American Republicanism Research Articles

Joel Barlow in Denmark: American Republicanism and the Republic of Translations in Continental Europe in the Revolutionary 1790s

ABSTRACT Through a case study of the Danish and German translations of the American revolutionary Joel Barlow's 'Advice to the Privileged Orders of Europe' (1792), this article explores the role of translations and the example of the American Revolution in forming ideas of republicanism in the Age of Revolutions. While it is today a little-known text, the article shows that Barlow's Advice had a significant impact on the formation of revolutionary ideology in the Northern Germany and Denmark. The article furthermore argues that contrary to what historians have hitherto believed, republicanism did make its way into Denmark in the period. Here, the article shows, it influenced the political ideas of key intellectuals such as Christen Henriksen Pram, August Hennings, and C.U.D. von Eggers. Because censorship made it difficult to express republican ideas, studying translations may give us a fuller and more precise picture of political ideas in the Age of Revolutions including in places like Denmark. The article thus argues that Barlow and his text was part of a broader ‘republic of translations,’ which was transformed in the wake of the American and French Revolutions and through which spread republicanism across the world, including Northern Europe.

Political realism between American republicanism and German elitism

Political realism between American republicanism and German elitism

Exploring Nuances in American Republican Discourse: A SFL-driven Basic Content Analysis of G. Bush and D. Trump as Case Studies

This exploratory study uses a Functional-Semantic approach to language with the aim to foreground the contrasting ideological, discursive, thematic and political discourse features that mark D. Trump and George Bush's nationalistic discourse. Using a Nvivo12-facilitated CDA-oriented Basic Content Analysis (BCA), I examine 5 purposively sampled public addresses delivered by George W. Bush and Donald Trump (5 for each case) during their respective presidencies. The key findings of this lexicometric analysis disclosed subtle variations and significant intertextual connections in these two nationalistic discourse genre chains. Both discourse makers deployed certain socio-cognitive elements consistent with their discursive purposes and addressee mental models. George Bush’s sample attests to a ‘conservative Jeffersonian internationalist discourse’ that is marked by a call for Americans to think of themselves as one people, whose members are equal, rather than being in conflict with an out-group America-internally. Indeed, Donald Trump's discourse subscribes to hardline Jacksonian stream, introducing an ideological and political nationalism, characterized by heightened polarization, conspiracy theories and group essentialization. This research has broader implications for political communication, informing discussions on how language shapes political ideologies and societies. The revealed intertextual links support previous research on the intertextuality and ideological encoding of nationalistic narratives in American political discourse.

Dwa amerykańskie konserwatywne republikanizmy

TWO AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE REPUBLICANISMS: THE INTELLECTUAL ORIGINS OF THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE RIGHT During the founding period of the United States, the ideological foundations of American political discourse were formed. The constitutional debate and the first years of the young republic showed the fundamental differences between the Founding Fathers. Their different conceptions of the Union and its essence created different currents within American republicanism. In the article, the author analyzes two conservative republicanisms that arose in the North and South of the United States. In his opinion, the northern republicanism of Hamilton, Ames, Adams and Marshall, emphasizing the negative side of human nature, had to appeal to power, which alone can tame particularisms and unite the efforts of all in one direction. Southerners, on the other hand, took as the starting point of their argument the organic nature and primordiality of the basic social structures that determine the scope of power, primarily federal.

How the Priesthood of All Believers Became American

Abstract: This article examines how the common priesthood or priesthood of all believers emerged from a narrow German Lutheran context and became “Americanized” in the nineteenth century. References to the common priesthood in any of its variations were seldom in early America, and the article traces how Americans in the mid-nineteenth century, especially the church historian Philip Schaff, drew on new understandings of the common priesthood in nineteenth-century Germany propagated by August Neander, among others, and applied it to the American republican context. By the end of the nineteenth century, it had gained wide currency among Protestants in America and would become a key element of American Protestant self-understanding. Lutherans drew on it as well, but many remained ambivalent about broader claims, especially as it might impinge on the authority of the ordained office. In the formulation “the priesthood of all believers,” the common priesthood continues to resonate in the twentieth century among a diverse range of American denominations from peace church Quakers to conservative Evangelicals, although interpretations of it continue to vary widely.

