaning against the trappings of an “unrepublican” aristocracy (82-96). These “rowdy” public expressions lambasted the social elite through mockery and personal satire of known officials. The fact that they were so derided by social authorities indicates for Davis that they had “hit their mark.” Occasionally prosecuted with limited success, attempts at suppression only spurred the parades “on to greater mockery and enthusiasm” (94-97).

The final type of parade studied by Davis was the “class drama” of the Worker’s Parade. Laborers “were pressured to appear in public, not as workers, but as respectable, classless citizens” as they were defined “from without and above” (113). “The difference between a favorable and unfavorable report” in the local papers tended to be “tied to the marchers’ appearance and their use of popular parade conventions;” i.e. groups such as the sawyers and stevedores who were “racially mixed, unskilled, and lacking the colorful sashes and hired bands” became described in the press as a “rabble” (136).

Celebrating the Fourth, Independence Day and the Rites of Nationalism in the Early Republic

Len Travers seeks to study the American celebration of the Fourth of July holiday from a chronological perspective; employing the method of organization as a “strobe light” wherein the same date is revisited over time to examine how rituals, symbols, and understandings have changed over time (11). To Travers, the Fourth of July originally began as a celebratory holiday in the midst of the war, itself, wherein public enthusiasm could be bolstered, morale increased, and invectives against the British and loyalists espoused.” It worked as a device which “allowed revolutionaries to solidify themselves as a group publicly and isolate enemies” (27-28). Following the war, different needs led to the incorporation of different meanings.

Initially, in the Antebellum Period the commemoration of Independence Day was directly linked to “self-identification.” The rhetoric reinforced the idea of a “national birthday” at which point Americans “began to be free.” Importantly, the construction admits “virtually no past before July 4, 1776; it was as if Americans could wipe history’s slate clean and start afresh” (55). In an effort to retain the “spirit of victory” while maintaining the “necessary virtue to practice festive restraint” a “balancing act” was needed between “intoxication” and “civil reinforcements.” Thus, the local elites created a controlled chaos, wherein popular bonfires would be replaced by controlled firework displays and popular rioting might be replaced by a parade dominated by the military and the militias (66).

However, by the late 1780’s the holiday was transformed into a political competition wherein festivities were directed to promote political agendas. A war waged “almost exclusively at the symbolic level” (69). In the Grand Federal Procession of 1788, for example, the events of the Revolution were displayed chronologically: beginning with the Fourth of July float, proceeding through events such as the French Alliance, it culminated in the Constitution while entirely ignoring the Articles of Confederation (73-78).

Toward the end of the 1790’s the unity of celebrations had given way to the polarizing conflict between Federalists and Republicans as each tried different symbols in public parades to advance their independent objectives. To Travers, “at stake was nothing less than the power to interpret America’s past ‘correctly’ – and in consequence to mold its future course” (101-106). The years leading up to the war of 1812 increasingly became an occasion for “gloomy ruminations and nostalgia for a halcyon past” as political tensions “soured dialogue and cast competing doubts on the legacy of the revolution” (189-190). The post-war years, however, witnessed a resurgence of nationalism. Shedding the legacy of the “great generation” which had proceeded them, parades lost their solemnity and the “God-like hero Washington was replaced by the more accessible war hero symbol of Jackson” (206-207).

The author invokes Gordon Wood’s impression that “Americans had moved into another century, not only in time but in though, in the way they perceived themselves and their world.” Essentially, they had gone from a republican ideology based on subordination to the public good, to one that glorified individual initiative” (215) and the author uses other symbols, such as Lewis Krimmel’s “Independence Day at Center Square” (1819) to demonstrate the transition to individualism and individual methods of celebration. Linked to this transformation of culture is the transformation of urban public spaces. Generally, the author concludes by asserting that because American republican nationalism depended so heavily on “recently invented traditions,” it was a “fragile construct” for which public ritual was well suited (225-227). While invented, it is nonetheless relevant and influential on the development and transformation of comunitas on a national scale and its study by historians can shed light on the transformation of both ritual and society.

