Young America Research Articles

“Tearing Down the Burning House”: James Buchanan's use of Edmund Burke

The 1854 Ostend Manifesto has long been scorned as an expansionist treatise, a leading indicator of “Young America's” hold on the antebellum Democratic Party, and a signal of Franklin Pierce's failed presidency. Unnoticed is the genesis of the document's most famous metaphor, of Cuba representing a neighbor's “burning house” that could cause American intervention. The primary author of the Manifesto was minister to Great Britain and future president James Buchanan, and he attempted to smooth over the rough suggestion of an American takeover of the island by borrowing imagery from Edmund Burke's 1791 Reflections on the Revolution in France. Buchanan's use of Burke, the anti‐revolutionary English philosopher of prudence and critic of ideology, demonstrates the wide but underappreciated popularity of Burke with American politicians of all parties. Not just Whigs and Southern planters, but also Northern Doughface Democrats such as Buchanan, especially in the 1850s, used Burke to preach calm, moderation, and political prudence. As his use in the Manifesto makes clear, a larger study of Edmund Burke's appeal to Americans is badly needed to plot his broad influence on American politics leading up to the Civil War.

The Fictive Transformation of American Nationalism after Sir Walter Scott

The Fictive Transformation of American Nationalism after Sir Walter Scott David Moltke-Hansen (bio) Americans had to invent their nationalism. As David Waldstreicher has indicated, nationalism was a new phenomenon at the end of the Revolution.1 Another closely related feeling, however, was already familiar. Like the Protestant Irish, colonists in British America early developed their attachment to British traditions, institutions, and the monarchy into a culture of patriotism. They had multiple reasons. They wished to be co-equal in self-government and standing with the English in England, and they wanted to claim the benefits of British commerce and military protection against both native populations and foreign invaders. By the late 1760s, they also sought to ally themselves with the colonial policies of the Whig Party in England. To these ends, as Colin Kidd has noted, Americans, like the Anglo-Irish and 18th-century Scots, asserted "a Gothic heritage of liberty, laws and institutions."2 American Revolutionaries, in turn, used that mythic claim to justify their appropriation of the patriot label for themselves in their defense of British institutions and traditions of self-government against the monarchy. They argued that they were acting out of love of the body politic—the patria. In this way, a culture of patriotism continued through the Revolution. But this culture's parades and celebrations were used to promote not loyalty to a distant king or common antecedents, but to a shared future and government and the putatively traditional principles on which these were founded. American patriotism united people despite their widely divergent ethnic, religious, and geographic antecedents, attachments, and interests. Americans were developing a nationalism of hope, ideological commitment, and Revolutionary pride, but not of ethnic identity—not yet. At the same time as the former colonists were transforming their British patriotism into American nationalism, Sir Walter Scott began writing books that promoted British nationalism at home. He had a receptive public. Many in Britain accepted the Gothic heritage evoked by Scott. Moreover, in the wake of the loss of British colonies in America and in the midst of the wars with Napoleonic France (then also starting to explore its "Gothic" roots), a growing number of Britons were eager to embrace any allegiance that would unite ever more closely the English and the Scots across their common border. For Scott and his readers, nationalism was an antidote to, rather than an expression of, ethnic particularism. It also transferred to the state the feelings of attachment, loyalty, and identity that in earlier times had adhered at different levels to monarchs and nobles, to ecclesiastical authorities, and to clans and tribes. In making his case, Scott deconstructed both English and Scottish ethnicity, arguing that lowland and highland Scots were historically different peoples and describing the English as a fusion of Anglo-Saxon and Norman peoples and cultures. The process of amalgamation, furthermore, was continuing both within Scotland and between the Scots and the English. Click for larger view View full resolution Sir Walter Scott Scott's example inspired American writers to think about how literature could be used to promote nationalism. None more closely followed the Scottish writer than William Gilmore Simms of Charleston, South Carolina. Joining the new Young America circle in the late 1830s, he began to flesh out a coherent and consistent set of ideas about the relationship between literature and nationalism. He did this as he wrote southern romances that emulated Scott's Scottish border romances. Gradually, in the face of growing sectional tensions, these vigorously developed and expounded commitments led him as well through American nationalism to southern nationalism. In the end, Simms decided, nationalism should not unite, but rather should separate divergent peoples if and when and as they became strong enough to govern themselves. Americans had developed sufficient strength by 1776, and white Southerners soon would be strong enough to seek independence in their turn. In making this case, Simms did not argue that Americans were essentially a distinct people from the beginning. Instead, he contended that they had developed into a distinct people over time. The same process was playing out for white Southerners. Ethnicities emerged historically through the joint processes of amalgamation and differentiation or speciation...