The Predicaments of Radical Individualism and the Gothic Return of Paternal Legacy in Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland

Scholars have read Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland in the context of early American republicanism, viewing the fall of the younger Wielands’ enlightened utopia as a sobering reflection on the nascent republic, as the family tragedy sheds light on the flipside of the early American Enlightenment. The bankruptcy of the Wielands’ enlightenment idealism, however, also reveals that they remain tragically bound to the gothic legacy of the first Protestant father.
 Wieland dramatizes how Clara’s enlightenment ends up being eclipsed by the return of the father’s sins, as she unwittingly inherits his radical individualism. This paper examines how the frontier immigrant father’s millennialistic fanaticism returns, leading Clara to gravitate toward an occult belief and a fatalist outlook. Indeed, Clara’s attempts to counter the oppressive paternal curse with her faith in benevolent Providence flounder, emblematically demonstrating the inherent limitations of her radical individualism. Clara’s descent is punctuated by her symbolic dread of her brother Theodore, the heir to the persistent curse of their patriarchal heritage. At the same time, her fear is mediated by a mystical voice that Carwin fabricates to embody divine authority. Clara’s near-blind obedience to what she imagines to be an occult agent is reminiscent of the elder Wieland’s apocalyptic fervor. As Clara’s moral fortitude succumbs to epistemological uncertainty and despair, the haunting shadows of her paternal lineage disrupt her rational inquiry and optimistic worldview, casting a pall over her struggle for enlightenment and self-realization.

Catholic Paternalism and Slavery’s Capitalism: Bishop John England’s Defense of Domestic Slavery and the Interstate Slave Trade

Catholic Paternalism and Slavery’s Capitalism: Bishop John England’s Defense of Domestic Slavery and the Interstate Slave Trade David Roach (bio) The 1840 presidential campaign between Democratic president Martin Van Buren and Whig challenger William Henry Harrison set the stage for the most sustained and most important American Catholic defense of slavery, Charleston bishop John England’s letters to Georgia politician and U.S. secretary of state John Forsyth.1 By then, the prelate had lived in South Carolina for the better part of two decades and overseen the gradual growth of his fledgling diocese. In 1820, the thirty-four-year-old Irish priest had been installed as the first Bishop of Charleston, a newly created diocese spanning all of Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina but counting perhaps four churches and three other priests to minister to the small number of communicants scattered across the region.2 But when England died in 1842, the diocese boasted [End Page 205] fourteen churches, twenty priests, two female religious institutions, and some seven thousand members.3 (So small a community, it turned out, could not fund all these projects, and England left a much-indebted diocese to his successor, Ignatius A. Reynolds.4) While pastoral, administrative, and ecclesiastical duties occupied much of England’s time, he also dedicated himself to literary endeavors, most often by writing editorials in the United States Catholic Miscellany, the diocesan publication he had founded in 1822 and the country’s first Catholic newspaper. By dint of his brilliant and often acerbic pen, the bishop won a national reputation as the most articulate champion of the compatibility of American republicanism and Roman Catholicism.5 (His erudition won for the bishop some respect from the local literati, too, as was evident from his occasional participation in Charleston intellectual circles.6) Though ever eager to praise his country’s political institutions, he was more reluctant to defend slavery. He had imbibed his political ideology back in Europe and, as historians have demonstrated, never fully embraced the South’s synthesis of republican values and human bondage.7 Nevertheless, circumstances compelled him to defend the institution at length in 1840. That fall, John Forsyth had planned on stumping for Van Buren throughout Georgia, but illness forced him to stop in Fredericksburg, Virginia, where he jotted off an article for his constituents that the Augusta, Georgia, Constitutionalist published on September 12, 1840. Eschewing more substantive matters of policy, Forsyth played upon [End Page 206] white southerners’ fears of English abolitionists, hoping to connect those much-reviled reformers to his American political opponents, the Whigs.8 The address may also have tapped into his readers’ nativism, for Forsyth suggested that “influences proceeding from the British isles” had set in motion the promulgation of In Supremo Apostolatus, Pope Gregory XVI’s 1839 apostolic letter condemning the international slave trade. Southern Catholics, most notably Bishop England but also others, interpreted Forsyth to be implying that the Vatican was plotting with the British Parliament against slavery, and they feared such accusations impugned American Catholics’ loyalties to southern institutions.9 And so, as he had done on so many other occasions, John England took up the pen to demonstrate Catholics’ loyalty to their country’s political institutions, this time defending slavery, over the course of eighteen letters published between October 1840 and April 1841 in the United States Catholic Miscellany.10 Throughout this correspondence, England sought to place an ecclesiastical imprimatur on the specific customs and laws at the core of antebellum southern slavery, including, in his first missive, a roundabout defense of the domestic slave trade. The bishop began his argument by distinguishing the domestic slavery practiced in the American South from the transatlantic slave trade sustained by Spanish and Portuguese merchants, and most often, historians have understood the bishop’s rhetorical thrust as follows: the pope censured only avaricious Iberians and so neither endorsed immediatism nor criticized southern slaveholders.11 But England made another, more precise, distinction [End Page 207] between the international slave trade and the internal slave trade.12 His decision to do so was quite understandable, for the pontiff’s condemnation of “that inhuman trade by which negroes, as if...

