Democracies in America

Keywords for the 19th Century and Today
Erscheinungsjahr 2023
ISBN: 978-0-19-287187-9
Verlag: Oxford University Press

Buch, Englisch, 336 Seiten, Format (B × H): 163 mm x 226 mm, Gewicht: 499 g

Ask someone their thoughts about "democracy" and you'll get many different responses. Some may presume it a thing once established yet now under threat. Others may believe that democracy has always been compromised by the empowered few. In the contemporary United States, marked by constituencies across the political spectrum believing that their voices have gone unheard, "democracy" gets wielded in so many divergent directions as to be rendered nearly incoherent.

Democracies in America reminds us that this reality is nothing new. Focusing on the various meanings of "democracy" that circulated in the long nineteenth century, the book collects twenty-five essays, each taking up a keyword in the language we use to talk about democracy. Penned by a group of diverse intellectuals, the entries tackle terms both commonplace (citizenship and representation) and paradigm-stretching (disgust and sham). The essays thus consider the relationship between "America" and "democracy" from multiple disciplinary angles and from different moments in a major historical period-amidst the vitality of the revolutionary epoch, in the contentious lead-up to the Civil War, and through the triumphs and failures of Reconstruction and the early reforms of the Progressive Era-while making both forward and backward glances in time.

The book frames its keywords around a series of enduring democratic dilemmas and questions, and provides extensive resources for further study. Ultimately the volume cultivates, for students and teachers in classrooms, as well as citizens in libraries and cafés, a language to deliberate about the possibilities and problems of democracy in America.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Emerson, D. Berton

Laski, Gregory

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Politikwissenschaft Allgemein Politische Theorie, Politische Philosophie
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Amerikanische Geschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Sozialphilosophie, Politische Philosophie
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturgeschichte und Literaturkritik

Inhaltsverzeichnis

- Foreword

- Acknowledgements

- About the Editors and Contributors

- Democracies in America: A User's Guide

- I. Preamble

- 1: Danielle Allen: Democracy vs. Republic

- 2: Kyle G. Volk: Personal Liberty

- 3: Edlie Wong: Equality

- 4: James Sanders: Scale (or, Democracy in las Américas)

- II. Institutions and Arrangements

- 5: Jack Jackson: Constitution

- 6: Elizabeth Maddock Dillon: Representation

- 7: Padraig Riley: Citizenship

- 8: Ariel Elizabeth Seay-Howard: Anti-Black Violence

- 9: David Gold: Women's Suffrage

- 10: Sandra M. Gustafson: The Town Hall Meeting

- III. Feelings, Attitudes, and Interdependence

- 11: Christopher Castiglia: Belief

- 12: Mark Schmeller: Public Opinion

- 13: Vincent Lloyd: Charisma

- 14: John Funchion: Partisan

- 15: Jason Frank: Disgust

- 16: Jean Ferguson Carr: Moderation

- 17: Michelle Sizemore: Comfort

- IV. Ambitions and Distortions

- 18: Dana D. Nelson: The Commons

- 19: Angélica María Bernal: Tyranny

- 20: Derrick Spires: Sham

- 21: Tess Chakkalakal: Disfranchisement

- 22: Russ Castronovo: Security

- 23: Alaina E. Roberts: Settlement

- 24: William Duffy and John Pell: Doubt

- 25: Nancy Rosenblum: Neighbors

- Further Reading and Additional Resources

Über Autor(innen)

D. Berton Emerson is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Honors Program at Whitworth University in Spokane, Washington. His writing has appeared in American Literature, ESQ, Nineteenth-Century Literature, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. He has participated at various levels with the work of the Commission on Democratic Citizenship, sponsored by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and he is currently working on a book manuscript titled American Literary Misfits: Vernacular Aesthetics and Alternative Democracies, 1830-1860.

Gregory Laski is the author of Untimely Democracy: The Politics of Progress after Slavery (OUP 2017), which won the American Literature Association's 2019 Pauline E. Hopkins Society Scholarship Award. Formerly a visiting faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University, he is currently a civilian associate professor of English at the United States Air Force Academy, where he co-founded the American Studies program. He was a Mellon Fellow at the Newberry Library in 2021-22 and is at work on an intellectual history of revenge in the Reconstruction era. He holds a PhD in English from Northwestern University.