American Patriotism Research Articles

American Patriots and the Rituals of Revolution

American Patriots and the Rituals of Revolution

American Patriots and the Rituals of Revolution

American Patriots and the Rituals of Revolution

American Patriots and the Rituals of Revolution

American Patriots and the Rituals of Revolution

Peter Shaw. <italic>American Patriots and the Rituals of Revolution</italic>. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1981. Pp. 279. $17.50

Peter Shaw. American Patriots and the Rituals of Revolution. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1981. Pp. 279. $17.50 Get access Shaw Peter. American Patriots and the Rituals of Revolution. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1981. Pp. 279. $17.50. Pauline Maier Pauline Maier Massachusetts Institute of Technology Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 87, Issue 1, February 1982, Pages 249–250, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/87.1.249 Published: 01 February 1982

American Patriots and the Rituals of Revolution

American Patriots and the Rituals of Revolution

American Patriots and the Rituals of Revolution

American Patriots and the Rituals of Revolution

Book Reviews

E. LeRoy Ladurie. The Territory of the Historian. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979. Pp. viii, 345. Cloth, $21.00. Review by J. B. Smallwood, Jr. of North Texas State University. De Lamar Jensen. Renaissance Europe: Age of Recovery and Reconciliation. Lexington, Massachusetts: D.C. Heath and Co., 1981. Pp. xiii, 402. Paper, $10.95; De Lamar Jensen. Reformation Europe: Age of Reform and Revolution. Lexington, Masschusetts: D.C. Heath and Co., 1981. Pp. xii, 468. Paper, $10.95. Review by Sanford Gutman of State University of New York, College at Cortland. Lacey Baldwin Smith, Jean Reeder Smith. The Past Speaks, To 1688: Sources and Problems in English History. Lexington, Massachusetts: D.C. Heath and Company, 1981. Pp. xii, 350. Paper, $8.95; Walter Arnstein. The Past Speaks, Since 1688: Sources and Problems in British History. Lexington, Massachusetts: D.C. Heath and Company, 1981 . Pp. xiv, 427 . Paper, $8.95. Review by John Wilkes of Trinity & All Saints College of Education, Leeds, U.K.. Carol R. Berkin and Clara M. Lovett, eds. Women, War & Revolution. New York: Holmes & Meier, Inc., 1980. Pp. 310. Cloth, $27.50; Paper, $9.75. Review by Barbara L. Tischler of Brooklyn College; SUNY- Empire State College. Walter Nugent. Structures of American Social History. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1981. Pp. xiii, 206. Cloth, $12.95. Review by Eckard V. Toy, Jr. of the University of Oregon. Peter Shaw. American Patriots and the Rituals of Revolution. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981. Pp. 279. Cloth, $17.50. Review by Raymond Starr of San Diego State University. John A. Schutz. The Dawning of America, 1492-1789. St. Louis: Forum Press, 1981. Pp. 217. Paper, $7.95. Review by Richard Robertson of Alabama Humanities Resource Center. George T. McJimsey. The Dividing and Reuniting of America, 1848-1877. St. Louis: Forum Press, 1981. Pp. 219. Paper, $7.95. Review by Charles F. Bryan Jr. of the University of Tennesse. Elizabeth Frick. Library Research Guide to History: Illustrated Search Strategy and Sources. Ann Arbor, Michigan: Pierian Press, 1980. Pp. x, 81. Cloth, $9.95; Paper, $5.95. Review by Howard A. Barnes of Winston-Salem State University. On Teaching Recent History: An Exchange. Joe P. Dunn of Converse College and William Griffen and J. D. Maricano of SUNY College, Cortland.

