Guest Review: Benjamin Park, American Nationalisms

April 26, 2018 By The Junto Moderator in Book Review, Recent Scholarship, Review / Q&A Tags: Abolitionism, American Revolution, Benjamin Park, book review, Early Republic, Nationalism, transatlantic Leave a comment

Skye Montgomery is a historian of the nineteenth-century United States, specializing in Anglo-American relations and the transformation of American national identity. She is currently completing a postdoctoral fellowship at the Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy at the University of Missouri-Columbia. Skye earned her DPhil in History at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and is revising a book manuscript entitled, Imagined Families: Anglo-American Kinship and the Formation of Southern Identity, 1830-1890.

**Benjamin E. Park, American Nationalisms: Imagining Union in the Age of Revolutions, 1783-1833 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018).**

nationalisms

In his seminal 1882 lecture, Ernest Renan posed the deceptively straightforward question, “What is a Nation?” Although recent historiography is generally more concerned with answering the adjacent questions of how and why nations come to be, scholars of European history have produced myriad reflections on Renan’s question in the decades since the Second World War. In contrast, however, histories of early America taking nationalism as their primary category of analysis have been relatively few and focused primarily upon understandings of nationalism yoked to the nation-state. Benjamin Park’s new volume, American Nationalisms: Imagining Union in the Age of Revolutions, 1783-1833, offers a convincing explanation for this omission and makes commendable strides towards rectifying it. Continue reading →

Q&A: Benjamin Park, author of American Nationalisms

April 25, 2018 By Tom Cutterham in Recent Scholarship, Review / Q&A Tags: Age of Revolutions, American Revolution, Benjamin Park, book review, JuntoLord, Nationalism 1 Comment

Today’s interviewee hardly needs introduction for readers of The Junto. Ben Park is an assistant professor of history at Sam Houston State University in Texas; he earned his PhD in Britain’s second-best history department, at Cambridge University; and went on to hold a postdoctoral fellowship at the Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy. Far more importantly, of course, he is also the founder of this blog, and author of the recent monograph American Nationalisms: Imagining Union in the Age of Revolutions, 1783-1833 (Cambridge University Press, 2018). Ahead of our review of the book tomorrow, I asked him a few questions about it. Continue reading →

Inspiration Roundtable: The Origins of My Origins Story

December 1, 2017 By Michael D. Hattem in Historiography, Inspiration in Research, Recent Scholarship, Research, Roundtables, Special Features Tags: American Revolution, historical memory, history culture, Nationalism, Past and Prologue: The Politics of Memory in the American Revolution, Yale University Press Leave a comment

This is the fourth post in our weeklong roundtable, “Inspiration in Research.” Previous contributors to the roundtable include Whitney Robles, Rachel Herrmann, and Lindsay O’Neill with Ken Owen’s final post of the roundtable coming tomorrow.

I am very happy to be able to participate in this fascinating roundtable on the inspiration behind research projects and to share my what I suspect are fairly common experiences among our readership. My dissertation, completed back in May, is now a manuscript entitled, Past and Prologue: The Politics of Memory in the American Revolution, that is under contract to Yale University Press. Past and Prologue explores the role of “history culture” and changing historical memories of the colonial and British pasts in the coming of the American Revolution and early efforts to forge a shared national identity in the revolutionary era. It traces that role in shaping the transition from British subject to American citizen through three developments: the deconstruction of colonists’ relationship to the British past before independence; the creation of a newly shared colonial past for the first time during the imperial crisis and the revision of that colonial past after the war; and, the cultural construction of a “deep national past” or American antiquity in the decades following the war. Rather than having “liberated Americans from the past,” I argue, the Revolution actually made the past matter more than ever before. Continue reading →

“Mixing the Sacred Character, With That of the Statesman”: Review of Pulpit and Nation

March 16, 2017 By Jonathan Wilson in Book Review, Recent Scholarship Tags: American Revolution, Christian nation, Christianity, clergy, Ministers, Nationalism, providentialism, religion, religious history 1 Comment

“Mixing the Sacred Character, With That of the Statesman”: Review of <em>Pulpit and Nation</em>

**Spencer W. McBride, Pulpit and Nation: Clergymen and the Politics of Revolutionary America (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2016**).

