Bøger i Jeffersonian America serien

Examines how the demands of western settlers, the potential of western disunion, and local, popular politics determined the fate of slavery and freedom in the West between 1790 and 1820. This book demonstrates that local political contests and geopolitical realities were responsible for determining slavery's fate in the West.

Although it eventually became a regrettably profitable business for enslavers and their partners, a successful slave economy in the American South was no foregone conclusion. Bringing the lower Mississippi valley to the foreground of the history of the early republic, Replanting a Slave Society is the first major study to analyze in tandem the sugar and cotton revolutions that took place in the region in the years before and after the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. It highlights the far-ranging, at times nation-encompassing, consequences of decisions made by a small elite group of planters and merchants in a remote colonial slave society and their effect on the subsequent course of American history.In the mid-1790s, the power and prosperity of the lower Mississippi valley's colonial elites came under threat from revolutionary instability and economic collapse. In response, those elites engaged in a successful effort to remake their society by rapidly adopting sugar and cotton production, adapting them to local conditions, taking advantage of, and advancing, the existing slave trades, and reshaping those slave trades to suit their needs. In 1811, following the successful suppression of the German Coast Insurrection (the largest slave revolt in North American history), these planter elites congratulated themselves on the stability and future prosperity of their "e;replanted"e; slave society. These crop revolutions marked a key turning point in the history of the lower Mississippi valley and set the economic and social course that the region-the hub of the Deep South-would follow until the American Civil War.

When we think of Thomas Jefferson, a certain picture comes to mind for some of us, combining his physical appearance with our perception of his character. During Jefferson's lifetime this image was already taking shape, helped along by his own assiduous cultivation. In Jefferson on Display, G. S. Wilson draws on a broad array of sources to show how Jefferson fashioned his public persona to promote his political agenda. During his long career, his image shifted from cosmopolitan intellectual to man of the people. As president he kept friends and foes guessing: he might appear unpredictably in old, worn, and out-of-date clothing with hair unkempt, yet he could as easily play the polished gentleman in a black suit, as he hosted small dinners in the President's House that were noted for their French-inspired food and fine European wines. Even in retirement his image continued to evolve, as guests at Monticello reported being met by the Sage clothed in rough fabrics that he proudly claimed were created from his own merino sheep, leading Americans by example to manufacture their own clothing, free of Europe.By paying close attention to Jefferson's controversial clothing choices and physical appearance--as well as his use of portraiture, architecture, and the polite refinements of dining, grooming, and conversation--Wilson provides invaluable new insight into this perplexing founder.

<p><p>What did Thomas Jefferson look like? How did he carry himself? Such questions, reasonable to ask as we look back on a person who lived in an era before photography, are the starting point for this boldly original new work. Maurizio Valsania considers all aspects of Jeffersons complex conception of "e;the body,"e; from eighteenth-century clothing and fashion to manners, adornment, posture, gesture, and visual and material culture. Drawing also from the fields of medical science, psychology, and cultural anthropology, the author conjures a vivid and detailed re-creation of the third president as a living, breathingand ponderinghuman being.</p><p>Having situated Jefferson in his own body, Valsania looks at the embodied Jefferson in the world of his fellow humans. Any one of the other people in Jeffersons societywhether that other person was male or female, free or enslaved, African American or Native Americanwas a critical counterexample for the eighteenth-century Virginian to define himself against, and Valsanias explorations here lead to numerous insightful discoveries about race, gender, and structures of power. The first comprehensive exploration of Jeffersons corporeal world, <i>Jeffersons Body</i> brings the man vividly to life for the modern reader while deepening our understanding of what it meant to Jefferson to be alive.</p></p>

Of all the founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson stood out as the most controversial and confounding. Loved and hated, revered and reviled, during his lifetime he served as a lightning rod for dispute. In this fascinating book, historian Robert M. S. McDonald explores how Jefferson, a man with a manner so mild some described it as meek, emerged as such a divisive figure.

Explores the historical consciousness of Americans caught up in the Revolution and its aftermath. By focusing on how various individuals and groups envisioned their future, the contributors show that revolutionary Americans knew they were making choices that would redirect the "course of human events".