Trump's Misogynistic Linguistic Elements and His Rhetorical Device

This paper analyzes the misogynistic linguistic elements of Donald Trump, from the first GOP debate (6 Aug. 2015) on a FOX channel and a CNN interview (7 Aug. 2015) concerning Fox News anchor and the debate moderator Megyn Kelly. His Twitter comments and live interview comments concerning women were projected to show his misogyny. If we consider that Trump became the American Republican presidential candidate at that time, these misogynistic linguistic elements seemed to be of little importance to Trump's supporters.
 Trump projected a smart image in terms of his linguistic strategy; justifying himself through the use of membership categorization, rhetorical use of mitigation and lexical cohesion such as anaphoric, exophoric references, and repetition as a rhetorical device. In his remarks, he showed a hierarchical structure on the importance of misogyny. For him and his supporters, the misogynistic characteristics seemed to be less important than other important issues facing the United States. Despite misogynistic controversies in Trump’s speeches, he succeeded in his path toward the election.

Stranger Citizens: Migrant Influence and National Power in the Early American Republic

Even for established early modern nation-states, the question of citizenship, the rights it confers, and the rights of resident aliens and migrants were subjective political sticky wickets. For a new nation, congealed from the Atlantic mélange of the British Empire, the issue was still more mucky. Add to that the universal and global nature of America's natural rights' revolutionary philosophy, the emergent American republican identity that thrust new political duties and expectations upon average men (usually white), and the new nation's need for open trade and an expanding labor force, and the issue clouded even further. John McNelis O'Keefe candidly touts the relevancy of this study given the policies of the previous administration, but it is just as relevant for the prior 240 years. In a republic such as the United States, the rights and duties of citizens, residents, and migrants are paramount yet evolving concerns in which the powerless contest with the powerful for the control of vital resources—among them their lives, liberty, and their pursuits of happiness.

