Articulating America Fashioning a National Political Culture

by Starr, Rebecca; Appleby, Joyce; Goldman, Lawrence; Greene, Jack; Pocock, J.G.A; Robertson, Andrew; Vernier, Richard

• ISBN13: 9780742520769
• ISBN10: 0742520765
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2001-12-11
• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

Summary

In this book seven distinguished historians explain how a national political culture developed in America. A political culture is both the collectivity of a community's values and a mode of behavior--an end as well as a process of obtaining that end which is always changing. Essays by J.G.A. Pocock, Jack Greene, Richard Vernier, Andrew Robertson, Joyce Appleby, Lawrence Goldman, and Rebecca Starr examine issues such as how British institutions and the common law were modified by unique colonial American experiences; how election rituals transformed the American political culture of deference into an expanded, abstract world of electoral opinion knit together by newspapers; how the South developed its own political culture by the end of the eighteenth century that persisted well beyond the Civil War; and more.

Table of Contents

Preface	ix
Anthony J. Badger
Introduction	1	(14)
Rebecca Starr
Part One: The Antecedents
Commerce, Settlement and History: A Reading of the Histoire des Deux Indes	15	(30)
J. G. A. Pocock
``The same liberties and privileges as Englishmen in England'': Law, Liberty and Identity in the Construction of Colonial English and Revolutionary America	45	(48)
Jack P. Greene
Part Two: The Materials and Means
The Fortunes of Orthodoxy: The Political Economy of Public Debt in England and America during the 1780s	93	(38)
Richard Vernier
Voting ``Rites'': The Implications of Deference in Virginia Electioneering Ritual, 1780-1820	131	(22)
Andrew W. Robertson
E Pluribus Unum: The Ideological Imperative in Revolutionary America	153	(24)
Joyce Appleby
Part Three: The Outcome: A National Political Culture at Work
Republicanism, Radicalism and Sectionalism: Land Reform and the Languages of American Working Men, 1820-1860	177	(60)
Lawrence Goldman
Part Four: Other Political Cultures
The Case of South Carolina: Reflections on the Nature of Political Culture	237	(20)
Rebecca Starr
A Scholar's Portfolio	257	(2)
Jack Richon Pole
Bibliography of Published Works	259	(8)
J. R. Pole
Doctoral Theses Supervised	267	(2)
J. R. Pole
Contributors	269	(2)
Index	271