Examines how Thomas Jefferson's contemporaries - including Washington, Adams, Hamilton, Madison, and Marshall - articulated their visions for the early American republic. This volume reveals how vigorous debates and competing rival visions defined the early American republic in the formative epoch after the revolution.

A study of the role of women in early American political history. Catherine Allgor demonstrates that the Republican values so central to the ideology of the post-Revolutionary era actually required the presence of women to permit the federal government to function.

Of all the founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson stood out as the most controversial and confounding. Loved and hated, revered and reviled, during his lifetime he served as a lightning rod for dispute. Few major figures in American history provoked such a polarization of public opinion. One supporter described him as the possessor of "e;an enlightened mind and superior wisdom; the adorer of our God; the patriot of his country; and the friend and benefactor of the whole human race."e; Martha Washington, however, considered Jefferson "e;one of the most detestable of mankind"e;--and she was not alone. While Jefferson's supporters organized festivals in his honor where they praised him in speeches and songs, his detractors portrayed him as a dilettante and demagogue, double-faced and dangerously radical, an atheist and "e;Anti-Christ"e; hostile to Christianity. Characterizing his beliefs as un-American, they tarred him with the extremism of the French Revolution. Yet his allies cheered his contributions to the American Revolution, unmasking him as the now formerly anonymous author of the words that had helped to define America in the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson, meanwhile, anxiously monitored the development of his image. As president he even clipped expressions of praise and scorn from newspapers, pasting them in his personal scrapbooks. In this fascinating new book, historian Robert M. S. McDonald explores how Jefferson, a man with a manner so mild some described it as meek, emerged as such a divisive figure. Bridging the gap between high politics and popular opinion, Confounding Father exposes how Jefferson's bifurcated image took shape both as a product of his own creation and in response to factors beyond his control. McDonald tells a gripping, sometimes poignant story of disagreements over issues and ideology as well as contested conceptions of the rules of politics. In the first fifty years of independence, Americans' views of Jefferson revealed much about their conflicting views of the purpose and promise of America.Jeffersonian America

In Pulpit and Nation, Spencer McBride highlights the importance of Protestant clergymen in early American political culture, elucidating the actual role of religion in the founding era. Beginning with colonial precedents for clerical involvement in politics and concluding with false rumors of Thomas Jefferson's conversion to Christianity in 1817, this book reveals the ways in which the clergy's political activism-and early Americans' general use of religious language and symbols in their political discourse-expanded and evolved to become an integral piece in the invention of an American national identity. Offering a fresh examination of some of the key junctures in the development of the American political system-the Revolution, the ratification debates of 1787-88, and the formation of political parties in the 1790s-McBride shows how religious arguments, sentiments, and motivations were subtly interwoven with political ones in the creation of the early American republic. Ultimately, Pulpit and Nation reveals that while religious expression was common in the political culture of the Revolutionary era, it was as much the calculated design of ambitious men seeking power as it was the natural outgrowth of a devoutly religious people.

In the decades following the Revolution, the supernatural exploded across the American landscape-fabulous reports of healings, exorcisms, magic, and angels crossed the nation. Under First Amendment protections, new sects based on such miracles proliferated. At the same time, Enlightenment philosophers and American founders explicitly denied the possibility of supernatural events, dismissing them as deliberate falsehoods-and, therefore, efforts to suborn the state. Many feared that belief in the supernatural itself was a danger to democracy. In this way, miracles became a political problem and prompted violent responses in the religious communities of Prophetstown, Turtle Creek, and Nauvoo. In Blood from the Sky, Adam Jortner argues that the astonishing breadth and extent of American miracles and supernaturalism following independence derived from Enlightenment ideas about proof and sensory evidence, offering a chance at certain belief in an uncertain religious climate. Jortner breaks new ground in explaining the rise of radical religion in antebellum America, revisiting questions of disenchantment, modernity, and religious belief in a history of astounding events that-as early Americans would have said-needed to be seen to be believed.