My Bad -- what is happening with History 8021 in these last weeks

Coming back from the holiday, I completely forgot to post a question on the Waldstreicher book this week. Instead of formal papers this week, why doesn't everyone just post a brief comment on the book here. Also, please take look at some of the dropped reading originally scheduled for this week, namely the intro and editors' chapters of Beyond the Founders. Then we will be able to talk a little about whether there really is a "new new political history" of the Early Republic, and what it is about compared to the earlier models.

Next week will read Nancy Isenberg's Fallen Founder, plus her chapter in Beyond the Founders and the Waldstreicher review-essay.

We talk tomorrow in class about whether we want to meet during finals week or not.

Davidson Paper

A Novel Class
As a cultural historian, Cathy Davidson address the issues of beliefs, social forms, and material traits as well as the shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices of the early American Republic in The Revolution and the Word Davidson, an English professor, aptly chose to examine early American novels in order to describe American culture. Like Bernard Bailyn, who examined pamphlets from pre-revolutionary times to describe an ideology, due to their wide circulation and easy access, Davidson did something similar. She asserts that novels were widely circulated among the lower classes. Yes, the lower classes, which included slaves, indentured servants, and Davidson’s main focus: women. Novels became the way in which feelings of inequality and class structure were expressed as well as the exclusivity of the supposed egalitarian government exposed. In short and contrary to the liberal and republican consensus, Davidson displays an un-American ideology that gave rise to inequality and class structure that opposed the Revolutionary ideal.
Davidson argues for a history of texts that defines the conditions that the work was written in versus the conditions that it is read in such that as the conditions change, so does the reading of the texts.[1] Davidson dispelled the misconceptions that there were not many American novels produced and of the ones that were, they were plagiarized.[2] Rather, American writers were trying to define themselves as independent from Europe. Novels, in turn, were read by many people because of their accessibility. However, the publication of novels was quite a taxing enterprise as Davidson described. Novels continued to be published, though, because of the ability to combine sensational plots with relative problems. The novel, then, contained the struggle over the path the new nation was to take.
The American Revolutionary myth is that, according to Jefferson, is that “all men were created equal.”[3] The problem was that the Federalists had created an exclusive elite government that the republican party would later fight against. The problem was, according to Davidson, what Lukac’s described as the bourgeoisie process of nascent empowerment.[4] In refuting the Federalists with an egalitarian argument, the republicans gained power. Once there, they had the choice of continuing equality or masking their exclusive government in egalitarian rhetoric, which Davidson says they did. This approach is not new.
Where Davidson contributes to American Revolutionary historiography is her assertion that the American novel was “ideally positioned to evaluate American society and to provide a critique of what was sorely missing in the exuberant postrevolutionary rhetoric of republicanism and, conversely but simultaneously, what was most dubious about an elite’s jeremiands against an increasingly heterogeneous social order.”[5] The novel, therefore, was the expression of a new democracy in which the excluded classes gained a voice and exposed the American myth as well as a democratization of mind, in the words of Gordon S. Wood used by Davidson.
Novels were so powerful because of their combination of their use of dialogue that connected the reader with the protagonist. Davidson showed that the connection was so powerful that many readers believed the story to be true, as in the instance of the grave of Charlotte Temple.[6] All three genre’s of novels that Davidson described, sentimental, picaresque, and gothic, attacked the American patriarchal society but never offered a solution; that was left for the readers. Left without a solution, Davidson believes that ““America” has existed as a self-contradictory and self-perpetuating symbolic construct right from its formative years, and American novelists, like other citizens of the new Republic, early debated, but did not resolve, the meaning of the “legacy America”-what it was, what it meant.”[7]
That unresolved conflict was evident in “The Anarchiad” and Monima, or the Beggar Girl in which the elite history of the first overshadows the history of the poor in the second. As in Monima the capitalistic society keeps her, a woman, in a degenerate occupation with a salary that will just allow her sustenance. She is perpetually kept in the lowest class by the elites who use her services.[8] That same capitalistic economy still exists and one has to wonder, thanks to Davidson, whether American’s egocentric view of capitalism and our way of life perpetuates a society of class in an American society ingrained with an idea of classlessness.
This leads to another question that Davidson elicits as she says, “no document can simply be “read” as if they were objective, scientific data produced or preserved as some pure product of a people and the abiding record of their times.”[9] While Davidson appears to be a cultural historian, might she also be a predecessor to the Post Modernism movement of the 1990s. As a English and literary professor first, it seems that Davidson is questioning the integrity of history by subjecting the reading of historical texts, such as “The Anarchiad” and Monima, to mere historical interpretation based upon “how what we read shapes how we read.”[10] Therefore, Davidson is reducing history to mere story making.[11]
If so, Davidson missed the historical footnote, or rather the reliance upon other historians through footnotes. Footnotes incorporate the work of others and build a historiography. Davidson constantly refers to others’ work but seems to mask a contradiction, much like the one she exposed in the republican party through her literary analysis of novels. She fails to see that it is impossible for one historian to cover all angles of the same issue: hence “The Anarchiad” and Monima. This is my only qualm and I really enjoyed, understood, followed, and believed her argument for class through the novel.
[1] Cathy Davidson, Revolution and the Word, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), x.
[2] Ibid., 3.
[3] Ibid., 117.
[4] Ibid., 313.
[5] Ibid., 313.
[6] Ibid. 365.
[7] Ibid., 241.
[8] Ibid., 362.
[9] Ibid., 360.
[10] Ibid., 358.
[11] Ibid., 124.