A message to political educators

Almost every state's laws require some form of political education. Miller (1976) believes that according to most of these laws, such education should form patriotic citizenry. Generally speaking, patriotism is an attachment to a country that engenders within citizens a spirited desire to defend its distinctive political order, both in word and deed. In America, patriotism presupposes a certain type of enlightenment or education. To be patriotic in America means to be attached primarily not to a place or to a culture but to a set of political scientific principles or self-evident truths. A good American citizen rationally acknowledges these truths and is willing and able to act politically on their basis. In principle, or in the strongest case, American citizenship does not depend upon an irrational or purely subjective preference one has for his own people's political choices; instead, it roots in respect for rights which all men share. A citizen's preference for America explained by his calculation that its political order best protects his rights, and his greatest pride derives from the fact that so many people from throughout the world have chosen to live in America in preference to the countries of their birth on the basis of similar calculations. I suspect that most responsible and educated citizens would more or less agree with this presentation, but many learned professors of education and political science would chuckle smugly while reading this rather old-fashioned or traditional analysis of American patriotism. We now know, they believe, that no such thing exists as immutable natural rights which all men share, that the political thought of the Founders was conditioned historically and is now obsolete, and that citizens prefer America for value and not as fact. For such learned individuals, taking patriotism too seriously degrades them. It causes them to forget what they believe to be the best, or scientific, side of themselves, in favor of an intellectually dishonest and morally pernicious ethnocentricism. They typically argue that being scientific means to eschew all dogmatism, and believing in America's political superiority or in natural rights is surely dogmatic. Most educators possess a naive sense of superiority to the American tradition based on a superficial understanding of that tradition. Few professors of education (none that I have ever met or read) have analyzed Locke's Second Treatise, The Federalist, and the political writings of Jefferson necessary to establish the scientific inadequacy of the moral and epistemological presuppositions of the American Founders. Instead, they accept dogmatically the analyses of horizon forming thinkers such as John Dewey, whose views on politics are far less plausible, in my opinion, than those of Jefferson and Locke. Meanwhile, the most profound student of the tradition of our time, Harry Jaffa (1978), finds its foundations intellectually credible and resolutely defends them to debunkers from both the Left and the Right.

Henry Blake Fuller and the "New Immigrant"

IKE MIANY of his contemporaries, Henry Blake Fuller (I857-I929) J.L frequently paired his ideas and his fears of the new with the spectre of a declining or dispossessed native American stock. Much like Henry James in The American Scene, he pondered what it meant, and what it would mean, share the sanctity of his American consciousness, the intimacy of his American patriotism, with the inconceivable alien.... Though those words belong to James, the sense of dispossession they express belonged to Fuller too.' Over the course of his long career as a writer he shifted between the view that the immigrant might be assimilated into a homogeneous American race and a set of beliefs close to those that marked the strenuous of his time. He feared the unmeltable and alien influence of the new (Eastern and Southern Europeans) and, on occasion, exaggerated the virtues of the old (the descendants of a vaguely defined or American race). Some of the typology of race and character historians have come to call the nativism of the American I89os, then, flows into his first city novels. Present in crowds, in gangs, or swarming hordes, immigrants in these novels seem to possess but a half-life, a virtually nameless, subterranean existence. Their speech and manners mark them, in the eyes of many Anglo-Saxon characters, as unclassifiable foreigners. They are almost uniformly associated with the

The Spirit of '76: The Growth of American Patriotism Before Independence

Journal Article The Spirit of '76: The Growth of American Patriotism Before Independence. By Carl Bridenbaugh. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975. xii + 162 pp. Notes and index. $8.95.) Get access Kobert C. Kitchie Kobert C. Kitchie University of California, San Diego Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 63, Issue 2, September 1976, Page 394, https://doi.org/10.2307/1899665 Published: 01 September 1976

The brothers Warren, American patriots

The brothers Warren, American patriots

The Brothers Warren, American Patriots

THIS IS not truly a story of the American War of Independence (the Revolutionary War). Rather, it is an account of two brothers Warren, one who died a hero's death early in the war and one who survived to found a surgical dynasty that endures to this day. In keeping with tradition during the year of the Bicentennial, John Singleton Copley's portrait of one of the brothers, Dr Joseph Warren, graces the cover of this issue ofThe Journal. JOSEPH WARREN The Physician When Joseph attended Harvard College with the intention of practicing medicine, he evidently had little thought that he would become an honored patriot of the American War of Independence. He was a member of the third generation of Warrens born in colonial America, and his maternal grandfather had been a physician before him. Joseph's medical education was typical for American physicians of his era, as described vividly

The Spirit of '76: The Growth of American Patriotism before Independence, 1607-1776

The Spirit of '76: The Growth of American Patriotism before Independence, 1607-1776

The Spirit of '76: The Growth of American Patriotism before Independence.

