David Walker's Nationalism - and Thomas Jefferson's
February 2017
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Journal article
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Journal of the Early Republic
Even after a century of intense “nation talk” in Europe and the Americas, the French philosopher Ernest Renan felt moved to ask in 1882 “What is a Nation?” There yet remained he said questions that a “thoughtful person would wish to have settled in order to put his mind at rest.” In particular, Renan puzzled at the relationship between principles of nationality and principles of race. Treating race in terms synonymous with ethnicity Renan asked how it was that Switzerland, with three languages, two religions and three or four “races” was a nation. Why did Europeans continue to find “Poland” a meaningful term even though any such national territory had been partitioned out of existence? Why were nations not synonymous with races and states not synonymous with nations? In the United States questions concerning the relationship between race, nationality and the political state were as far from being settled by the Constitution as they were in the Europe that emerged from the Napoleonic Wars. As the descendants of enslaved, coerced or voluntary migrants drawn from two continents neither white nor black Americans could follow the organic path to nationhood described in the late eighteenth-century by Romantic nationalists like Johann Gottlieb Fichte: a model wherein peoples, acting on their own cultural characteristics, seamlessly created nations reflecting their particular qualities. (America’s native peoples were the only inhabitants of the continent who could lay claim to form of national development). For many white Americans the continued enslavement of African-Americans, buttressed as it was by attributions of racial inferiority and superiority, transcended their ethnic, religious and political divisions and held “their” country together. But the institution of slavery, and the racial thinking it reflected and promoted, also introduced destabilising definitions of nationality to the white republic.
Social Death and Slavery: The Logic of Political Association and the Logic of Chattel Slavery in Revolutionary America
April 2015
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Chapter
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Between Sovereignty and Anarchy The Politics of Violence in the American Revolutionary Era
Between Sovereignty and Anarchy considers the conceptual and political problem of violence in the early modern Anglo-Atlantic, charting an innovative approach to the history of the American Revolution.
HISTORY
“I am an Indian”: Reading Robert Beverley’s The History and Present State of Virginia.
October 2013
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Internet publication
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'I have Known': Thomas Jefferson, Experience, and Notes on the State of Virginia
October 2011
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Chapter
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A Companion to Thomas Jefferson
Aristotle and King Alfred in America
September 2011
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Chapter
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Thomas Jefferson, the Classical World, and Early America
Thomas Jefferson read Latin and Greek authors throughout his life and wrote movingly about his love of the ancient texts, which he thought should be at the core of America's curriculum. Yet at the same time, Jefferson warned his countrymen not to look to the ancient world for modern lessons and deplored many of the ways his peers used classical authors to address contemporary questions. As a result, the contribution of the ancient world to the thought of America's most classically educated Founding Father remains difficult to assess. <br><br>This volume brings together historians of political thought with classicists and historians of art and culture to find new approaches to the difficult questions raised by America's classical heritage. The essays explore the classical contribution to different aspects of Jefferson’s thought and taste, as well as examining the significance of the ancient world to America in a broader historical context. The diverse interests and methodologies of the contributors suggest new ways of approaching one of the most prominent and contested of the traditions that helped create America's revolutionary republicanism.
Biography & Autobiography
Rum Punch and Revolution: Taverngoing and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia
November 2010
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Book
'Twas Honest old Noah first planted the Vine
And mended his morals by drinking its Wine.
—from a drinking song by Benjamin Franklin
There were, Peter Thompson notes, some one hundred and fifty synonyms for inebriation in common use in colonial Philadelphia and, on the eve of the Revolution, just as many licensed drinking establishments. Clearly, eighteenth-century Philadelphians were drawn to the tavern. In addition to the obvious lure of the liquor, taverns offered overnight accommodations, meals, and stabling for visitors. They also served as places to gossip, gamble, find work, make trades, and gather news.
In Rum Punch and Revolution, Thompson shows how the public houses provided a setting in which Philadelphians from all walks of life revealed their characters and ideas as nowhere else. He takes the reader into the cramped confines of the colonial bar room, describing the friendships, misunderstandings and conflicts which were generated among the city's drinkers and investigates the profitability of running a tavern in a city which, until independence, set maximum prices on the cost of drinks and services in its public houses.
Taverngoing, Thompson writes, fostered a sense of citizenship that influenced political debate in colonial Philadelphia and became an issue in the city's revolution. Opinionated and profoundly undeferential, taverngoers did more than drink; they forced their political leaders to consider whether and how public opinion could be represented in the counsels of a newly independent nation.