Contested Liberalisms: Martineau, Dickens and the Victorian Press, by Iain Crawford

Reviewed by: Contested Liberalisms: Martineau, Dickens and the Victorian Press by Iain Crawford Jessie Reeder (bio) Contested Liberalisms: Martineau, Dickens and the Victorian Press, by Iain Crawford; pp. xii + 332. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019, $110.00, $29.95 paper, $110.00 ebook. Comparing two Victorian authors’ experiences in the United States might not seem a particularly expansive prospect. And yet, in Iain Crawford’s Contested Liberalisms: Martineau, Dickens and the Victorian Press, we see just how wide the view can get. Crawford identifies Harriet Martineau’s and Charles Dickens’s early visits to the United States as formative to their views of the periodical press, their own careers, and, ultimately, their incompatible philosophies of liberalism that led to their infamous and public falling-out. While the two authors share much in their parallel trajectories as self-fashioning authors and liberals, they turn out to diverge on subjects as wide-ranging and consequential as the role of women in the public sphere (something Martineau advocated and Dickens disliked) and the nature of progressive history (Martineau adhering to a stadial arc while Dickens saw more indeterminacy than pattern). Crawford follows these fissures through an impressive array of subjects, including abolition, working-class and Irish unrest, urban versus rural prospects, and the role of the celebrity author. Working adroitly in three fields—transatlantic studies, periodical studies, and liberalism—Crawford’s two-author study offers a vision of the early Victorian press as “shaped by a transatlantic community of letters broadly united in [End Page 691] support for the advance of progressive values but crucially divided over core elements of the ideology of liberalism itself” (2). Chapters 1 and 2 track Martineau’s political philosophy as it developed in the early 1830s in England and then during her lengthy stay in the United States. Influenced by Friedrich Schiller and Adam Smith, Martineau believed the key to social progress was the creation of sympathy through robust public discourse, which in turn required a free press and universal access to education, particularly for women. In her American writings, then, Crawford argues, Martineau depicts the United States—and especially the western frontier—as “a potential if still partially realised exemplar of liberal progress” in which slavery, constrained womanhood, and a restricted press all threaten the otherwise promising advance of liberal subjectivity (50). By turning to Dickens in chapters 3 and 4, Crawford offers a striking comparison of the two authors’ American experiences. Reading American Notes (1842), Crawford shows that where Martineau privileged the frontier, Dickens favored New York City; where Martineau saw the promise of progress in America, Dickens saw degeneration from a British ideal; and where Martineau despised the restrictions of American republican motherhood, Dickens condoned domesticity and limited subjectivity for women. Both writers, however, “examined the American press as a predictor of what the future might hold in store for British journalism” (119). And so, on his return to Britain, Dickens penned Martin Chuzzlewit (1844), which Crawford reads as a response to widespread criticism of American Notes—and as a doubling-down on its critiques of American society. Martin Chuzzlewit depicts an atopic America, drowning in a tide of unregulated mass media, disconnected from both history and future, and corrupted by women’s independence. These first four chapters contain some of Crawford’s most compelling close reading, particularly as he tracks Martineau’s and Dickens’s divergent senses of the temporality of American landscapes. And he makes a persuasive case that the transatlantic voyage was formative for both authors’ political views and professional futures. Crawford is somewhat more critical of Dickens’s version of liberalism than of Martineau’s in these early chapters. And although he concedes that both authors “endors[ed] the underlying theory [of progress] that pushed Native Americans beyond the pale of civilised society,” one wishes for a more critical orientation toward Martineau’s erasure of violence against Indigenous and enslaved people (118). Martineau is apparently concerned with miscegenation only as it affects white families and not Black victims of sexual violence, and she locates Andrew Jackson’s threat to liberalism in his censorship of the press rather than in his genocidal policies of Indigenous displacement. These are features of her...