Balancing Act: Young America’s Struggle to Revive the Old Democracy

Balancing Act: Young America’s Struggle to Revive the Old Democracy Elizabeth R. Varon (bio) Yonatan Eyal. The Young America Movement and the Transformation of the Democratic Party, 1828–1861. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. xii + 252 pp. Notes and index. $75.00. This impressive first book challenges us to look anew at the Democratic party of the late antebellum period and thereby to appreciate the profound influence of the party’s self-styled progressive vanguard, the “Young Americans.” In the 1840s and 1850s, “Young America” had its heyday as a faction in the political party of Old Hickory. Led by men such as editor John O’Sullivan, whose Democratic Review was the organ of the new movement; politicians Stephen Douglas, James K. Polk and Franklin Pierce; and New York financier August Belmont, this faction, Eyal explains, broke with the agrarian and strict constructionist orthodoxies of the past and embraced commerce, technology, regulation, reform, and internationalism. They defied, so Eyal seeks to prove, the “recurrent stereotype of the Democrats and racists and imperialists” and appeasers of the slaveocracy (p. 12). Eyal’s book, he notes early on, is a political, not a cultural, history. It is meant to complement the extensive scholarship on the literary branch of Young America—a New York-based movement of editors and writers who wanted to break free of dependence on European standards of high culture and to prove the excellence and exceptionalism of America’s own literary tradition.1 As important as they were, drawing into their orbit the likes of Hawthorne and Melville, literary Young Americans were eclipsed in prominence by political ones. Young Americans represented, literally, a new generation of political leaders. “Sons of the Jacksonians and grandchildren of the Founders,” they confronted a paradox: Jacksonians had promoted the idea that representatives should be accountable to their local constituents, but now in the 1840s, those constituents were demanding, in the name of localism, that Democratic politicians abandon some of the party’s most hallowed economic principles (p. 32). Around the country, but especially in western boomtowns, Democratic constituents wanted to tap the power of the market revolution in order to generate prosperity and [End Page 42] development—and that meant supporting the very sorts of state-sponsored “internal improvements” that Democrats had traditionally decried. Young Americans (or New Democrats), most prominently Stephen Douglas of Illinois, proved responsive to constituent pressures and skilled at justifying internal improvements in a political language that Democrats could call their own. To meet the mounting demands for the construction of railroads, canals, telegraphs, turnpikes, bridges, harbors, steamships and other vehicles of the market revolution, Young Americans advocated Congressional land grants to the states; this created the comforting fiction that internal improvements were locally rather than federally sponsored. They argued that improved transportation networks would perpetuate the agrarian vision of Jefferson by allowing farmers to sell their products and therefore to prosper. And they linked internal improvements to free trade: they accepted moderate tariffs as a necessary means to generate government revenue, and they defended the Independent Treasury (the Jacksonian alternative to the Second Bank of the United States) not as a “scheme to quash [the] special priviledge” of the Whiggish Northeastern eastern monied elite, but as a pro-growth instrument for promoting development and commerce (p. 79). With the economy booming in the mid-1840s and the first Young American president, James K. Polk, in office, reform-minded Democrats set their sights on exporting American democracy. Allying themselves with the “Young Europe” movements springing up on the continent, some New Democrats called for foreign intervention to support the revolutions of 1848. While such calls had little practical consequence, they do reveal, Eyal notes, the strong strain of idealism—a belief in the transcendent power of democracy—that animated Young Americans. Such idealism drove many influential New Democrats, such as Belmont, who became President Pierce’s minister at the Hague, into the foreign service. And it drove New Democrats to look to the American West and the Caribbean as fields where they might plant democracy. “Bringing Cuba and Mexico into the liberty-loving folds of Union seemed no different from helping Louis Kossuth to shrug off autocracy...