Notions of democracy and nationhood constitute the pivotal legacy of the American Revolution, but to understand their development one must move beyond a purely American context. Citizens of a Common Intellectual Homeland explores the simultaneous emergence of modern concepts of democracy and the nation on both sides of the Atlantic during the age of revolutions. Armin Mattes argues that in their origin the two concepts were indistinguishable because they arose from a common revolutionary impulse directed against the prevailing hierarchical political and social order. The author shows how the reconceptualization of democracy and the nation, which resulted from this revolutionary impulse, received its decisive form from the French Revolution. Although the French Revolution was instrumental in redefining the two terms, however, neither were these changes confined to France, nor did the new meanings merely radiate from France to other countries. To illustrate the transatlantic emergence of these ideas, Mattes considers the works of pairs of prominent intellectual contemporaries-one in America and the other in Europe-each writing on a common topic. The thinkers and topics include Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke on the transatlantic revolutions, John Adams and Friedrich von Gentz on the mixed constitution, James Madison and Immanuel Kant on perpetual peace, and Thomas Jefferson and Destutt de Tracy on the nation. Mattes's approach highlights the significant impact that the French Revolution had on the evolution of thought in the period, demonstrating that the emergence and early development of modern concepts of democracy and the nation in America were intimately tied to revolutionary events and processes in the larger Atlantic world.Preparation of this volume has been supported by the Thomas Jefferson Foundation.Jeffersonian America

In Patriotism and Piety, Jonathan Den Hartog argues that the question of how religion would function in American society was decided in the decades after the Constitution and First Amendment established a legal framework. Den Hartog shows that among the wide array of politicians and public figures struggling to define religion's place in the new nation, Federalists stood out-evolving religious attitudes were central to Federalism, and the encounter with Federalism strongly shaped American Christianity. Den Hartog describes the Federalist appropriations of religion as passing through three stages: a "e;republican"e; phase of easy cooperation inherited from the experience of the American Revolution; a "e;combative"e; phase, forged during the political battles of the 1790s-1800s, when the destiny of the republic was hotly contested; and a "e;voluntarist"e; phase that grew in importance after 1800. Faith became more individualistic and issue-oriented as a result of the actions of religious Federalists.Religious impulses fueled party activism and informed governance, but the redirection of religious energies into voluntary societies sapped party momentum, and religious differences led to intraparty splits. These developments altered not only the Federalist Party but also the practice and perception of religion in America, as Federalist insights helped to create voluntary, national organizations in which Americans could practice their faith in interdenominational settings. Patriotism and Piety focuses on the experiences and challenges confronted by a number of Federalists, from well-known leaders such as John Adams, John Jay, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, and Timothy Dwight to lesser-known but still important figures such as Caleb Strong, Elias Boudinot, and William Jay.

Christa Dierksheide argues that "e;enlightened"e; slaveowners in the British Caribbean and the American South, neither backward reactionaries nor freedom-loving hypocrites, thought of themselves as modern, cosmopolitan men with a powerful alternative vision of progress in the Atlantic world. Instead of radical revolution and liberty, they believed that amelioration-defined by them as gradual progress through the mitigation of social or political evils such as slavery-was the best means of driving the development and expansion of New World societies. Interrogating amelioration as an intellectual concept among slaveowners, Dierksheide uses a transnational approach that focuses on provincial planters rather than metropolitan abolitionists, shedding new light on the practice of slavery in the Anglophone Atlantic world. She argues that amelioration-of slavery and provincial society more generally-was a dominant concept shared by enlightened planters who sought to "e;improve"e; slavery toward its abolition, as well as by those who sought to ameliorate the institution in order to expand the system. By illuminating the common ground shared between supposedly anti- and pro-slavery provincials, she provides a powerful alternative to the usual story of liberal progress in the plantation Americas. Amelioration, she demonstrates, went well beyond the master-slave relationship, underpinning Anglo-American imperial expansion throughout the Atlantic world.

Young Continental soldiers carried a heavy burden in the American Revolution. Their experiences of coming of age during the upheavals of war provide a novel perspective on the Revolutionary era, eliciting questions of gender, family life, economic goals, and politics. "e;Going for a soldier"e; forced young men to confront profound uncertainty, and even coercion, but also offered them novel opportunities. Although the war imposed obligations on youths, military service promised young men in their teens and early twenties alternate paths forward in life. Continental soldiers' own youthful expectations about respectable manhood and their goals of economic competence and marriage not only ordered their experience of military service; they also shaped the fighting capacities of George Washington's army and the course of the war. Becoming Men of Some Consequence examines how young soldiers and officers joined the army, their experiences in the ranks, their relationships with civilians, their choices about quitting long-term military service, and their attempts to rejoin the flow of civilian life after the war. The book recovers young soldiers' perspectives and stories from military records, wartime letters and journals, and postwar memoirs and pension applications, revealing how revolutionary political ideology intertwined with rational calculations and youthful ambitions. Its focus on soldiers as young men offers a new understanding of the Revolutionary War, showing how these soldiers' generational struggle for their own independence was a profound force within America's struggle for its independence.