Taking the “Race” Out of Master Race: The Evolving Role of the Jew in White Supremacist Discourse

Abstract Across Europe and North America, political leaders and elites use ethnoreligious appeals based on white supremacist ideology with increasing success. Yet this rhetoric frequently includes positive references to Jews and Israel. What explains this pivot away from the historic reliance on the so-called “nefarious, menacing Jew”? Rather than interpret the transformation of the white supremacist Jewish trope as an ideological shift, this article demonstrates that the transformation reflects a mainstreaming of white supremacist discourse. More specifically, as white supremacist discourse increasingly finds a home in successful nativist political parties, framing Jews as a religion rather than a race sidesteps hurdles to attracting votes. Second, positive references to Israel rather than Jews demonstrates the evolution of an identitarian strand within white supremacy rather than a de-escalation of racist ideology. A comparison of the German AfD and the American Republican Party, two parties that increasingly employ white supremacist rhetoric alongside pro- Jewish rhetoric, illustrates the phenomenon. Within a larger political context, the de-racializing of Jews in white supremacist discourse reflects a shift in twenty-first century nativism from a preoccupation with race and nationality, to a focus on civilizational, cultural, and religious identities.

Joseph Smith for President: The Prophet, the Assassins, and the Fight for American Religious Freedom

Joseph Smith for President: The Prophet, the Assassins, and the Fight for American Religious Freedom

Sarah Pogson’s The Female Enthusiast (1807) and American Republican Virtue

Sarah Pogson’s The Female Enthusiast (1807) and American Republican Virtue

George Washington’s Hair: How Early Americans Remembered the Founders by Keith Beutler

Reviewed by: George Washington’s Hair: How Early Americans Remembered the Founders by Keith Beutler Matthew R. Costello George Washington’s Hair: How Early Americans Remembered the Founders. By Keith Beutler. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2021. 292 pages. Cloth, ebook. Though most of the colonial political elite traditionally referred to as the Founders or Founding Fathers did not envision women, African Americans, Native Americans, or other religiously or politically marginalized communities as equal members of the emerging United States, these groups and individuals lived through the crucible of war and experienced different degrees of revolutionary change in the war’s aftermath. In recent decades, as social historians have shifted focus away from military leaders, elites, and institutions, they have instead emphasized the agency of these marginalized peoples, as well as their impact on the Revolutionary War and wider contributions to independence. In turn, scholars of memory—among them Michael Kammen and Alfred F. Young—have explored how diverse individuals and groups remembered and commemorated the American Revolution differently, each with their own goals, which included political autonomy, economic gain, and cultural influence.1 In the years following the American Revolution, women, African Americans, and working-class whites in the new nation, who were marginalized and generally excluded from participating in formal politics, found other ways to connect with the birth of the country through public and private memory practices. Scholars such as David Waldstreicher and Len Travers have used key anniversaries, such as the Fourth of July, to show how people divided by race, class, and gender participated collectively in rituals of American republican political culture.2 Other scholars such as Robert Cray Jr. and Sarah Purcell have highlighted specific efforts made by local communities, state officials, and political parties to honor the deceased while claiming them as their own. Beyond public memory practices such as ceremonies, orations, parades, and processions, private practices were also democratized in the nineteenth century, as more people ventured to historic places in search of tangible pieces of the American past. George Washington’s Mount Vernon estate is but one of many examples, [End Page 161] as nineteenth-century visitors proclaimed Washington the “property of the nation” and absconded with all kinds of mementos and “relics.” These items provided a physical connection to Washington, imbued with the experience of visiting as well as the stories provided by enslaved African Americans and other workers who showed them the grounds and tomb.3 In George Washington’s Hair: How Early Americans Remembered the Founders, Keith Beutler builds upon these works with a fascinating discussion of the various intellectual, scientific, religious, and pseudoscientific ideas and movements that shaped the memory of the American Revolution in the first half of the nineteenth century. From 1790 to 1840, Beutler argues, transatlantic memory culture and ideas influenced how Americans understood memory, eventually turning them toward a physicalist perspective. As Americans began to use relics as “concrete memory aids” (2), historical societies, organizations, and individuals sought out physical pieces of the past such as objects, artifacts, and even people in the form of Revolutionary War veterans. Though historians have explored how democracy transformed American life and by extension patriotic memory, Beutler contends the opposite, arguing that the “popular redefinition of the faculty of memory itself causally contributed to the young nation’s democratization” (3). Beutler grounds his study in the best example of this phenomenon: strands of Washington’s hair. As he notes, “Scores of institutions hold locks from his mane. . . . To drive the ten-hour stretch from Richmond, Virginia, to Portland, Maine, is to pass within fifty miles of a lock of his hair nearly four dozen times—an average of about once every fourteen minutes” (x). The author’s accompanying website even features an interactive map identifying more than one hundred sites, museums, historical societies, and universities across the United States that purport to house a lock of Washington’s hair. Those that possessed these “sacred patriotic relics” (8) believed they were entitled to greater cultural authority and used the memory of the Founders and Washington to advance their causes. Beutler illustrates this contest over the memory of the revolution through the lives, experiences, and events surrounding five individuals...