Young America: Land, Labor, and the Republican Community , and: For the People: American Populist Movements from the Revolution to the 1850s (review)

Young America: Land, Labor, and the Republican Community. By Mark A. Lause. (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2005. Pp. 240. Cloth, $42.00; Paper, $20.00.)For the People: American Populist Movements from the Revolution to the 1850s. By Ronald P. Formisano. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. Pp. 315. Cloth, $35.00.)Reviewed by Kyle G. VolkMark A. Lause and Ronald P. Formisano make two important contributions to the political history of the early republic and continue the important trend of examining vital arenas of political action in the so-called golden age of democracy beyond party and electoral behavior. Lause's more focused and deeply researched study, Young America, makes a fine contribution to antebellum reform, labor, and political history by offering a comprehensive look at the origins, operation, and legacy of the National Reform Association (NRA). Born in 1844 in the back of a New York City print shop and led by free-thinker George Henry Evans, the NRA quickly emerged as a nationally prominent that advanced land reform as the essential solution to growing socioeconomic dislocations and working-class strife in urbanizing and industrializing America. Eschewing the two-party electoral system, the NRA instead adopted a nonpartisan strategy (17) that privileged public-policy objectives. Three measures to democratize landholding - state legislation exempting homesteads from being seized for debts, a federal homestead act, and most radically, limitations on the amount of land any individual could own - guided the and allowed it to build often surprising bridges between varied reform and political movements. Through alliance-building and local organizing, conventions, congresses, and conferences, the embrace of third parties, and national petition drives, the NRA gained widespread support for key pillars of its agenda by midcentury. The NRA's success, Lause contends, influenced the political realignments of the 1850s and the rise of the Free Soil and the Republican Party and provided crucial underpinnings to the Republicans' Homestead Act of 1862.According to Lause, scholarly reliance on how contemporary politicians disparagingly viewed the NRA has caused historians to misunderstand the and overlook its importance. In three sections, each comprising three short chapters, Lause works his readers hard, relying rather heavily on direct quotations from movement sources (2) to make the case that the NRA was an influential player in the late antebellum political environment. Section One locates the NRA's origins in the Workingmen's Party and Locofoco Democrats of the 1820s and 1830s and charts its quest to build a broad coalition among disparate groups like Rhode Island's Dorrites, Upstate New York's Anti-Renters, Mike Walsh's Spartan Band, urban workingmen's associations, New England Fourierists, and Robert Owen's communitarians. The NRA's land reform proposals united these groups behind a common agenda, and its call for citizens to Vote Yourself a Farm, Lause argues, was the lynchpin converting American socialism from a communitarian to a political orientation. Section Two unearths the NRA's democratic ideology and political tactics and exposes, among other things, National Reformers' distrust of centralized government and their populist hope that America's working majority would use their right of democratic self-government to regain their right to the soil. Readers interested in the relationship between labor politics, race, and slavery should consider Lause's recovery of the NRA's antislavery stance and his contention that key portions of the NRA challenged the assumptions of white supremacy (72). Section Three gauges the impact of National Reform, which lasted, Lause contends, well beyond the association's formal demise in 1849. Land reformers joined abolitionists to bolster the Free Soil response to the western lands question and helped reframe slavery's expansion as a working-class issue. …

