A “Distressed Class of People”: French Refugees and Mobility Control in Philadelphia, 1790s–1810

Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewSiân Silyn Roberts Gothic Subjects: The Transformation of Individualism in American Fiction, 1790–1861 Gothic Subjects: The Transformation of Individualism in American Fiction, 1790–1861. Siân Silyn Roberts. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. Pp. 239.Bridget M. MarshallBridget M. MarshallUniversity of Massachusetts, Lowell Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreSiân Silyn Roberts’s book is one response to Leslie Fiedler’s classic question about why American literature is so very gothic. She argues against Fiedler’s notion that the American gothic’s appeal lies in our collective national guilt about events of the past (destruction of native people, slavery, etc.) with the very logical response that it seems unlikely that the gothic’s popularity is the result of readers dwelling upon such unpleasant thoughts; indeed, as Roberts aptly says, such an activity seems “the very antithesis of an appealing pastime” (27). Instead, she suggests that what fueled the popularity of the gothic in early and nineteenth-century America (and what emerges from American gothic novels specifically) is a complicated and then-emergent idea about the individual that questioned Lockean subjectivity and offered new options for citizens of a new nation. Roberts posits that “the gothic form thrived in the decades following the Revolution because it offered new narrative possibilities at the level of social relations and psychological life” (27). Roberts opens her argument with a thorough and nuanced reading of Locke and other philosophers on the figure of the modern individual. She then traces the contradictions to these notions of subjectivity throughout a wide array of early American fiction (both novels and short stories). Her selection of fiction is expansive, with a mix of now-canonical texts along with underread texts, providing a considerable depth of examples demonstrating her view of this new individualism’s emergence.The first chapter focuses on a significant but obscure novel, Sally Sayward Barrell Keating Wood’s Julia and the Illuminated Baron (1800), an American gothic novel that employs every classic British gothic convention of the Radcliffe/Walpole school. Facing off against Charles Brockden Brown (who issued his edict on the American gothic’s intentionally autochthonous origins just one year prior), Wood set her novel in France rather than on US soil. As Roberts argues, “Wood does not distance herself from the task of literary autochthony; rather, she shifts its terms to include a reconfiguration of British cultural materials for an American audience” (32). Roberts is right to point out that for readers of the late 1790s, American gothic was British gothic since the earliest gothic novels available in the United States were British reprints. This fact about literary culture in the early United States, and the centrality of circum-Atlantic trade to culture in this period, is one of the aspects that feeds into the larger argument that Roberts makes in the book, which is that the early United States was a hybrid place, with writers and readers from numerous and divergent cultural backgrounds. Roberts identifies a new idea about the individual appearing in the gothic novels produced in the early United States, particularly in evidence in her reading of Charles Brockden Brown’s Arthur Mervyn (1799), where she suggests that “Gothic tropes effectively displace the Enlightenment individual with one that is porous, fluid, and projected beyond the metaphysical boundaries of the body” (41). Through close readings of all of Brown’s major novels, along with other American gothic tales, she proposes that “as a national literary style, the gothic form has less to do with [Fiedler’s theory of] repression and return […] than with imagining ways of making a nation out of disparate and diverse parts” (57). Perhaps American gothic is a kind of Frankenstein—both the doctor who created the creature and the creature itself—in that it assembled itself from assorted parts and then took on a life of its own. Roberts understands this hybridity to be not just within the form of the gothic but constitutive of American national character.In chapter 2, Roberts deftly connects captivity narratives by Mary Jemison and Mary Rowlandson with several of Charles Brockden Brown’s novels, using Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s concept of the rhizome to show how these texts convey the idea that community is more significant than individuality. Her use of rhizomes is effective in the exploration of familial and social relationships in Brown’s novels, but it also functions at a conceptual level for her book, in which she unpacks American gothic as a concept greater than the individual texts that comprise it. As she shows, American gothic is distinct but not for the reasons that have been claimed before (by Brown, or Fiedler, or any number of other critics).Chapter 3 pursues the history of “common sense” philosophy in America and the way gothic texts—including Washington Irving’s “Sleepy Hollow” (1820), several stories by Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Robert Montgomery Bird’s Sheppard Lee (1836)—question whether such a philosophy can make sense of a new American culture of diverse populations; her selected stories, frequently featuring characters capable of metempsychosis, “address the challenge of cross-cultural understanding for a national community that thinks of itself as a cluster of disparate and discrete parts” (87).The final two chapters focus on individual novels rather than the groupings of texts that were so intriguing in the earlier chapters of the book. Chapter 4 focuses exclusively on Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850), concentrating on the exclusion of Hester and Pearl from sympathy, from community, and ultimately from subjectivity. Continuing the inquiry into excluded outsiders, chapter 5 concentrates on slavery, using William Wells Brown’s Clotel (1853) as the primary text.Roberts finally accounts for the popularity of the gothic form on the grounds that “it prepared a culturally diverse readership to think of itself as very much part of a transatlantic world of exchange” (171). Readers interested in US intellectual history, political philosophy, and the history of the novel generally or the gothic specifically will be particularly interested in Roberts’s study. Her selection and close reading of a wide array of literary texts is engaging, drawing intriguing connections to demonstrate a curious coherence around a set of profound questions about nationhood, selfhood, and citizenship. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 112, Number 4May 2015 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/679343 Views: 271Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