Sacred Socialism

Sacred Socialism

Media Analysis of the Canadian Deemed Consent Policy: Valuable Insights?

> No man is good enough to govern another man without the other's consent. I say this is the leading principle—the sheet anchor of American republicanism. —Abraham Lincoln What a pleasure it is, as a policy professional and 42-year patient with kidney disease, to review a CJASN article outside

The Powers of Dignity: The Black Political Philosophy of Frederick Douglass

The Powers of Dignity: The Black Political Philosophy of Frederick Douglass

A Contest of Civilizations: Exposing the Crisis of American Exceptionalism in the Civil War Era by Andrew F. Lang

Reviewed by: A Contest of Civilizations: Exposing the Crisis of American Exceptionalism in the Civil War Era by Andrew F. Lang Mark Wahlgren Summers A Contest of Civilizations: Exposing the Crisis of American Exceptionalism in the Civil War Era. By Andrew F. Lang. The Littlefield History of the Civil War Era. ( Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. Pp. x, 558. $34.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-6007-3.) We were one of a kind. Americans never doubted it. In a world of aristocrats, autocrats, and mobs, the United States felt like the one safe haven for liberty wedded to law: a loose-jointed governing structure shared between the states and the nation, beholden to the public will but within a constitutional framework that barred the way to would-be dictators and leveling sans-culottes, running roughshod over the safeguards for individual freedom. Every upheaval in Europe, every fresh caudillo posing as a savior in Latin America, only told Americans how rare and precious the Founders' work was and how it was worth dying for its defense. That sense of exceptionalism, as Andrew F. Lang's closely researched study makes clear, helps explain both secession and its suppression, the new birth of freedom and what, to some at least, felt like its stunted growth in the years after the Civil War. Time proved that the American experiment would not translate easily or smoothly into other cultures. It also made America more exceptional in one particular way: as one of the few Western countries where slavery persisted—indeed, embedded itself deeper. For northerners, slavery's spread looked ever more like a menace to what had made this country special. It revealed itself as a subversive force undermining white people's freedom as well as that of Black people. Slaveholding and democracy could not endure forever; the house divided could not stand. At the same time, as race and servitude became more [End Page 169] deeply entwined with white southerners' identity, they came to see attacks on slavery as a threat to what made American republicanism special. With it, they saw danger to that other distinctively American fundamental—the federal system that let states define their own institutions as they would. So in 1860, many white southerners embraced secession as the only way to preserve what made the republic unique. They were willing to fight for it, just as so many others were prepared to shoulder arms to preserve those values that they thought defined America's distinctiveness: government by the consent of the governed, the rule of law, and, at least for the antislavery minority, that gradual working toward a Union in which all were treated equally. This sense of exceptionalism defined the kind of war soldiers preferred to make, to spare civilians and to limit themselves to military targets; rather than shelving the Constitution to meet the crisis, policy makers emphasized that at worst they were only stretching it, and not for keeps. Seceded states' sovereignty might slumber, but theirs was no sleep of death. That sense of exceptionalism fostered a northern commitment to do whatever it took to save the Union, including recasting the relationship between the states and the national government and the caste system that gave white people such commanding sway over Black people. With the war's end, though, that sense of exceptionalism not only furthered the North's commitment to remake the Confederate South but also put a leash and a time limit on Reconstruction. The authority needed to subdue the often violent resistance to equal rights felt too much like the iron hand of authoritarian regimes elsewhere. The world was too much with us, late and soon: our eyes turned to French imperial adventurism in Mexico and mob law in Commune-run Paris. In President Ulysses S. Grant's use of troops to uphold southern governments, his critics saw Julius Caesar and Napoleon Bonaparte; in the so-called Force Bills they could read the ukases of czars and Iron Chancellors. Not racism alone, but a fear for the fragility of the one successful experiment in carefully restricted self-government, put confines on how far Reconstruction could go and on how long intervention from...