Ark of the Liberties

Ark of the Liberties Michael Kimmage (bio) Edward L. Widmer. Ark of the Liberties: America and the World. New York: Hill and Wang, 2008. 384 pp. Illustrations, index, and notes. $25.00. A study of literary culture in the early republic, Ted Widmer’s first book, Young America: The Flowering of Democracy in New York City, took him to the intersection of words and politics. Widmer is currently director of the John Carter Brown Memorial Library and a senior fellow at the New America Foundation’s American Strategy Program. He has himself worked at the intersection of words and politics, serving as a speechwriter and consultant to President Bill Clinton, while Clinton was in office, and subsequently helping Clinton with his memoir and presidential library. Widmer has compiled two collections of political speeches for the Library of America, ranging from the revolution to the presidency of Bill Clinton. In his most recent book, Ark of the Liberties: America and the World, Widmer begins with a phrase from Herman Melville’s novel White-Jacket: America as “ark of the liberties of the world.” Widmer’s book is a study of the ark and arc of American liberty. On one plane, Widmer follows the American ark—an Old Testament vessel charged with the task of political redemption—as it navigates the rough waters of modern history. On another plane, Widmer traces the arc of liberty, a movement toward democracy and liberty in world history, and one in which the American continent has been a guiding force. Throughout Widmer’s book, the medium of politics is the written (and sometimes the spoken) word. Liberty rests on the ability to articulate liberty’s cause. When Americans have demonstrated this ability, they have honored the goddess of liberty; when they have been unwilling to speak for liberty, they have betrayed their national calling. Widmer traces a cyclical pattern of virtue achieved and then lost, democratic ideals promoted, tarnished and then rediscovered. Ark of the Liberties is emphatically not a monograph. It is, for one, a book without footnotes and it is a book of many ambitions. Widmer begins with European fantasies about America and concludes with the presidency of George W. Bush, a stretch of history foreshortened by American continuities, by the “ideas that we Americans carry around like iPods, barely conscious of their weight” (p. xiv). Widmer refers to “America’s intellectual DNA” and at another [End Page 28] point to “the American DNA,” a constellation of ideas and convictions formed around the principle of liberty; such genetics can transcend historical particularity (pp. 22, 291). In his preface, Widmer praises “the sweeping histories of the 1940s and 1950s, when Americans thought nothing of trying to express big national ideas at a time when everything American suddenly had global ramifications” (p. xiv). Widmer’s aspiration is not merely to express big national ideas with global resonance. His book has a strong normative impulse. Often employing the first-person plural, Widmer writes for an American audience and hopes, with his book, “to make plain the value of history as a guide for a nation” (p. xxi). His guide shows the way forward, while chronicling the deviations and errors contained within the historical record. These amount to the misuse of American liberty, the chauvinism and power politics that can be hidden in a false language of liberty. The way forward has been there since the beginning: the New World illuminated a passage out from tyranny, first on the level of fantasy, until this fantasy was realized by the American Revolution, reinvented by Lincoln and translated, finally, into a global project. The passage out from tyranny is mostly the example of American democracy, but it can also be the projection of this example through military force, as was the case with the Second World War. The value of history resides in “our” capacity to distinguish real liberty, extended by America as a gift to the world, from its dangerous simulacra. Widmer possesses a marvelous sensitivity to language, which follows from his erudition, his knowledge of political as well as literary history, and his deep involvement with American history, from European settlement to the present. He can catch the...

The Young America Movement and the Transformation of the Democratic Party, 1828–1861 (review)

The Young America Movement and the Transformation of the Democratic Party, 1828–1861 (review)

“The Slaves That They Are” and the Slaves That They Might Become: Bondage and Liberty in William Gilmore Simms’s <i>The Yemassee</i>

