Civic Longing

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Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674981723
Total Pages : 185 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (749 download)

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Book Synopsis Civic Longing by : Carrie Hyde

Download or read book Civic Longing written by Carrie Hyde and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2018-01-11 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Citizenship defines the U.S. political experiment, but the modern legal category that it now names is a relatively recent invention. There was no Constitutional definition of citizenship until the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868, almost a century after the Declaration of Independence. Civic Longing looks at the fascinating prehistory of U.S. citizenship in the years between the Revolution and the Civil War, when the cultural and juridical meaning of citizenship—as much as its scope—was still up for grabs. Carrie Hyde recovers the numerous cultural forms through which the meaning of citizenship was provisionally made and remade in the early United States. Civic Longing offers the first historically grounded account of the formative political power of the imaginative traditions that shaped early debates about citizenship. In the absence of a centralized legal definition of citizenship, Hyde shows, politicians and writers regularly turned to a number of highly speculative traditions—political philosophy, Christian theology, natural law, fiction, and didactic literature—to authorize visions of what citizenship was or ought to be. These speculative traditions sustained an idealized image of citizenship by imagining it from its outer limits, from the point of view of its “negative civic exemplars”—expatriates, slaves, traitors, and alienated subjects. By recovering the strange, idiosyncratic meanings of citizenship in the early United States, Hyde provides a powerful critique of originalism, and challenges anachronistic assumptions that read the definition of citizenship backward from its consolidation in the mid-nineteenth century as jus soli or birthright citizenship.

Longing for Justice

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Publisher : University of Toronto Press
ISBN 13 : 1442619678
Total Pages : 281 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (426 download)

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Book Synopsis Longing for Justice by : Jennifer S. Simpson

Download or read book Longing for Justice written by Jennifer S. Simpson and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2014-11-05 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A timely and persuasive argument for Higher Education’s obligations to our democratic society, Longing for Justice combines personal narrative with critical analysis to make the case for educational practices that connect to questions of democracy, justice, and the common good. Jennifer S. Simpson begins with three questions. First, what is the nature of the social contract that universities have with public life? Second, how might this social contract shape undergraduate education? And third, how do specific approaches to knowledge and undergraduate education inform how students understand society? In a bold challenge to conventional wisdom about Higher Education, Simpson argues that today’s neoliberal educational norms foreground abstract concepts and leave the complications of real life, especially the intricacies of power, unexamined. Analysing modern teaching techniques, including service learning and civic engagement, Simpson concludes that for Higher Education to serve democracy it must strengthen students’ abilities to critically analyse social issues, recognize and challenge social inequities, and pursue justice.

Political Liberalism and the Rise of American Romanticism

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Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0198891954
Total Pages : 289 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (988 download)

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Book Synopsis Political Liberalism and the Rise of American Romanticism by : Scott M Reznick

Download or read book Political Liberalism and the Rise of American Romanticism written by Scott M Reznick and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-08-09 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume traces how American literature evolved in response to widespread conflicts over the very nature of US democracy in the early republic and antebellum eras. It examines how American writers reacted to three moments of profound divisiveness in the 1790s, 1830s, and 1850s.

Patriotism by Proxy

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Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 019260905X
Total Pages : 240 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (926 download)

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Book Synopsis Patriotism by Proxy by : Colleen Glenney Boggs

Download or read book Patriotism by Proxy written by Colleen Glenney Boggs and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-08-03 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the height of the Civil War in 1863, the Union instated the first-ever federal draft. Patriotism By Proxy develops a new understanding of the connections between American literature and American lives by focusing on this historic moment when the military transformed both. Paired with the Emancipation Proclamation, the 1863 draft inaugurated new relationships between the nation and its citizens. A massive bureaucratic undertaking, it redefined the American people as a population, laying bare social divisions as wealthy draftees hired substitutes to serve in their stead. The draft is the context in which American politics met and also transformed into a new kind of biopolitics, and these substitutes reflect the transformation of how the state governed American life. Censorship and the suspension of habeas corpus prohibited free discussions over the draft's significance, making literary devices and genres the primary means for deliberating over the changing meanings of political representation and citizenship. Assembling an extensive textual and visual archive, Patriotism by Proxy examines the draft as a cultural formation that operated at the nexus of political abstraction and embodied specificity, where the definition of national subjectivity was negotiated in the interstices of what it means to be a citizen-soldier. It brings together novels, poems, letters, and newspaper editorials that show how Americans discussed the draft at a time of censorship, and how the federal draft changed the way that Americans related to the state and to each other.