Irish Republicanism and the Colonial Australian Bushranger Narrative

This article examines a range of colonial Australian Irish bushranger narratives in terms of their investments in revolutionary republicanism, arguing that these become increasingly contested and compromised over time. Beginning with the anonymously published novel Rebel Convicts (1858), it looks at how the fate of transported Irish revolutionaries is imagined in relation to colonial settlement and the convict system. It then turns to Ned Kelly’s Jerilderie Letter (c. 1879), highlighting Kelly’s rhetoric of resistance and mapping his affinities with Irish American republicanism. John Boyle O’Reilly was a Fenian activist, transported to Western Australia in 1867. His novel Moondyne (1878, 1879), rather than unleashing an Irish revolutionary political agenda, is based instead on an English-Catholic bushranger, and its interest in republicanism is in any case displaced from its Australian setting. Ned Kelly’s execution in 1880 gave rise to a new wave of popular narratives, including James Skipp Borlase’s The Iron-Clad Bushranger (1881), which fictionalises Kelly’s career – embroiling him in Irish Fenian plots – and recasts his political affiliations as criminal characteristics. Rolf Boldrewood’s Robbery Under Arms (1882–3) was also published in the wake of the Kelly saga but is notable for its political conservatism, stripping its Irish-Catholic bushrangers of their revolutionary potential to better serve the interests of a powerful pastoral elite. This conservatism is both challenged and magnified in Rosa Praed’s Outlaw and Lawmaker (1893), which celebrates the career of John Boyle O’Reilly while also re-directing his political radicalism into romance. The article concludes that the revolutionary figure of the Irish bushranger is gradually divorced from any radical agency and relegated to a remote chapter of colonial Australia’s history.

Cuba and the United States in Democratic and Republican times: continuity or change?

For a comprehensive understanding, one as close to reality as possible, of the U.S.-Cuban relations it is necessary to study in detail the conceptual foundations and historical background of the U.S. foreign policy towards the Latin American region in general, and towards Cuba in particular. To this end, the author offers a retrospective overview of the U.S. policy in interaction with the Cuban state, taking as a starting point the very formation of the United States as a state from thirteen original colonies. The origins of the U.S.-Cuban interaction, the context of the victory of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, as well as the political motivation of American leaders, both Democratic and Republican, in the context of building relations with Cuba are examined. The political decisions of the U.S. leadership regarding Cuba are immersed into the global dynamics of world political processes and the positioning of the U.S. in the international arena in different periods. Building the sequence of the U.S. relations with the island the author comes to the conclusion that the dialogue with Cuba has always been from the position of force, and it is proven in the article that such approach, often accompanied by unfair destructive actions, remained in place even in the moment of warming, namely during the restoration of relations with Cuba in the years of Barack Obama’s presidency. The author is convinced that the solution of the conflict between the two countries will be realistically possible only when the U.S. government fully recognizes Cuba’s sovereignty and ambitions to be more actively involved in the regional and international agenda.