In 1844, in the heat of the North Georgia August, William Gilmore Simms, the US South's preeminent man of letters, delivered an address titled Americanism in Literature to a University of Georgia honor society. young nation, he told his audience, suffered no shortage of writers, but few of them had distinguished themselves as truly and distinctly American. Instead, these writers simply followed the models of their predecessors and contemporaries from across the Atlantic: writers think after European models, draw their stimulus and provocation from European books, fashion themselves to European tastes, and look chiefly to the awards of European criticism. This is to denationalize the American mind. This is to enslave the national heart--to place ourselves at the mercy of the foreigner, and to yield all that is individual, in our character and hope, to the paralyzing influence of his will, and frequently hostile purposes. (Americanism 271, emphasis added) Continuing this theme, Simms told the crowd: Europe must cease to taunt us because of our prolonged servility to the imperious of the Old World. We must set ourselves free from the tyranny of this genius (272, emphasis added). In its diagnosis and indeed its prescription, Simms's essay has much in common with Ralph Waldo Emerson's more familiar text, The American Scholar, originally given as an address to a Phi Beta Kappa meeting at Harvard in August of 1837. However, it is unlikely that the image of enslavement would have the same rhetorical utility for Emerson, speaking to a group in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as it did for Simms in the red clay hills of Athens, Georgia, seven years later. use of an abstract image of enslavement is not unique to this oration; rather, it is a familiar rhetorical trope for southern writers and political figures in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, according to Kenneth S. Greenberg's Masters and Statesmen: Political Culture of American Slavery (1985), and figures prominently in Simms's 1835 novel, Yemassee. In these formulations, slavery and bondage exist in binary opposition to liberty and independence--values that were at the core of the nationalist ideologies that emerged from the American Revolution and were later claimed by Jacksonian Democrats such as Simms. This polarized rhetoric supported a literally and figuratively black and white vision of the nation held by many antebellum southern political leaders. existence of Native groups, however, complicates this narrative, particularly for Simms. These coterminous binaries--bondage and liberty, black and white--provided an ideological bulwark for the rarified social, political, and financial positions Simms occupied within the plantocracy of the antebellum South. However, Simms's reach extended beyond the plantations of the Carolina Low Country, and as a member of the literary and artistic movement that would become known as Young America, he was a key player in the project to construct a national literary and artistic culture that would rival that of any European nation. writers of this movement found inspiration in the country's history and landscape--themes inexorably connected with a third racial group, Native Americans. Yemassee might be seen as an attempt to write a national narrative and resolve these contradictions, to imagine a story that simultaneously celebrates Native Americans, fulfills Simms's nationalistic aims, and bolsters the dominant racial order. Briefly, Yemassee is Simms's reimagination of the historical conflicts between British colonialists, Native Americans, and Spanish forces in South Carolina in the 1720s. Simms presents the story through two intersecting narratives; the first presents the story of the Yemassees and centers on their chief, Sanutee, and the second focuses on the British colonists and their Cavalier leader, Captain Gabriel Harrison (who is ultimately revealed to be Charles Craven, the disguised royal governor of the colony). …