In Word or Deed:Practices of Print and Citizenship in the Early U.S. Nathan Jérémie Brink (bio) THE PRACTICE OF CITIZENSHIP: BLACK POLITICS AND PRINT CULTURE IN THE EARLY UNITED STATES. By Derrick R. Spires. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. A LITERATE SOUTH: READING BEFORE EMANCIPATION. By Beth Barton Schweiger. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019. The third chapter and seventeenth verse of the book of Colossians encourages its readers that their word and deed must be unified practices of faith. The scripture mentions shared songs and teachings, but also suggests the ethical model of Jesus demands peace and mutual concern overriding the marks of religion, people groups, and states of freedom or bondage. This scripture would be familiar to many of the antebellum urban Black activists and rural White female southern readers explored in new monographs by Derrick R. Spires and Beth Barton Schweiger. Both Spires' The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States and Schweiger's A Literate South: [End Page 7] Reading Before Emancipation consider not only the words their subjects' read or wrote, but rather examine their literary activities as culturally and politically significant practices. For their subjects, word and deed were not distinct categories but enmeshed practices demonstrating what they thought, how they encountered ideas, and the ways they enacted them in the world. However, these books reveal that readers of the nineteenth century did not uniformly interpret what this text's proposition that in Christ there is neither slave nor free meant in their own context. They show the divergence between communities of interpreters, with some who celebrated Black humanity and fostered revolutionary social restructure, and others whose tacit or overt support upheld ideas of white superiority and the institution of slavery in the early United States. In the early nineteenth-century United States, to read, talk about, recite, or share printed material sometimes took on significant civic meaning. Spires and Schweiger each contribute to an expanding field of studies on the practices of literacy and print culture during this period that push the field beyond the literary and print culture of White cosmopolitan elites. The Practice of Citizenship and A Literate South both problematize the view that literary culture was a normative, uniform, or straightforward building block for citizenship and public virtue in the early American republic. Neither relies upon discussion of the public sphere initiated by Michael Warner that serves as a dominant paradigm for understanding the broader subject of literacy and print culture in this period.1 Spires examines the practices and agency of African American thinkers and activists and Schweiger explores the access and agency of rural, mostly White women in Southern states. Each show how their subjects' reading, writing, and participation in print culture represented important cultural and political practices. The Practice of Citizenship was awarded the St. Louis Mercantile Library Prize from the Bibliographical Society of America. It offers an exceptional balance between recovery of under-examined sources and a powerful framework for understanding the significance of Black ideas and practices of citizenship in the early-nineteenth century United States. Spires, an associate professor of English at Cornell University, takes care to recognize literary historians such as Frances Smith Foster, Jocelyn Moody, Carla Peterson, and others, on whose work he builds. In contrast to asking where Black print culture of the nineteenth century fits within theorization of the early American public sphere so commonly considered since Warner's application of Jürgen Habermas' theory, or as creating a what Joanna Brooks has theorized as a Black counterpublic in print, Spires method of "black theorizing" takes Black writers of the nineteenth century at their word.2 Instead of considering how Black ideas of the period fit scholarly paradigms "in a largely white-defined discourse," Spires pays close attention to primary sources, textual details, and social practices of Black writers, preachers, authors, and their communities whose thought and action developed "a practice of citizenship." Spires offers a refreshing suggestion to "base our working definitions of citizenship on black writers' proactive attempts to describe their own political work."3 This method of "black theorizing" in Spires draws upon the [End Page...