The relationship between Christianity and the American founding is a topic of obvious contemporary political relevance in the United States. It is also a field in which historians during the last few years have labored with great energy.[1] In Pulpit and Nation: Clergymen and the Politics of Revolutionary America, Spencer McBride adds to that labor with a book that is—at first glance—less politically charged than some other contributions have been. Yet Pulpit and Nation advances what may be a subversive claim. Continue reading →

Reading Race in Early America

December 21, 2016 By Jessica Parr in Lists, Recent Scholarship Tags: books, Citizenship, Gender, lists, Nationalism, New Orleans, new scholarhip, race, religion 15 Comments

In the past 10 years, we have seen an embarrassment of riches in scholarship that considers race in Early America (broadly understood). The list below is not exhaustive, but highlights some of the recent scholarship. Feel free to add your own favorite recent scholarship in the comments, and keep your eyes out next month, for our CFP for a roundtable on race in Early America.

Continue reading →

Identity and the Founders: A Response to Mark Lilla

November 21, 2016 By Jonathan Wilson in Commentary, Opinion Tags: Founders, identity politics, liberalism, National Identity, Nationalism, Republicanism 10 Comments

This weekend, Mark Lilla, a historian of ideas at Columbia University, published a New York Times op-ed on “identity liberalism.” Reacting to the outcome of the presidential election, Lilla argues that contemporary American liberalism’s celebration of diversity, however morally salutary in private life, has been politically suicidal at the national level. “National politics in healthy periods is not about ‘difference,'” Lilla writes; “it is about commonality. And it will be dominated by whoever best captures Americans’ imaginations about our shared destiny.”

Lilla’s argument is a response—one of several possible responses—to what I see as a real problem. In contemporary America, demands for inclusion, equality, and dignity often seem to be made in the name of particular groups rather than in the name of the common good. Whether this perception is accurate is another matter. I won’t address that complicated question here. But Lilla’s perspective on early American history warrants a critical response.

Continue reading →

On The Origins of American Religious Nationalism

May 24, 2016 By Seth in Book Review, Recent Scholarship Tags: book review, Nationalism, religion 7 Comments

trifles Right after I agreed to review Sam Haselby’s The Origins of American Religious Nationalism for the Journal of Religion, Gordon Wood’s review of it appeared in the New York Review of Books. When one of our number gets that kind of exposure with their first book, we should all applaud, but there I was, feeling out-classed before I even opened the book. Now that I’m done with my review, everything about Wood’s makes sense to me—it was big exposure on a big stage for a big book. And I learned something from Wood there, which was to have enough patience with a big book’s faults to appreciate what it’s trying to do. Wood called Origins an “unusual book” with a meandering argument, but nevertheless “a book to be reckoned with.” I have to agree, and (spoiler alert) said as much in my forthcoming JR review. In writing that, though, I realized that if I hadn’t been primed for indulgence by Wood’s review I would have judged Origins more harshly. I think Origins is a good book that’s in too much of a hurry. Without repeating what I’ve written in JR for a religious-studies audience, I want to use this space for something of an historian’s rant about the hurried use of sources in this book. Continue reading →

The OId World of the New Republic

August 18, 2014 By Michael D. Hattem in Commentary, Historiography, Recent Scholarship Tags: colonial America, colonial history, Early Republic, Jack P. Greene, Nationalism, Political history, postcolonialism, Public Sphere 7 Comments

As someone who works on the late colonial period (1730s-1770s) in a field dominated by the “early republic,” it is easy to feel as though I am working on the margins of the field of early American history rather than what is actually the middle or center of what we usually define as early America (i.e., 1607 to somewhere between 1848 and 1861).[1] Yet, in this brief, speculative post, I will suggest that—in terms of my own subfield of political history and political culture—one of the things missing from much of the scholarship on the early republic is the colonial period itself. Continue reading →

Reptiles of America

November 21, 2013 By Tom Cutterham in Commentary, From the Archives Tags: Benjamin Franklin, cultural symbols, Nationalism, Natural History, semiotics, snakes, War of Independence 2 Comments

Thanks to the Comte de Buffon’s comprehensive Natural History, every European in the eighteenth century knew that the American environment was conducive only to degeneration. Still, Buffon admitted, “though Nature has reduced all the quadropeds of the new world, yet she has preferred the size of reptiles, and enlarged that of insects.” As his Dutch colleague Cornelis de Pauw put it, giant insects and venomous snakes “so unhappily distinguish this hemisphere” from the more hospitable side of the Atlantic.[1] Leaving aside insects for the moment, reptiles—and especially serpents—have always had a powerful symbolic valence. In the American context, the ambivalent use of the reptile shows up some of the complex relationship between the colonists’ natural world and their political imagination.