Where Did Our Love Go? The Rise and Fall of the Motown Sound by Nelson George

122 MichiganHistoricalReview Nelson George. Where Did Our Love Go? The Rise and Fall of the Motown Sound. 1985; repr., Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007. Pp. 312. Discography. Index. Photographs. Preface. Paper, $24.95. For those who missed Nelson George's excellent history ofMotown Records when itwas first published in 1985, the University of Illinois Press recendy issued a paperback edition ofWhere Did Our Love Go? The Rase andFall ofthe Motown Sound. Unfortunately, the preface for the new edition does not include more current information about what happened to Berry Gordy and Motown in the years since the book's first publication. Nor does the volume include endnotes to identify sources. Still,George's book offers a definitive history and analysis of one of the most important record companies in the history of popular music. The story ofMotown is in large part the story of Berry Gordy, Jr., the company's founder and guiding force. George begins by examining Gordy's family background. Berry learned from his parents the lessons of self-reliance and entrepreneurial ability, as well as the importance of family, all ofwhich contributed to the birth and growth ofMotown. Gordy began his music career as a songwriter in the late 1950s, writing hits such as "Lonely Teardrops" for Jackie Wilson. He then branched out as an independent record producer, eventually founding his own record company in 1959. Within a decade he owned and operated amusic empire that included Motown Records, several other labels, Jobete Music Publishers, and International Talent Management. Gordy and hisMotown enterprises left theirmark on pop music, the entertainment industry, and American culture. Gordy dubbed his Detroit headquarters "Hitsville, USA" and boasted that the "Motown Sound" was the "sound of young America" (p. 103). To a large extent, it was. The original Motown roster included future superstars such as Smokey Robinson and theMiracles, Diana Ross and the Supremes, the Temptations, Mary Wells, Martha Reeves and theVandellas, the Four Tops, Marvin Gaye, and Stevie Wonder, as well as top-notch songwriters and producers such as the aforementioned Smokey Robinson, Holland-Dozier-Holland, and Norman Whitfield. Not only did the "Motown Sound" leave its imprint on popular music, but the rise ofMotown also reflected and helped shape the civil rights movement and black enterprise in the 1960s and early 1970s. Nelson George's excellent history tells the entire Motown story, explaining Gordy's role aswell as the stories behind important hits and groups. This book is a valuable resource for anyone interested in music, African American history, or recent America. It offers a detailed Book Reviews 123 look at an important chapter inMichigan history?the rise and fall of Detroit's "Motown Sound." Richard Aquila Penn State University, Erie Steven High and David W. Lewis. CorporateWasteland: The Landscape and Memory of Deindustrialization. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2008. Pp. 192. Bibliography. Index. Notes. Photographs. Paper, $18.95. In Corporate Wasteland, Steven High explores the historical landscape of deindustrialization from a variety of perspectives, offering cultural, aesthetic, and class analyses of issues often relegated to the realm of economics. High considers the cultural side of industrial decline through the prism ofmemory and place. Contributing to the ongoing consideration of memory inmaterial-culture circles, he sees historical understanding of plant closings and decaying industrial sites as shaped by issues of class and community. In other words, middle-age blue-collar workers living in Detroit, Michigan, form a different historical understanding of General Motors's shutdown of the Fisher Division's Fort Street Plant than do a younger generation ofwhite-collar urban explorers. Different memories and different interactions with a particular place compete with one another to shape a broader historical interpretation. After introducingDavid W. Lewis's photographs of postmodern ruins and "modern gothic" (p. 9), High turns to the aesthetics of deindustrialization and the phenomenon of postindustrial urban explorers, those who investigate decaying industrial sites in somewhat the same way nineteenth-century transcendentalists interacted with natural landscapes. Urban explorers tend to experience the "technological sublime" (p. 52) outside of any historical context and certainlywithout any framework of labor history. Emphasizing class-based responses to deindustrialized sites, High notes "these were not the sons and daughters of mill and...

The Young America movement and the transformation of the Democratic Party, 1828-1861

Introduction: the spirit of Young America 1. Orthodox Jacksonianism, 1828-44 2. Trade and improvements: the economic orientation of Young America Democrats 3. Rails, canals, and a new commercial spirit 4. Young America Democrats and the revolutions of 1848 5. A new international consciousness 6. The fires of perfection revisited 7. The anti-slavery democracy 8. New Democrats and the coming of the Civil War Conclusion: Lincoln on Young America.

Yonatan Eyal.The Young America Movement and the Transformation of the Democratic Party, 1828–1861.:The Young America Movement and the Transformation of the Democratic Party, 1828–1861

Yonatan Eyal.<i>The Young America Movement and the Transformation of the Democratic Party, 1828–1861</i>.:The Young America Movement and the Transformation of the Democratic Party, 1828–1861

The Young America Movement and the Transformation of the Democratic Party, 1828�1861

The Young America Movement and the Transformation of the Democratic Party, 1828�1861

Race, manhood, and modernism in America: the short story cycles of Sherwood Anderson and Jean Toomer