The Lives of Jewish Things

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Publisher : Wayne State University Press
ISBN 13 : 081435047X
Total Pages : 268 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (143 download)

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Book Synopsis The Lives of Jewish Things by : Gabrielle Anna Berlinger

Download or read book The Lives of Jewish Things written by Gabrielle Anna Berlinger and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2024-12-03 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tracing the paths of Jewish things across time, place, and culture, this collection reveals complex stories of individual and collective struggles to survive.

Missionary Diplomacy

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Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 1501773992
Total Pages : 353 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (17 download)

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Book Synopsis Missionary Diplomacy by : Emily Conroy-Krutz

Download or read book Missionary Diplomacy written by Emily Conroy-Krutz and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2024-03-15 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Missionary Diplomacy illuminates the crucial place of religion in nineteenth-century American diplomacy. From the 1810s through the 1920s, Protestant missionaries positioned themselves as key experts in the development of American relations in Asia, Africa, the Pacific, and the Middle East. Missionaries served as consuls, translators, and occasional trouble-makers who forced the State Department to take actions it otherwise would have avoided. Yet as decades passed, more Americans began to question the propriety of missionaries' power. Were missionaries serving the interests of American diplomacy? Or were they creating unnecessary problems? As Emily Conroy-Krutz demonstrates, they were doing both. Across the century, missionaries forced the government to articulate new conceptions of the rights of US citizens abroad and of the role of the US as an engine of humanitarianism and religious freedom. By the time the US entered the first world war, missionary diplomacy had for nearly a century created the conditions for some Americans to embrace a vision of their country as an internationally engaged world power. Missionary Diplomacy exposes the longstanding influence of evangelical missions on the shape of American foreign relations.

Imaginary Empires

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Publisher : LSU Press
ISBN 13 : 0807179264
Total Pages : 243 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (71 download)

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Book Synopsis Imaginary Empires by : Maria O'Malley

Download or read book Imaginary Empires written by Maria O'Malley and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2022-12-07 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Imaginary Empires, Maria O’Malley examines early American texts published between 1767 and 1867 whose narratives represent women’s engagement in the formation of empire. Her analysis unearths a variety of responses to contact, exchange, and cohabitation in the early United States, stressing the possibilities inherent in the literary to foster participation, resignification, and rapprochement. New readings of The Female American, Leonora Sansay’s Secret History, Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie, Lydia Maria Child’s A Romance of the Republic, and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl confound the metaphors of ghosts, haunting, and amnesia that proliferate in many recent studies of early US literary history. Instead, as O’Malley shows, these writings foreground acts of foundational violence involved in the militarization of domestic spaces, the legal impediments to the transfer of property and wealth, and the geopolitical standing of the United States. Racialized and gendered figures in the texts refuse to die, leave, or stay silent. In imagining different kinds of futures, these writers reckon with the ambivalent role of women in empire-building as they negotiate between their own subordinate position in society and their exertion of sovereignty over others. By tracing a thread of virtual history found in works by women, Imaginary Empires explores how reflections of the past offer a means of shaping future sociopolitical formations.

Xenocitizens

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Publisher : Fordham University Press
ISBN 13 : 0823287769
Total Pages : 172 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (232 download)

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Book Synopsis Xenocitizens by : Jason Berger

Download or read book Xenocitizens written by Jason Berger and published by Fordham University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-02 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Xenocitizens, Jason Berger returns to the antebellum United States in order to challenge a scholarly tradition based on liberal–humanist perspectives. Through the concept of the xenocitizen, a synthesis of the terms “xeno,” which connotes alien or stranger, and “citizen,” which signals a naturalized subject of a state, Berger uncovers realities and possibilities that have been foreclosed by dominant paradigms. Innovatively re-orienting our thinking about traditional nineteenth-century figures such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau as well as formative writers such as William Wells Brown, Martin R. Delany, Margaret Fuller, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, Xenocitizens glimpses how antebellum thinkers formulated, in response to varying forms of oppression and crisis, startlingly unique ontological and social models as well as unfamiliar ways to exist and to leverage change. In doing so, Berger offers us a different nineteenth century—pushing our imaginative and critical thinking toward new terrain.