The Spirit of '76: The Growth of American Patriotism before Independence.

Familial Politics: Thomas Paine and the Killing of the King, 1776

THIS exploratory paper attempts a probe into the problem of who killed George III and why. It seeks as well to inquire into the subliminal sources of popular political influence. It also raises indirectly the problem of how and indeed whether historians should explore such arcane instances of homicide. Granted, any reports concerning the death of George III in 1776 may be said in one sense to be greatly exaggerated. Nonetheless one can propose that in 1776 George III was killed in his American provinces vicariously but very effectively by an anonymous hand and that this act of murder constitutes a legitimate subject for historical inquiry. The American Revolution has been occasionally placed upon the couch for a brisk session of psychiatric analysis; the resulting diagnoses of American independence as a rejection of the British father have not been difficult.' But they have also apparently not been wholly persuasive to the rather large number of historians who think that generalizations about a major historical event ought somehow to be tied to what facts are known about it. If one looks at these facts, and particularly at the public discussion during 1775 and during the first six months of 1776 about separation from Britain, one becomes impressed by the way Americans strummed persistently upon certain themes: that there was the utmost necessity for union among the colonies, that the British government had mounted a conspiracy to deprive American colonials of their rights, that Americans were threatened with outright enslavement, that Great Britain and especially the British government was steeped in corruption and degeneracy. These are familiar. Yet one theme which one might reasonably expect to find usually arose only implicitly: American patriots simply assumed that an independent America would be republican, that monarchy would come to an end in

The Amphibious Campaign for West Florida and Louisiana, 1814-1815: A Critical Review of Strategy and Tactics at New Orleans.

with Sir Guy Carleton on the new government of Quebec. All this is made clear in Treasury and Foreign Office documents. Despite its shortcomings, the book serves the valuable purpose of examining in some detail the career of a loyalist who does not fit neatly into the conservative mold too often reserved for such men by historians. Smith was a leader of the opposition in New York at least until 1765, and he believed that the American colonies should be given a considerable amount of autonomy within the British Empire. Many other loyalists also espoused the same theory of the relationship between England and her colonies, and regarded themselves as true American patriots even though they supported the British. Upton's work will substantially assist in granting these men the recognition the deserve.

The liberty tree: A symbol for American patriots

The liberty tree: A symbol for American patriots

An American Patriot in Spain: 1781

An American Patriot in Spain: 1781

Pre-Emptive Rights in the Disposition of a Confiscated Estate, Philipsburgh Manor, New York

JN New York during the Revolutionary era the confiscation of loyalist property was conceived as a punitive measure and was implemented as a fiscal device. Yet, on the basis of New York's treatment of tenanted loyalist estates it can also be maintained that confiscation seemed on paper to be the most social revolutionary step taken by the American patriots.' New York's basic confiscation law of 1779 showed a marked solicitude for the patriotic tenants of convicted or attainted Tories, permitting tenants to become owners of their own farms through pre-emption, that is, the first right of purchase at fair market value.2 This measure might be viewed merely as an attempt to win active adherents to the American cause, but the friction between landlords and tenants was so widespread and long-standing that a promise of land ownership to any tenants must be related to prewar conditions as well as to the politics and finances of the Revolution.3 John Watts drew no distinction between Tory and Whig landlords when he commented in I777 on the vassalage of the Hudson River counties and declared that an offer to make freeholders of the tenants of

John Daly Burk: Irish Revolutionist and American Patriot

John Daly Burk: Irish Revolutionist and American Patriot