History
Henry Drax's Instructions on the Management of a Seventeenth-Century Barbarian Sugar Plantation
July 2009
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Journal article
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William and Mary Quarterly: a magazine of early American history and culture
In 1679, on the eve of his departure for England, Henry Drax drew up a meticulously detailed document describing how he wished his overseer, Richard Harwood, to run the Drax plantations and manage the three hundred slave laborers. Drax was among the first planters on Barbados to integrate all aspects of sugar production on a single site and to employ “cane-hole” planting techniques; both practices came to characterize the industry across the Caribbean as a whole. This piece offers a critical edition of Drax’s document and an interpretive essay stressing the role played by environmental and agronomic factors in shaping labor relations within what Drax referred to as his “family” of workers. Drax’s “Instructions,” reproduced in full, offers a wealth of detail of interest to historians of Barbados and to historians of plantation slavery.
Inventive Localism in the Seventeenth Century
July 2007
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Journal article
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William and Mary Quarterly: a magazine of early American history and culture
The Thief, the Householder, and the Commons: Languages of Class in Seventeenth-Century Virginia
April 2006
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Journal article
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William and Mary Quarterly: a magazine of early American history and culture
William Bullock's "Strange Adventure": A Plan to Transform Seventeenth-Century Virginia
January 2004
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Journal article
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William and Mary Quarterly: a magazine of early American history and culture
"Judicious Neology": The Imperative of Paternalism in Thomas Jefferson's Linguistic Studies
September 2003
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Journal article
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Early American Studies An Interdisciplinary Journal
4303 Historical Studies, 43 History, Heritage and Archaeology
The Cassell Dictionary of American History
June 2002
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Book
CASSELL'S DICTIONARY OF AMERICAN HISTORY is a clear and comprehensive history of the United States charting its progress from British colony immediately preceding the American Revolution to 21st century superpower. Blending lengthy in-depth articles on core themes and topics such as the American Revolution and the Civil War with quick-reference entries on hundreds of key names and events, it is the ideal reference for college students and an accessible companion to US history for the general reader.
Cassell's Dictionary of Modern American History
October 2000
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Book
Cassell's Dictionary of Modern American History is a guide to the people, events, movements and ideas that have shaped modern America. Taking as its starting point the period immediately preceding the American Revolution, the dictionary guides the reader through the birth of the United States and its 19th-century territorial expansion, examines the traumatic impact of the Civil War and America's rapid ascent to great-power status, and goes on to consider the economic consequences of the Great Depression, America's decisive role in two world wars and the many domestic upheavals of the 20th century, from the Civil Rights Movement to the Lewinsky Scandal.
The dictionary contains over 1000 articles focusing not only on major political, diplomatic and military topics but also on economic, social and cultural matters. Extensive thematic articles on core subjects such as the Civil War and Reconstruction blend clear and readable narrative with trenchant analysis, whilst a wealth of briefer entries define essential terms from baby boom to bussing, provide biographical data on public figures as diverse as Eleanor Roosevelt and Sitting Bull, deliver key facts about battles, treaties and acts of Congress from the Banking Act to the Bay of Pigs, and explain the significance of crucial Supreme Court verdicts from Marbury vs. Madison to Roe vs. Wade.
No chance in nature: Cannibalism as a solution to maritime famine
December 1996
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Chapter
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American Bodies Cultural Histories of the Physique
Most human bodies have two arms, two legs, hands, feet, a head. Yet the body, as we perceive it, is ultimately a cultural construct defined by the values and meanings each individual, and each culture, ascribes to it. Beyond its corporeal realities, the implications of the body-how we adorn, alter, heal, and please it-are potentially endless, limited only by the manner in which we frame it. Revealing how the human body has served as as metaphor for social process, the anthology unveils the body as intrinsically configured by politics, gender, racial categories, fears of pollution, and commercial forces which exploit and regulate it. Historical snapshots of American bodies over the past two and a half centuries, the essays in this volume cover such diverse subjects as sailor tattoos, maritime cannibalism in the early 1800's, birth control, rest cures for neurasthenia, and, more recently, anorexia, boxing, cyberpunk, and plastic surgery. Drawing from history, literary and cultural studies, and film studies, American bodies is an eclectic, stimulating collection that will challenge many fundamental beliefs about our physical form.
Health & Fitness
The Logic of Slavery and the Language of Violence in America's Associational Moment