Reading the Early RepublicHarvard University Press, 2009 M06 30 - 370 páginas Reading the Early Republic focuses attention on the forgotten dynamism of thought in the founding era. In every case, the documents, novels, pamphlets, sermons, journals, and slave narratives of the early American nation are richer and more intricate than modern readers have perceived. Rebellion, slavery, and treason--the mingled stories of the Revolution--still haunt national thought. Robert Ferguson shows that the legacy that made the country remains the idea of what it is still trying to become. He cuts through the pervading nostalgia about national beginnings to recapture the manic-depressive tones of its first expression. He also has much to say about the reconfiguration of charity in American life, the vital role of the classical ideal in projecting an unthinkable continental republic, the first manipulations of the independent American woman, and the troubled integration of civic and commercial understandings in the original claims of prosperity as national virtue. Reading the Early Republic uses the living textual tradition against history to prove its case. The first formative writings are more than sacred artifacts. They remain the touchstones of the durable promise and the problems in republican thought |
Dentro del libro
Resultados 1-5 de 53
Página 5
... gives itself orders about how to handle the present , and this thought process lends itself to another distortion . By transfiguring the past , we also yearn for it.13 The result is an unwarranted nostalgia for a better past that never ...
... gives itself orders about how to handle the present , and this thought process lends itself to another distortion . By transfiguring the past , we also yearn for it.13 The result is an unwarranted nostalgia for a better past that never ...
Página 15
... give you a detail of circumstances " ( LXXI , 161 ) . The best of these salacious fictionalized versions , Foster's account is read today as a feminist protest against " the negation of the female self " in Amer- ican life through ...
... give you a detail of circumstances " ( LXXI , 161 ) . The best of these salacious fictionalized versions , Foster's account is read today as a feminist protest against " the negation of the female self " in Amer- ican life through ...
Página 21
... give her . She learns instead " We are dependent beings " ( LV , 120 ; LXI , 133 ) . Eliza enters the pursuit of happiness in good faith only to find it unavailable in practice . " I look around for happiness , " she observes quietly ...
... give her . She learns instead " We are dependent beings " ( LV , 120 ; LXI , 133 ) . Eliza enters the pursuit of happiness in good faith only to find it unavailable in practice . " I look around for happiness , " she observes quietly ...
Página 25
... give up his money . " " I saw him while he was thus tortured to death , " writes Broteer at age sixty - nine . " The shocking scene is to this day fresh in my memory , and I have often been overcome while THE EARLINESS OF THE EARLY ...
... give up his money . " " I saw him while he was thus tortured to death , " writes Broteer at age sixty - nine . " The shocking scene is to this day fresh in my memory , and I have often been overcome while THE EARLINESS OF THE EARLY ...
Página 28
... gives a benefit of the doubt ( p . 23 ) . He suffers betrayal time and again because he takes others at their word until proven wrong and assumes the validity of formal institutions until the moment that they fail him ( pp . 22-23 ) ...
... gives a benefit of the doubt ( p . 23 ) . He suffers betrayal time and again because he takes others at their word until proven wrong and assumes the validity of formal institutions until the moment that they fail him ( pp . 22-23 ) ...
Contenido
9 | |
The Dialectic of Liberty | 51 |
The Commonalities of Common Sense | 84 |
Becoming American | 120 |
The Forgotten Publius | 151 |
Finding Rome in America | 172 |
Gabriels Rebellion | 198 |
Jefferson at Monticello | 218 |
Charity in the City of Brotherly Love | 234 |
The Last Early Republican Text | 254 |
Epilogue | 282 |
Notes | 293 |
Index | 353 |
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Términos y frases comunes
Alexander Hamilton Ameri American Revolution answer Benedict Arnold Benjamin Boston British Broteer Cambridge century citizen civil claim classical colonial Common Sense conception Constitution Convention Cooper Cora Court culture danger Dickinson discourse early republic early republican eighteenth-century Eliza England Enlightenment explain Federal Federalist figure Fisher Ames freedom George Washington Girard happiness Harvard University Press Hawk-eye Henrico County Ibid ideological intellectual James James Fenimore Cooper Jay's John Adams John André John Jay Joseph Story language Last leaders legal positivism Letters liberty Magua Major André ment mind Mohicans Monticello narrative Nathaniel natural law novel Paine's pamphlet past philosophical political problem Public Papers question reason rebellion religion religious repressed Revolutionary rhetorical secular slave social society speaker Story Thomas Jefferson Thomas Paine thought tion trial turn understanding union United Virginia virtue vols Webster William words Writings wrote York
Pasajes populares
Página 83 - Without doubt, it denotes not merely freedom from bodily restraint but also the right of the individual to contract, to engage in any of the common occupations of life, to acquire useful knowledge, to marry, establish a home and bring up children, to worship God according to the dictates of his own conscience, and generally to enjoy those privileges long recognized at common law as essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men.
Página 49 - ... enlightened by a benign religion, professed indeed and practiced in various forms, yet all of them inculcating honesty, truth, temperance, gratitude, and the love of man; acknowledging and adoring an overruling Providence, which by all its dispensations proves that it delights in the happiness of man here and his greater happiness hereafter, — with all these blessings, what more is necessary to make us a happy and a prosperous people?
Página 63 - Religion, always a principle of energy, in this new people is no way worn out or impaired ; and their mode of professing it is also one main cause of this free spirit. The people are Protestants, and of that kind which is the most adverse to all implicit submission of mind and opinion.
Página 44 - Equal and exact justice to all men, of whatever state or persuasion, religious or political; peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none; the support of the State governments in all their rights, as the most competent administrations for our domestic concerns and the surest bulwarks against antirepublican tendencies; the preservation of the General Government in its whole constitutional vigor, as the sheet anchor of our peace at home and safety abroad...
Página 44 - ... a well-disciplined militia, our best reliance in peace, and for the first moments of war, till regulars may relieve them...
Página 42 - If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this union, or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated, where reason is left free to combat it.
Página 118 - ... let a day be solemnly set apart for proclaiming the charter ; let it be brought forth placed on the divine law, the word of God ; let a crown be placed thereon, by which the world may know, that so far as we approve of monarchy, that in America the law is king. For as in absolute governments the king is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king ; and there ought to be no other.
Página 66 - ... they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up a sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. But they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree; and none shall make them afraid : for the mouth of the Lord of Hosts hath spoken it.
Página 81 - FOR the principal aim of society is to protect individuals in the enjoyment of those absolute rights, which were vested in them by the immutable laws of nature ; but which could not be preserved in peace without that mutual assistance and intercourse which is gained by the institution of friendly and social communities. Hence it follows, that the first and primary end of human laws is to maintain and regulate these absolute rights of individuals.