Scholars increasingly acknowledge the contingent, varied, complex nature of capitalism, yet overlook a viable vision of the early nineteenth-century United States: communal capitalism. Communal societies proliferated in the early United States as a way to regulate the market. The most industrious, materially successful model of this approach was George Rapp’s Harmony Society, established in 1805. Rapp was a radical Pietist, immigrating with his followers from Württemberg in order to establish a purified community that would persevere into the millennium he predicted was imminent. Despite a ban on private property, the Harmonists embraced the market, building textile factories and conducting market activity under the moniker “Rapp & Associates.” Technologically innovative, shrewd in business, and dogged in pursuit of a “divine economy,” the example of the Harmony Society helps us better understand how religious businesses helped shape the early American capitalist system and, specifically, the contributions of German Pietism to economic thought in the Atlantic world. Ultimately, we discover how the Harmonists’ communal capitalism forsook wages and private property, while embracing stocks, bonds, leases, mortgages, patents, trademarks, licenses, litigation, and contracts as they built an incredibly successful and wealthy manufacturing community in the then-western United States, even as George Rapp’s authoritarian leadership style created tensions within his workforce of immigrant women, men, and children.

Soil diversity in the United States reflects a vast array of parent materials and topography, as modified and affected by changing climate and organisms through time. Although complex in origin, US soils have been classified, mapped in detail, and interpreted for their suitability and limitations for land uses. This Herculean task was accomplished by the US Soil Survey via a hierarchical taxonomic system used to classify soils known as Soil Taxonomy. At the highest taxonomic level are the 12 soil orders. Mollisols are the most widespread soil order in the conterminous United States; Gelisols are most common in Alaska; and Andisols are most common in Hawai'i. The prevalence of Mollisols across the central part of the United States, in addition to a favorable plant growth climate, is responsible for the largest and most productive agricultural system in the history of civilization. The greatest challenge currently facing US soils is human misuse of soil. Although the Soil Survey helped correct past human behaviors that were unsustainable, ending decades of poor soil management, the future security of US soils will depend on aggressive education and research on soil management in the face of an ever‐growing human population.

Collier Cobb and Allen D. Hole: Geologic mentors to early soil scientists

Reviewed by: The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States by Derrick R. Spires Peter Wirzbicki (bio) Keywords Print culture, Citizenship, African American thinkers, Political theory, Literary analysis The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States. By Derrick R. Spires. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. Pp. 314. Cloth, $49.95.) Derrick Spires, an associate professor of English at University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, wrote The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States in part to respond to the sense that discussions about print culture, the public sphere, and democratic deliberation had left out black participants and visions. The resulting work, though, is far more interesting than if Spires simply had applied the theories of Jürgen Habermas or others to early African American literature. Instead he develops his own theory of how black thinkers and writers developed what he calls a "practice of citizenship." Scholars working on black radicalism, American print culture, and antebellum politics will find this a provocative and fruitful read. The book uses a rich diversity of sources, a wide array of theoretical perspectives from [End Page 379] contemporary critical theory, and close readings of both well-known and sometimes unfamiliar sources to establish that antebellum black thinkers were developing novel ways to think about power and citizenship through engagement with a literary public sphere. At the center of Spires's argument is a convincing and important re-theorization of citizenship. Black thinkers and activists in the antebellum period—men and women like Absalom Jones, Richard Allen, James McCune Smith, William J. Wilson, Francis Watkins Harper, and many others—conceived of citizenship, he argues, less as a formal legal right defined by the state and more as a practice, something that is produced through energetic and engaged political activism, especially through an assertive print culture. Black thinkers conceived of citizenship as what you do, in other words, not who you are or how the state sees you. By adding a valuable literary-studies perspective to such recent historiographical studies of the history of citizenship by legal historians like Barbara Welke and Martha Jones, Spires's work shows how the creation of citizenship was a cultural and literary project as much as a political one. The black press plays a central role in this construction of citizenship. Spires sees the emergence of a black print culture as a central "space" in which "black writers constituted community outside of the nation-state form" (9). It was in pamphlets, newspapers, and short fiction that black writers theorized these new practices of citizenship. He begins in the immediate post-revolutionary period with an analysis and discussion of the "neighborly" ethos that black Philadelphians preached in the wake of the famous yellow-fever epidemic of 1793. Spires argues that black Philadelphians sought to mobilize under the hegemonic banner of civil republicanism while simultaneously expanding this notion of civic virtue by incorporating "neighborliness," a trait that had a "more democratic ethos of equality and inclusion" than white thinkers tended to (56). The relatively restrained and deferential citizenship of Jones and Allen is soon supplanted by the more assertive "circulating" citizenship of the Colored Convention movement. Spires shows how accounts of these conventions were meant to be printed and published, "circulating" well beyond their immediate contexts. Historians may be interested in how Spires centers debates about state citizenship, in contrast to some historiographical interpretations that have tended to focus on the creation of [End Page 380] national citizenship. Black thinkers also increasingly engaged with questions about "economic citizenship." Spires discusses debates between William J. Wilson and James McCune Smith about "black aristocracy" and the "best average colored citizen" (143). Together, Spires shows that a rich and vibrant debate about the meaning of republicanism, market life, and economic citizenship occurred in the black press. Next, Spires turns his attention to "critical citizenship," especially as modeled by the briefly lived Anglo-African Magazine. For Spires, "critical citizenship" disrupts and unsettles otherwise fixed and unified norms of white supremacy and white citizenship. Critical citizenship is "intrusive"; it invades the settled spaces of white politics that seek to...