Collegiate Republic offers a compellingly different view of the first generation of college communities founded after the American Revolution. Such histories have usually taken the form of the institutional tale, charting the growth of a single institution and the male minds within it. Focusing on the published and private writings of the families who founded and ran new colleges in antebellum America--including Bowdoin College, Washington College (later Washington and Lee), and Franklin College in Georgia--Margaret Sumner argues that these institutions not only trained white male elites for professions and leadership positions but also were part of a wider interregional network of social laboratories for the new nation. Colleges, and the educational enterprise flourishing around them, provided crucial cultural construction sites where early Americans explored organizing elements of gender, race, and class as they attempted to shape a model society and citizenry fit for a new republic. Within this experimental world, a diverse group of inhabitants--men and women, white and "e;colored,"e; free and unfree--debated, defined, and promoted social and intellectual standards that were adopted by many living in an expanding nation in need of organizing principles. Priding themselves on the enlightened and purified state of their small communities, the leaders of this world regularly promoted their own minds, behaviors, and communities as authoritative templates for national emulation. Tracking these key figures as they circulate through college structures, professorial parlors, female academies, Liberian settlements, legislative halls, and main streets, achieving some of their cultural goals and failing at many others, Sumner's book shows formative American educational principles in action, tracing the interplay between the construction and dissemination of early national knowledge and the creation of cultural standards and social conventions.

In Era of Experimentation, Daniel Peart challenges the pervasive assumption that the present-day political system, organized around two competing parties, represents the logical fulfillment of participatory democracy. Recent accounts of "e;the rise of American democracy"e; between the Revolution and the Civil War applaud political parties for opening up public life to mass participation and making government responsive to the people. Yet this celebratory narrative tells only half of the story.By exploring American political practices during the early 1820s, a period of particular flux in the young republic, Peart argues that while parties could serve as vehicles for mass participation, they could also be employed to channel, control, and even curb it. Far from equating democracy with the party system, Americans freely experimented with alternative forms of political organization and resisted efforts to confine their public presence to the polling place. Era of Experimentation demonstrates the sheer variety of political practices that made up what subsequent scholars have labeled "e;democracy"e; in the early United States. Peart also highlights some overlooked consequences of the nationalization of competitive two-party politics during the antebellum period, particularly with regard to the closing of alternative avenues for popular participation.

For over one hundred years, Thomas Jefferson and his Statute for Establishing Religious Freedom have stood at the center of our understanding of religious liberty and the First Amendment. Jefferson's expansive vision-including his insistence that political freedom and free thought would be at risk if we did not keep government out of the church and church out of government-enjoyed a near consensus of support at the Supreme Court and among historians, until Justice William Rehnquist called reliance on Jefferson "e;demonstrably incorrect."e; Since then, Rehnquist's call has been taken up by a bevy of jurists and academics anxious to encourage renewed government involvement with religion. In Religious Freedom: Jefferson's Legacy, America's Creed, the historian and lawyer John Ragosta offers a vigorous defense of Jefferson's advocacy for a strict separation of church and state. Beginning with a close look at Jefferson's own religious evolution, Ragosta shows that deep religious beliefs were at the heart of Jefferson's views on religious freedom. Basing his analysis on that Jeffersonian vision, Ragosta redefines our understanding of how and why the First Amendment was adopted. He shows how the amendment's focus on maintaining the authority of states to regulate religious freedom demonstrates that a very strict restriction on federal action was intended. Ultimately revealing that the great sage demanded a firm separation of church and state but never sought a wholly secular public square, Ragosta provides a new perspective on Jefferson, the First Amendment, and religious liberty within the United States.

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 "e;philosophical anthropology"e;-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.