Race, Manhood, and Modernism in America offers the first extended comparison between American writers Sherwood Anderson (1876-1941) and Jean Toomer (1894-1967), examining their engagement with the ideas of Young American writers and critics such as Van Wyck Brooks, Paul Rosenfeld, and Waldo Frank. This distinctively modernist school was developing unique visions of how race, gender, and region would be transformed as America entered an age of mass consumerism. Focusing on Anderson s Winesburg, Ohio (1919), and Toomer s Cane (1923), Race, Manhood, and Modernism in America brings Anderson and Toomer together in a way that allows for a thorough historical and social contextualization that is often missing from assessments of these two literary talents and of modernism as a whole. The book suggests how the gay subcultures of Chicago and the traumatic events of the Great War provoked Anderson s anxieties over the future of male gender identity, anxieties that are reflected in Winesburg, Ohio. Mark Whalan discusses Anderson s primitivistic attraction to African American communities and his ambivalent attitudes toward race, attitudes that were embedded in the changing cultural and gendered landscape of mass mechanical production. The book next examines how Toomer aimed to broaden the racial basis of American cultural nationalism, often inspired by the same cultural critics who had influenced Anderson. He rejected the ethnographically based model of tapping the buried cultures of ethnic minorities developed by his mentor, Waldo Frank, and also parted with the folk aesthetic endorsed by intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance. Instead, Toomer' monumental Cane turned to discourses of physical culture, machine technology, and illegitimacy as ways of conceiving of a new type of manhood that refashioned commonplace notions of racial identity. Taken together, these discussions provide a fresh, interdisciplinary appraisal of the importance of race to Young America, suggest provocative new directions for scholarship, and give new insight into some of the most crucial texts of U.S. interracial modernism. Mark Whalan is a senior lecturer in American literature and culture at the University of Exeter. He is the editor of The Letters of Jean Toomer, 1919-1924, and his articles have appeared in the Journal of American Studies, Modernism/Modernity, Studies in American Fiction, and Modern Fiction Studies.

Young America: Land, Labor, and the Republican Community (review)

Young America: Land, Labor, and the Republican Community (review)

Mark A. Lause - Young America: Land, Labour, and the Republican Community

Left History features articles from a variety of theoretical approaches; these include feminist, marxist, and postmodernist deliberations on topics such as race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, culture, the state, labour, the environment, theory, and method.

Obesity

Every family across the U.S. is confronting the same questions as state governments and federal agencies: why have we all gained so much weight and what are we going to do about it (1–8)? The century-long, slow, silent, and deadly increase in body weight now impacts every family in the U.S. The world has caught the obesity bug, 1.5 billion times. Obesity explains why Mom is injecting herself twice a day with insulin and explains why health care costs have erupted while the basic health care that U.S. prisoners get for free is unavailable to 45 million free-living Americans. The obesity explosion explains about three-quarters of health care costs in the U.S. The future, the Centers for Disease Control warn, is more alarming than the present. Not only is it Mom who cannot afford basic diabetes supplies, such as blood testing strips and insulin needles, but now John, her 10-year-old son, cannot either. The “new epidemic” of childhood diabetes will wash across America in the wake of the heaviest young America has ever raised. Obesity may cost $100 billion a year in the U.S., but that is nothing compared with the price tag of childhood obesity. When I grew up, I feared the doctor because I hated needles. John will grow up using needles every day but terrified as to how he will afford them. Without viable solutions to obesity, health care will become the exclusive right of the wealthy. The predominant voice in the Perspectives articles published in this edition of Diabetes (9–11) is a shrill tone of retrospection, asking how we got to where we are today. Although these articles emit an odor of impending catastrophe, threading through the papers are rivulets of hope. “Hope” is a voice of consensus that speaks to the …

Portraits of a People: Picturing African Americans in the Nineteenth Century, and: Young America: Childhood in 19th-Century Art and Culture, and: My Likeness Taken: Daguerreian Portraits in America (review)