Reviewed by: Historic Real Estate: Market Morality and the Politics of Preservation in the Early United States by Whitney Martinko Richard Longstreth Historic Real Estate: Market Morality and the Politics of Preservation in the Early United States. By Whitney Martinko. Early American Studies. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020. Pp. x, 291. $39.95, ISBN 978-0-8122-5209-5.) Over the last quarter century, historic preservation has emerged as a major phenomenon in the reshaping of communities in the United States, but only much more recently has it begun to emerge as a significant factor in American intellectual thought—that is, how attitudes toward the physical past relate to a sense of identity and culture. The pioneering, and still very useful, volumes on the history of preservation in the United States written by Charles B. Hosmer Jr. are more a documentary narrative than an analytical exploration. Beginning with the remarkable studies of David Lowenthal, subsequent scholarship has begun to depart from examining preservation in a vacuum and to address its broader implications. As a result, we can begin to see how preservation entails much more than the documentary, legal, organizational, and technical frameworks established for protecting, repairing, or restoring historic buildings, structures, and landscapes. Preservation is a multifaceted, and sometimes contradictory, outlook toward how we retain things from the past that we consider significant through tangible or intangible means. Whitney Martinko's Historic Real Estate: Market Morality and the Politics of Preservation in the Early United States is an important addition to this growing corpus of scholarly investigations. Hosmer's first book drove home the [End Page 330] fact that preservation efforts in the United States, far from being a new phenomenon, began well before the Civil War and generated a rich array of endeavors by the early twentieth century. Martinko reveals that veneration of colonial architecture was widespread by the 1820s, and active measures to protect portions of ancient Native earthworks in the Ohio River Valley were taken well before the early republic. Preservation, as she presents it, did not simply entail rescuing threatened vestiges of the past, as in the well-known case of George Washington's headquarters at Newburgh, New York, where efforts began in 1838 and were successfully consummated in 1850. Preservation could also mean keeping a country estate intact and in the family. While rebuilding the main house in a more modern vein, preservation could also entail saving fragments and undertaking visual documentation, including images in publications. While we would like to think that we are far more accomplished at saving historic properties today than two centuries ago, Martinko's investigation shows how contemporary some of the attitudes in the early republic seem today. The Native earthworks were partially saved to enhance the appeal to attract settlers to the Ohio Company's real estate venture in what became Marietta, Ohio. Some merchants in the Northeast sought to capitalize on their "ancient" buildings as preferable to the new commercial buildings of the 1830s and 1840s (p. 22). Many persons sympathetic to the past assumed a moral high ground, insisting that the most financially lucrative development was not necessarily the optimal one. Others sought to adapt old buildings as a means of remaining economically competitive. Martinko presents the many aspects of considering the historic built environment between the late eighteenth and the mid-nineteenth centuries in such a clear, thoughtful, and often engaging way that it can be easy for readers to lose sight of what a formidable endeavor this study represents. Some of the work discussed is well known to specialists in the history of preservation, but much of it lies in previously unexplored territory, and even finding the material was no mean feat. The result is not only a very rich investigation but also a revelatory framework for understanding how Americans have considered their physical heritage. Richard Longstreth George Washington University Copyright © 2021 The Southern Historical Association

“Black soils” in the Russian Soil Classification system, the US Soil Taxonomy and the WRB: Quantitative correlation and implications for pedodiversity assessment