In his new book, Michal Jan Rozbicki undertakes to bridge the gap between the political and the cultural histories of the American Revolution. Through a careful examination of liberty as both the ideological axis and the central metaphor of the age, he is able to offer a fresh model for interpreting the Revolution. By establishing systemic linkages between the histories of the free and the unfree, and between the factual and the symbolic, this framework points to a fundamental reassessment of the ways we think about the American Founding.Rozbicki moves beyond the two dominant interpretations of Revolutionary liberty-one assuming the Founders invested it with a modern meaning that has in essence continued to the present day, the other highlighting its apparent betrayal by their commitment to inequality. Through a consistent focus on the interplay between culture and power, Rozbicki demonstrates that liberty existed as an intricate fusion of political practices and symbolic forms. His deeply historicized reconstruction of its contemporary meanings makes it clear that liberty was still understood as a set of privileges distributed according to social rank rather than a universal right. In fact, it was because the Founders considered this assumption self-evident that they felt confident in publicizing a highly liberal, symbolic narrative of equal liberty to represent the Revolutionary endeavor. The uncontainable success of this narrative went far beyond the circumstances that gave birth to it because it put new cultural capital-a conceptual arsenal of rights and freedoms-at the disposal of ordinary people as well as political factions competing for their support, providing priceless legitimacy to all those who would insist that its nominal inclusiveness include them in fact.

The Limits of Optimism works to dispel persistent notions about Jefferson's allegedly paradoxical and sphinx-like quality. Maurizio Valsania shows that Jefferson's multifaceted character and personality are to a large extent the logical outcome of an anti-metaphysical, enlightened, and humility-oriented approach to reality. That Jefferson's mind and priorities changed over time and in response to changing circumstances indicates neither incoherence, hypocrisy, nor pathology.Valsania's reading of Jefferson, the Enlightenment, and negativity helps to make sense of the many paradoxes typically associated with that eighteenth-century thinker. At the same time, it provides a corrective to the common though erroneous equation of Enlightenment thinking with rationalism and shallow optimism.

Thousands of British American mainland colonists rejected the War for American Independence. Shunning rebel violence as unnecessary, unlawful, and unnatural, they emphasized the natural ties of blood, kinship, language, and religion that united the colonies to Britain. They hoped that British military strength would crush the minority rebellion and free the colonies to renegotiate their return to the empire.Of course the loyalists were too American to be of one mind. This is a story of how a cross-section of colonists flocked to the British headquarters of New York City to support their ideal of reunion. Despised by the rebels as enemies or as British appendages, New York's refugees hoped to partner with the British to restore peaceful government in the colonies. The British confounded their expectations by instituting martial law in the city and marginalizing loyalist leaders. Still, the loyal Americans did not surrender their vision but creatively adapted their rhetoric and accommodated military governance to protect their long-standing bond with the mother country. They never imagined that allegiance to Britain would mean a permanent exile from their homes.

Tom Paine's America explores the vibrant, transatlantic traffic in people, ideas, and texts that profoundly shaped American political debate in the 1790s. In 1789, when the Federal Constitution was ratified, "e;democracy"e; was a controversial term that very few Americans used to describe their new political system. That changed when the French Revolution-and the wave of democratic radicalism that it touched off around the Atlantic World-inspired a growing number of Americans to imagine and advocate for a wide range of political and social reforms that they proudly called "e;democratic."e;One of the figureheads of this new international movement was Tom Paine, the author of Common Sense. Although Paine spent the 1790s in Europe, his increasingly radical political writings from that decade were wildly popular in America. A cohort of democratic printers, newspaper editors, and booksellers stoked the fires of American politics by importing a flood of information and ideas from revolutionary Europe. Inspired by what they were learning from their contemporaries around the world, the evolving democratic opposition in America pushed their fellow citizens to consider a wide range of radical ideas regarding racial equality, economic justice, cosmopolitan conceptions of citizenship, and the construction of more literally democratic polities.In Europe such ideas quickly fell victim to a counter-Revolutionary backlash that defined Painite democracy as dangerous Jacobinism, and the story was much the same in America's late 1790s. The Democratic Party that won the national election of 1800 was, ironically, the beneficiary of this backlash; for they were able to position themselves as the advocates of a more moderate, safe vision of democracy that differentiated itself from the supposedly aristocratic Federalists to their right and the dangerously democratic Painite Jacobins to their left.