Reminder

Just a reminder that I will be coming from a meeting in Jeff City, so we won't be starting class until around 4pm on Thursday, Nov. 15. We will try to quit around the usual time.

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When English Departments Write History

In After the Revolution: Profiles of Early American Culture (1979), Joseph J. Ellis argues that an evolution took place during the colonial and early federal period that caused previously liberal democrat artists to become conservative republicans due to their experiences as artists within an emerging market economy that turned their art into commodities. These individuals began as champions for the democratization of cultural production because they felt and adhered to the prevailing view that America as on the precipice of artistic greatness. All that was necessary was the liberation from old, specifically European, constraints and limitations. Once individual and national freedom was obtained, American would become the next Greece, the next cultural capital of the world in accordance with current ideologies of cultural progress. However, optimistic predictions such as these went unfulfilled and a vast pessimism prevailed during the first half of the nineteenth century. Ellis seeks to understand how such a failure could occur by looking at the lives and artistic experiences of four individuals who represent a specific area of the fine arts: Brackenridge (author), Peale (painter), Dunlap (dramatist), and Webster (educator).

I assume that these men were chosen because their historical significance can be read as a metaphor for the period as well. They were famous in their day but have been lost to the current era, at least in Ellis’s perception. Their work is not canonized and is not considered significant and thus they are perfect subjects for the type of analysis Ellis seeks to conduct. These men who held so much promise and sought fame and public service through their art became republicans (and hardened federalists) because of their experiences in the artistic marketplace. They found that they had to prostitute their art for the whims and demands of the masses in order to gain financial success or at the very least solvency. In order to reclaim art from its commodification, they sought without success federal subsidies for cultural productions. These men, with the exception of Noah Webster, do not carry artistic legacies of the same caliber as Cooper, Emerson, and Hawthorne because their post-revolutionary experiences demanded that they contend with the marketplace first and with art second.

In Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (1988), Lawrence Levine poses as his central argument, “because the primary categories of culture have been the products of ideologies which were always subject to modifications and transformations, the perimeters of our cultural divisions have been permeable and shifting rather than fixed and immutable” (8). He goes on to specifically state that the nineteenth century, particularly the earlier half, was a time when “Americans…shared a public culture less hierarchically organized, less fragmented into relatively rigid adjectival boxes than their descendents were to experience a century later” (9). In this text, Levine highlights a trend of perception and classification where certain types of cultural production is ranked higher or lower in comparison to other native productions and in relation to European modes and tastes. His text is an excellent example of the ongoing debate in fine art and literature departments regarding the quality of American culture over time or if there is even a comparable American works that stand up to the test of European cultural artifacts.

In brief, Levine moves from shared culture where the masses experienced art together, even at the theater where economic and class determined the seating arrangements, to the rigid categorization and classification of art during the early twentieth century. To provide proof of such a shared experience by the masses at even the highest of highbrow artistic activities, he dedicates an entire chapter to the prevalence of Shakespeare theatrical productions in America during the entire nineteenth century, even in the California goldfields. This was not just an educational moment where the elites were attempting to civilize the miners for the actors found out quickly when mistakes were made that the miners knew their Shakespeare. However, cultural productions that were considered to be “highbrow culture” would not always succeed financially, but Levine argues that this has more to do with the way this artistic expression was being presented to the people. In the epilogue, he brings the discussion forward to the present moment of the late 1980s when the fine arts were being contested and the canon itself was under revision. He ends the text by advocating a open mind that understands the cultural and historical contexts that have used and abused culture for certain social ends. It would appear that he seeks a return to the shared, and unpretentious, cultural experience of the nineteenth century.

In Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language, and the Culture of Performance (1993), Jay Fleigelman argues the revolution and postrevolutionary periods was also an era of elocutionary revolution. The Declaration of Independence was meant to be read aloud and thus be performed for the masses, not read silently as an individual experience.

It seeks to recover a ‘lost world’, specifically the evolution of rhetoric and oratory from persuasion to emotional presentation of sincerity. The orator had to become physically and orally ‘self-evident’ to his audience.

Questions: Davidson's Revolution and the Word

The work attempts to incorporate literary history and ‘mainstream’ history by arguing that novels of the period are certifiable artifacts of political and social discourse.

1) Do you buy the argument? Is her attempt to reconstruct the mentalite of the era accurate? and how does it compare with ideological histories, such as Bailyn and Wood?

2) In the original text, Davidson argues for the ‘subversive’ nature of the novels. In the new and improved introduction, she states that she would alter the argument from ‘subversive’ to ‘oppositional’. Are these novels really subversive or oppositional considering their popularity amongst the masses (i.e. is there a significant class dimension missing from the analysis)? Also, consider the analysis of a picaresque novel – if the material does not take a position can that still be considered ‘oppositional’ or ‘subversive’?

3) Considering the financial and popular failure of at least one of her examples, is the material itself even relevant to her argument? Can a published book that was not purchased and read be considered a valid source?

4) Gender: What about the men? Davidson states several times that the readership of novels included men and women and yet she does not include masculinity or men in general in her analysis. Her primary focus upon the female readership tends to fall into the trap of isolating (and possibly alienating) the women and thus reinforcing the stereotypical and circular argument that only women read novels and thus novels are substandard literature.

5) Evidence: Is using marginalia as evidence credible and valid? Could a historian get away with this method (if so, in what instances?)?

Evaluation:

How would you incorporate this material into an undergraduate course? Or is this just great information that will never see the light of day outside of graduate courses and the libraries of professors?

Paper question for Davidson, "Revolution and the Word"

Evaluate Cathy Davidson's Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (either edition) from an historian's point of view. How exactly was the novel related to the American Revolution, according to Davidson? Is her book the major contribution to the historiography of the Early Republic it has been cracked up to be, or just a chance for an English professor to riff on some dusty old novels?