Portraits of a People: Picturing African Americans in the Nineteenth Century. By Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw. (Seattle, WA: Addison Gallery of American Art, University of Washington Press, 2006. Pp. 184. Illustrations. Paper, $40.00.)Young America: Childhood in 19th-Century Art and Culture. By Claire Perry. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press with Cantor Art Center, 2006. Pp. x, 236. Illustrations. Cloth, $50.00.)My Likeness Taken: Daguerrian Portraits in America. By Joan L. Severa. (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2005. Pp. xix, 303. Illustrations. Cloth, $65.00.)Reviewed by Jack LarkinThese three books-two of them emerging from museum exhibitions, the other from a study of private and public image collections-take us into the visual world of the nineteenth century in very different ways. Of the three, Portraits of a People, by Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, is by far the most useful volume for historians of early America. Based on original research, it engages with the questions that historians care about. Three essays provide contextual, closely argued analyses of the earliest views of African Americans in portraiture, of the creation and significance of the portrait engraving of the poet Phillis Wheatley, and of the career of Philadelphia's African American profile cutter, Moses Williams. Shaw then provides a chronological survey of portraits of free men and women of color, providing generally useful biographical detail and often illuminating short discussions of sitter, artist, and significance.Shaw foregrounds her discussion with a lengthy quotation from Frederick Douglass, who maintained that the real portraiture of black subjects by white artists was virtually impossible, because whites could not see blacks as fully human. Shaw works against the grain to find and interpret images that belie or at least soften Douglass's bitter certainty, and she has found true portraits. Douglass himself, in all his fierce intelligence, leaps out from the page in both a painting and a daguerreotype. Shaw shows us how some American painters, including a few artists of color and antislavery sympathizers like William Matthew Prior, produced fully realized and respectful portraits of striving African American men and women. Yet, as she reminds us, these were rare; they must be seen as a trickle against the flood of hundreds of thousands of comic stereotypes and vicious caricatures that were drawn and published.The Wheatley essay is particularly interesting, providing the poet's frontispiece portrait-as opposed to her poetry-with its first really serious analysis. Shaw makes a good case that it is a revolutionary image, depicting a black female as a genteel woman and a writer. Shaw might at times be guilty of interpretive overreach-it's not clear that this relatively simple, although nicely executed, portrait engraving can hold up the weight of symbolic interpretation she would like to place on it-but is always interesting and provocative. For those of us interested in how portraits represent the self and reveal the social order, this is an important study.Claire Perry's Young America: Childhood in 19th-Century Art and Culture, emerges out of an exhibition that gave this reviewer a good deal to look at and think about. Perry has assembled many interesting images and often provides provocative and useful interpretations of individual works. However, the book breaks no new historical ground.Young America's thematic organization mirrors the class, race, and gender concerns of most social history; it looks sequentially at the country boy, the daughter of liberty, the children of bondage, the African American child, the ragamuffin or urban waif, the papoose, and the child in school. The themes hang together reasonably well, except for the section on the Papoose; the discussion of the images of Native American children seemed tacked on.Young America makes abundant reference to the standard themes of historical transformation-industrialization, urbanization, westward migration and settlement, changes in women's roles, and African American emancipation-but uses them to uneven effect. …

Young America: Land, Labor, and the Republican Community

Young America: Land, Labor, and the Republican Community

CLAIRE PERRY. Young America: Childhood in Nineteenth-Century Art and Culture. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Beinecke Library in association with the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Stanford University. 2006. Pp. x, 236. $50.00

CLAIRE PERRY. Young America: Childhood in Nineteenth-Century Art and Culture. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Beinecke Library in association with the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Stanford University. 2006. Pp. x, 236. $50.00

MARK A. LAUSE. Young America: Land, Labor, and the Republican Community. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. 2005. Pp. viii, 240. Cloth $42.00, paper $20.00

MARK A. LAUSE. Young America: Land, Labor, and the Republican Community. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. 2005. Pp. viii, 240. Cloth $42.00, paper $20.00

Young America: Land, Labor, and the Republican Community, by Mark A. Lause

"Young America: Land, Labor, and the Republican Community, by Mark A. Lause." Canadian Journal of History, 41(2), pp. 397–398