History has largely forgotten the writings, both public and private, of early nineteenth-century America's legal scholars. However, Ellen Holmes Pearson argues that the observers from this era had a unique perspective on the young nation and the directions in which its legal culture might go. Remaking Custom draws on the law lectures, treatises, speeches, and papers of the early republic's legal scholars to examine the critical role that they played in the formation of American identities. As intermediaries between the founders of America's newly independent polities and the next generation of legal practitioners and political leaders, the nation's law educators expressed pride in the retention of the "e;republican parts"e; of England's common law while at the same time identifying some of the central features that distinguished American law from that of Britain. From their perspective, the new nation's blending of tradition and innovation produced a superior national character.Because American law educators interpreted both local and national legal trends, Remaking Custom reveals how national identities developed through Americans' articulation of their local customs and identities. Pearson examines the innovations that legists could celebrate, such as constitutional changes that placed the people at the center of their governments and more egalitarian property laws that accompanied America's abundant supply of land. The book also deals with innovations that presented uncomfortable challenges to law educators as they sought creative ways to justify the legal cultures that grew up around slavery and Anglo-Americans' hunger for land occupied by Native Americans.

After the War of 1812 the United States remained a cultural and economic satellite of the world's most powerful empire. Though political independence had been won, John Bull intruded upon virtually every aspect of public life, from politics to economic development to literature to the performing arts. Many Americans resented their subordinate role in the transatlantic equation and, as earnest republicans, felt compelled to sever the ties that still connected the two nations. At the same time, the pull of Britain's centripetal orbit remained strong, so that Americans also harbored an unseemly, almost desperate need for validation from the nation that had given rise to their republic.The tensions inherent in this paradoxical relationship are the focus of Unfinished Revolution. Conflicted and complex, American attitudes toward Great Britain provided a framework through which citizens of the republic developed a clearer sense of their national identity. Moreover, an examination of the transatlantic relationship from an American perspective suggests that the United States may have had more in common with traditional developing nations than we have generally recognized. Writing from the vantage point of America's unrivaled global dominance, historians have tended to see in the young nation the superpower it would become. Haynes here argues that, for all its vaunted claims of distinctiveness and the soaring rhetoric of "e;manifest destiny,"e; the young republic exhibited a set of anxieties not uncommon among nation-states that have emerged from long periods of colonial rule.

Most Americans believe that the ratification of the Constitution in 1788 marked the settlement of post-Revolutionary disputes over the meanings of rights, democracy, and sovereignty in the new nation. In The Citizenship Revolution, Douglas Bradburn undercuts this view by showing that the Union, not the Nation, was the most important product of independence.In 1774, everyone in British North America was a subject of King George and Parliament. In 1776 a number of newly independent "e;states,"e; composed of "e;American citizens"e; began cobbling together a Union to fight their former fellow countrymen. But who was an American? What did it mean to be a "e;citizen"e; and not a "e;subject"e;? And why did it matter?Bradburn's stunning reinterpretation requires us to rethink the traditional chronologies and stories of the American Revolutionary experience. He places battles over the meaning of "e;citizenship"e; in law and in politics at the center of the narrative. He shows that the new political community ultimately discovered that it was not really a "e;Nation,"e; but a "e;Union of States"e;-and that it was the states that set the boundaries of belonging and the very character of rights, for citizens and everyone else. To those inclined to believe that the ratification of the Constitution assured the importance of national authority and law in the lives of American people, the emphasis on the significance and power of the states as the arbiter of American rights and the character of nationhood may seem strange. But, as Bradburn argues, state control of the ultimate meaning of American citizenship represented the first stable outcome of the crisis of authority, allegiance, and identity that had exploded in the American Revolution-a political settlement delicately reached in the first years of the nineteenth century. So ended the first great phase of the American citizenship revolution: a continuing struggle to reconcile the promise of revolutionary equality with the pressing and sometimes competing demands of law, order, and the pursuit of happiness.