In an open-minded and substantive way, please answer this question in 2-4 pages by our next class meeting, 11/15/07. If you get done in time, please post the text of your paper as a comment here, so that your instructor and colleagues have a chance to look at it beforehand.

P.S. I would advise reading all the way to the end -- the chapter on Early American Gothic is one of my favorite and more relevant parts of the book. Also, don't get bogged down in the new edition's intro either, as it chiefly addresses post-1986 trends in cultural studies that will probably confuse many of you. Do study the new intro if you have taken a university-level literature class in the past decade or so.

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Supplementary reading for Waldstreicher,"In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes"

Included are influences and other works on nationalism, political culture, and public celebrations.

• Agnew, Jean-Christophe. Worlds Apart : The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550-1750. New York : Cambridge University Press, 1986.
• Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. London and New York: Verso, 1991.
• Baker, Jean H. Affairs of Party: The Political Culture of Northern Democrats in the Mid-Nineteenth Century. New York: Fordham University Press, 1998.
• Beeman, Richard, Stephen Botein, and Edward C. Carter II, eds. Beyond Confederation: Origins of the Constitution and American National Identity. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1987.
• Bell, David A. The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism, 1680-1800. Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 2001.
• Ben-Atar, Doron and Barbara B. Oberg, eds. Federalists Reconsidered. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998.
• Branson, Susan. These Fiery Frenchified Dames: Women and Political Culture in Early National Philadelphia. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001.
• Brooke, John L. "Ancient Lodges and Self-Created Societies: Voluntary Association and the Public Sphere in the Early Republic." In Launching the 'Extended Republic': The Federalist Era, ed. Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert, 273-377. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1996.
• Brooke, John L. "Reason and Passion the Public Sphere: Habermas and the Cultural Historians." 29, no. 1 (Summer 1998): 43-67.
• Brooke, John L. To Be 'Read by the Whole People': Press, Party, and Public Sphere in the United States, 1789-1840. Worcester: American Antiquarian Society, 2002.
• Brown, Richard D. Knowledge Is Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America, 1700-1865. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.
• Burstein, Andrew. Sentimental Democracy: The Evolution of America's Romantic Self-Image. New York: Hill & Wang, 1999.
• Calhoun, Craig, ed. Habermas and the Public Sphere. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992.
• Colley, Linda. Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992.
• Conroy, David W. In Public Houses: Drink and the Revolution of Authority in Colonial Massachusetts. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1995.
• Cunningham Jr., Noble E. The Jeffersonian Republicans: The Formation of Party Organization, 1789-1801. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1957.
• Curti, Merle. The Roots of American Loyalty. New York: Atheneum, 1968.
• Davis, Susan G. Parades and Power: Street Theatre in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986.
• Estes, Todd. The Jay Treaty Debate, Public Opinion, and the Evolution of Early American Political Culture. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006.
• Formisano, Ronald P. "The Concept of Political Culture." Journal of Interdisciplinary History
• ________. "Deferential-Participant Politics: The Early Republic's Political Culture, 1789-1840." American Political Science Review 68 (1974): 473-87.
• Formisano, Ronald P. The Transformation of Political Culture: Massachusetts Parties, 1790s-1840s. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983.
• Gellner, Ernest. Nations and Nationalism. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1983.
• Gendzel, Glen. "Political Culture: Genealogy of a Concept." Journal of Interdisciplinary History 28, no. 2 (1997): 225-50.
• Grasso, Christopher. A Speaking Aristocracy: Transforming Public Discourse in Eighteenth-Century Connecticut. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1999.
• Greenfield, Liah. Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992.
• Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991.
• Hobsbawm, E. J. Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
• Hunt, Lynn, ed. The New Cultural History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989.
• ________. Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.
• Hutchinson, John and Anthony D. Smith, eds. Nationalism. Oxford, Eng.: Oxford University Press, 1994.
• Karsten, Peter. Patriot-Heroes in England and America: Political Symbolism and Changing Values Over Three Centuries. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978.
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