Throughout much of the interwar period, France was Europe's foremost nation of asylum, promising protection, adequate living conditions, and, best of all, steady work to thousands of international political refugees.1 In fact, the issue of civilians in search of refuge was recognized as commonplace by the French long before the twentieth century. The past, however, offered no preparation for the extent of the refugee problem during the 1930s, when thousands of Europeans were forced to leave their homes. Indeed, by spring 1938, French generosity soured in the face of the ever increasing numbers of refugees, the continuing economic depression, and the threat of war with Nazi Germany and its allies. The admitted refugees became scapegoats for the economic troubles of the country, and their political loyalties also became suspect. Consequently, the French government turned to a policy of strict refugee control. The complex circumstances underlying the development of the French government's restrictive refugee policy have not been the focus of scholarly energy and debate. Relatively little attention has

- The French case is always mentioned as an exception, in the existing literature on cultural migration. This consolidated judgment is based on the fact that the exile of French intellectuals was marked by a very high number of repatriations after 1945. Starting from a review of the general traits of this experience, the author aims at overcoming this common place, starting from a different methodological assumption: he considers the figure of the refugee as an entity having a weak national identity, always subject to modification. The essay concentrates on political activities carried out by French refugees in the United States and on the cultural and scientific contribution they offered to the nation.Parole chiave: esilio, identitŕ nazionale, attivismo politico, École libre, gollismo, ritorno exile, national identity, political activism, École libre, Gaullism, homecoming

Reviewed by: The Medical Imagination: Literature and Health in the Early United States by Sari Altschuler Kelly L. Bezio (bio) The Medical Imagination: Literature and Health in the Early United States. By Sari Altschuler. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. Pp. 312. Cloth, $55.00.) When tasked with writing the history of American medicine, it may seem counterintuitive to say that imagination, genre, and literary devices supply an integral part. We might concede that the body beset by diverse ailments in the early years of the republic provides excellent fodder for fiction. Think, for example, of American gothic thrillers about yellow-fever epidemics, such as Charles Brockden Brown's Arthur Mervyn (1799), or a girl rendered strangely emotionally numb from a snakebite in the womb, such as Oliver Wendell Holmes's Elsie Venner (1861). However, we might also ask, don't such fictions simply reflect medical attitudes of the day about anesthesia or a devastating outbreak? In this monograph, Sari Altschuler makes the argument for why literature and literary study should not been seen as mere handmaidens to American medical history. Without a nuanced analysis of what she calls the medical imagination, our understanding of the healing arts in the early United States remains incomplete and impoverished. The Medical Imagination: Literature and Health in the Early United States provides a fresh, provocative approach to medical history by uncovering how doctors in the early republic relied unquestioningly upon creative critical thinking and literary form in their pursuit of knowledge about health and well-being. Altschuler makes a valuable methodological intervention with this argument and introduces a new way to "move beyond a version of the field that principally uses empirical methods to study the rise of empiricism" (5). She questions a tendency to privilege historiographical narratives that are oriented toward unpacking the turn from medical rationalism and its heroic measures of bleeding, purging, and blistering patients to empiricism's reliance on clinical observation and scientific experimentation. Such a focus might bolster our confidence in what we see as the contemporary successes of medicine by recounting a progress narrative about how it all began. But is that shift how American physicians saw the driving force behind medicine's evolution in the nineteenth century? Altschuler's answer to this question is a resounding "no." The strength of Altschuler's method lies in bringing the critical tools [End Page 583] of science studies to bear on her analysis precisely because it exposes the different epistemological commitments of this earlier era. Its epistemic crises were not our own, which is why the imagination played such a crucial role—and why we can't continue to rely on rationalism and empiricism as the only conceptual frames for writing American medical history. Altschuler eschews looking to "important figures, milestones, and breakthroughs" to define the contours of this history (5). Instead, she draws on the work of Thomas Kuhn and other historians of scientific knowledge by focusing on epistemic crises during which "a central precipitating event, such as an untreatable epidemic disease, a significant discovery, or a political crisis, unseats central ideas about the health of the human body" (13). Developing a history around moments when knowledge was challenged and innovation demanded establishes the inseparability of literary and medical pursuits. American practitioners relied on what Altschuler calls "imaginative experimentation" to construct new medical knowledge. Five chapters each focus on a specific "precipitating event": the American Revolution, yellow fever, global cholera pandemics, emerging sciences of anatomical difference, and the discovery of anesthesia. In each case, imaginative experimentation complemented either rationalist explanations of embodied phenomena or empiricist observations of the physical world. For example, physician and signatory of the Declaration of Independence Benjamin Rush sought to solve the problem of how to re-conceive of health in republican terms. Instead of depicting the heart as a king or ruler over the body, he envisioned it as an empty ocean to be filled with blood only after blood vessels did their work. Another chapter discusses the unpredictable movements of cholera across the globe, which led to the fear that mapping alone could not account for the disorder as a dynamic, living system. Gothic forms allowed friends Edgar Allan Poe and John...