The debate over the affair between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings rarely rises above the question of "e;Did they or didn't they?"e; But lost in the argument over the existence of such a relationship are equally urgent questions about a history that is more complex, both sexually and culturally, than most of us realize. Mongrel Nation seeks to uncover this complexity, as well as the reasons it is so often obscured. Clarence Walker contends that the relationship between Jefferson and Hemings must be seen not in isolation but in the broader context of interracial affairs within the plantation complex. Viewed from this perspective, the relationship was not unusual or aberrant but was fairly typical. For many, this is a disturbing realization, because it forces us to abandon the idea of American exceptionalism and re-examine slavery in America as part of a long, global history of slaveholders frequently crossing the color line.More than many other societies--and despite our obvious mixed-race population--our nation has displayed particular reluctance to acknowledge this dynamic. In a country where, as early as 1662, interracial sex was already punishable by law, an understanding of the Hemings-Jefferson relationship has consistently met with resistance. From Jefferson's time to our own, the general public denied--or remained oblivious to--the possibility of the affair. Historians, too, dismissed the idea, even when confronted with compelling arguments by fellow scholars. It took the DNA findings of 1998 to persuade many (although, to this day, doubters remain). The refusal to admit the likelihood of this union between master and slave stems, of course, from Jefferson's symbolic significance as a Founding Father. The president's apologists, both before and after the DNA findings, have constructed an iconic Jefferson that tells us more about their own beliefs--and the often alarming demands of those beliefs--than it does about the interaction between slave owners and slaves. Much more than a search for the facts about two individuals, the debate over Jefferson and Hemings is emblematic of tensions in our society between competing conceptions of race and of our nation.

This truly transnational history reveals the important role of Americans abroad in the Age of Revolution, as well as providing an early example of the limits of American influence on other nations. From the beginning of the French Revolution to its end at the hands of Napoleon, American cosmopolitans like Thomas Jefferson, Gouverneur Morris, Thomas Paine, Joel Barlow, and James Monroe drafted constitutions, argued over violent means and noble ends, confronted sudden regime changes, and negotiated diplomatic crises such as the XYZ Affair and the Louisiana Purchase. Eager to report on what they regarded as universal political ideals and practices, Americans again and again confronted the particular circumstances of a foreign nation in turmoil. In turn, what they witnessed in Paris caused these prominent Americans to reflect on the condition and prospects of their own republic. Thus, their individual stories highlight overlooked parallels between the nation-building process in both France and America, and the two countries' common struggle to reconcile the rights of man with their own national identities.

Revolutionary Negotiations examines early American diplomatic negotiations with both the European powers and the various American Indian nations from the 1740s through the 1820s. Sadosky interweaves previously distinct settings for American diplomacy-courts and council fires-into one singular, transatlantic system of politics.Whether as provinces in the British Empire or as independent states, American assertions of power were directed simultaneously to the west and to the east-to Native American communities and to European empires across the Atlantic. American leaders aspired to equality with Europeans, who often dismissed them, while they were forced to concede agency to Native Americans, whom they often wished they could ignore. As Americans used diplomatic negotiation to assert their new nation's equality with the great powers of Europe and gradually defined American Indian nations as possessing a different (and lesser) kind of sovereignty, they were also forced to confront the relations between the states in their own federal union.Acts of diplomacy thus defined the founding of America, not only by drawing borders and facilitating commerce, but also by defining and constraining sovereign power in a way that privileged some and weakened others. These negotiations truly were revolutionary.

Rome Reborn on Western Shores examines the literature of the Revolutionary era to explore the ways in which American patriots employed the classics and to assess antiquity's importance to the early political culture of the United States. Where other writers have concentrated on political theory and ideology, Shalev demonstrates that classical discourse constituted a distinct mode of historical thought during the era, tracing the role of the classics from roughly 1760 to 1800 and beyond. His analysis shows how the classics provided a critical perspective on the management of the British Empire, a common fund of legitimizing images and organizing assumptions during the revolutionary conflict, a medium for political discourse in the process of state construction between 1776 and 1787, and a usable past once the Revolution was over. Rome Reborn examines the extent to which classical antiquity, especially Rome, molded understandings of history, politics, and time, even as the experience of the Revolution reshaped patriots' understanding of the classics. The book studies the historical sensibilities that enabled revolutionaries to imagine themselves continuing a historical process that originated with classical Greece and Rome. In particular, their attitudes toward, and understandings of, time provided revolutionaries with a distinct historical consciousness that connected the classical past to the revolutionary present and shaped their expectations about America's future.