Book Review| February 01 2020 Review: The Kingdom and the Republic: Sovereign Hawai‘i and the Early United States, by Noelani Arista The Kingdom and the Republic: Sovereign Hawai‘i and the Early United States. By Noelani Arista. (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. 300 pp.) Joy Schulz Joy Schulz Metropolitan Community College Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Pacific Historical Review (2020) 89 (1): 159–160. https://doi.org/10.1525/phr.2020.89.1.159 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Joy Schulz; Review: The Kingdom and the Republic: Sovereign Hawai‘i and the Early United States, by Noelani Arista. Pacific Historical Review 1 February 2020; 89 (1): 159–160. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/phr.2020.89.1.159 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentPacific Historical Review Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2020 by the Pacific Coast Branch, American Historical Association2020 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Encountering Revolution looks afresh at the profound impact of the Haitian Revolution on the early United States. The first book on the subject in more than two decades, it redefines our understanding of the relationship between republicanism and slavery at a foundational moment in American history. For postrevolutionary Americans, the Haitian uprising laid bare the contradiction between democratic principles and the practice of slavery. For thirteen years, between 1791 and 1804, slaves and free people of color in Saint-Domingue battled for equal rights in the manner of the French Revolution. As white and mixed-race refugees escaped to the safety of U.S. cities, Americans were forced to confront the paradox of being a slaveholding republic, recognizing their own possible destiny in the predicament of the Haitian slaveholders. Historian Ashli White examines the ways Americans-black and white, northern and southern, Federalist and Democratic Republican, pro- and antislavery-pondered the implications of the Haitian Revolution. Encountering Revolution convincingly situates the formation of the United States in a broader Atlantic context. It shows how the very presence of Saint-Dominguan refugees stirred in Americans as many questions about themselves as about the future of slaveholding, stimulating some of the earliest debates about nationalism in the early republic.

Encountering Revolution looks afresh at the profound impact of the Haitian Revolution on the early United States. The first book on the subject in more than two decades, it redefines our understanding of the relationship between republicanism and slavery at a foundational moment in American history. For postrevolutionary Americans, the Haitian uprising laid bare the contradiction between democratic principles and the practice of slavery. For thirteen years, between 1791 and 1804, slaves and free people of color in Saint-Domingue battled for equal rights in the manner of the French Revolution. As white and mixed-race refugees escaped to the safety of U.S. cities, Americans were forced to confront the paradox of being a slaveholding republic, recognizing their own possible destiny in the predicament of the Haitian slaveholders. Historian Ashli White examines the ways Americans-black and white, northern and southern, Federalist and Democratic Republican, pro- and antislavery-pondered the implications of the Haitian Revolution. Encountering Revolution convincingly situates the formation of the United States in a broader Atlantic context. It shows how the very presence of Saint-Dominguan refugees stirred in Americans as many questions about themselves as about the future of slaveholding, stimulating some of the earliest debates about nationalism in the early republic.

Book Review| March 01 2015 Culture and Liberty in the Age of the American Revolution the Genius of Democracy: Fictions of Gender and Citizenship in the United States, 1860–1945 Liberty of the Imagination: Aesthetic Theory, Literary Form, and Politics in the Early United States Culture and Liberty in the Age of the American Revolution. By Rozbicki, Michal Jan. Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia Press. 2011. x, 288 pp. Cloth, $35.00; paper, $24.50; e-book, $24.50.The Genius of Democracy: Fictions of Gender and Citizenship in the United States, 1860–1945. By Olwell, Victoria. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press. 2011. 288 pp. Cloth, $59.95; e-book, $59.95.Liberty of the Imagination: Aesthetic Theory, Literary Form, and Politics in the Early United States. By Cahill, Edward. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press. 2012. 318 pp. Cloth, $65.00; e-book, $65.00. Michelle Neely Michelle Neely Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Literature (2015) 87 (1): 187–189. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2865247 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Michelle Neely; Culture and Liberty in the Age of the American Revolution the Genius of Democracy: Fictions of Gender and Citizenship in the United States, 1860–1945 Liberty of the Imagination: Aesthetic Theory, Literary Form, and Politics in the Early United States. American Literature 1 March 2015; 87 (1): 187–189. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2865247 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsAmerican Literature Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2015 by Duke University Press2015 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.