Liberalism Beyond Justice

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Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 1400824214
Total Pages : 182 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (8 download)

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Book Synopsis Liberalism Beyond Justice by : John Tomasi

Download or read book Liberalism Beyond Justice written by John Tomasi and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-04-13 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Liberal regimes shape the ethical outlooks of their citizens, relentlessly influencing their most personal commitments over time. On such issues as abortion, homosexuality, and women's rights, many religious Americans feel pulled between their personal beliefs and their need, as good citizens, to support individual rights. These circumstances, argues John Tomasi, raise new and pressing questions: Is liberalism as successful as it hopes in avoiding the imposition of a single ethical doctrine on all of society? If liberals cannot prevent the spillover of public values into nonpublic domains, how accommodating of diversity can a liberal regime actually be? To what degree can a liberal society be a home even to the people whose viewpoints it was formally designed to include? To meet these questions, Tomasi argues, the boundaries of political liberal theorizing must be redrawn. Political liberalism involves more than an account of justified state coercion and the norms of democratic deliberation. Political liberalism also implies a distinctive account of nonpublic social life, one in which successful human lives must be built across the interface of personal and public values. Tomasi proposes a theory of liberal nonpublic life. To live up to their own deepest commitments to toleration and mutual respect, liberals, he insists, must now rethink their conceptions of social justice, civic education, and citizenship itself. The result is a fresh look at liberal theory and what it means for a liberal society to function well.

The Part and the Whole in Early American Literature, Print Culture, and Art

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Author :
Publisher : Rutgers University Press
ISBN 13 : 1684485096
Total Pages : 193 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (844 download)

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Book Synopsis The Part and the Whole in Early American Literature, Print Culture, and Art by : Matthew Pethers

Download or read book The Part and the Whole in Early American Literature, Print Culture, and Art written by Matthew Pethers and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2024-04-12 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays in this pathbreaking collection consider the significance of varied early American fragmentary genres and practices—from diaries and poetry, to almanacs and commonplace books, to sermons and lists, to Indigenous ruins and other material shards and fragments—often overlooked by critics in a scholarly privileging of the “whole.” Contributors from literary studies, book history, and visual culture discuss a host of canonical and non-canonical figures, from Edward Taylor and Washington Irving to Mary Rowlandson and Sarah Kemble Knight, offering insight into the many intellectual, ideological, and material variations of “form” that populated the early American cultural landscape. As these essays reveal, the casting of the fragmentary as aesthetically eccentric or incomplete was a way of reckoning with concerns about the related fragmentation of nation, society, and self. For a contemporary audience, they offer new ways to think about the inevitable gaps and absences in our cultural and historical archive.

War Power

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Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0198897375
Total Pages : 257 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (988 download)

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Book Synopsis War Power by : Philip Gould

Download or read book War Power written by Philip Gould and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-09-10 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What happens if we reconsider the literature of the Civil War North in light of the transformation of the federal state's power? While literary scholarship about the Civil War has more generally focused on the rise of wartime nationalism, Philip Gould looks particularly at how literary works engage the subjects of censorship, propaganda, and the reconfigured meanings of "loyalty" and "treason" at a time of political crisis. During the war the Lincoln Administration shut down opposition newspapers and curtailed free expression and civil liberties protected by the US Constitution. Lincoln also suspended the writ of habeas corpus to deal with political dissenters and try to control public opinion. Early in the war, he coined the phrase "war power" to describe the (presumed) powers to address this crisis; his policies became controversial throughout the conflict. War Power: Literature and the State in the Civil War North considers literary production in this "total war" that radically changed the federal government's (and its military's) relation to traditional norms and spaces of private, domestic, and social life. Each chapter focuses on a major writer in the Civil War North's engagement with questions of identity, affect, and affiliation: Could one love the Union as one loved home and family? What were the implications for literary expression in the midst of a political culture being reshaped by censorship and propaganda? The final two chapters address the role and plight of African Americans in the Civil War and its aftermath, focusing particularly on African American military service as the supposed means by which racially disenfranchised Americans might become citizens.

Peace in the US Republic of Letters, 1840-1900

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Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0192884883
Total Pages : 380 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (928 download)

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Book Synopsis Peace in the US Republic of Letters, 1840-1900 by : Sandra M. Gustafson

Download or read book Peace in the US Republic of Letters, 1840-1900 written by Sandra M. Gustafson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-09-21 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Peace in the US Republic of Letters, 1840-1900 explores the early peace movement as it captured the imagination of leading writers. The book charts the rise of the peace cause from its sources in the works of William Penn and John Woolman, through the founding of the first peace societies in 1815 and the mid-century peace congresses, to the postbellum movement's consequential emphasis on arbitration. The Civil War is the central axis for the book, with three chapters organized around readings of novels by James Fenimore Cooper, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Nathaniel Hawthorne spanning the period from 1840 to 1865. Cooper had personal connections to the movement and thought deeply about the issues it addressed. Literary interest in peace at times overlapped with abolitionism, as was true for Stowe. And, in the case of Hawthorne, attention to peace advocacy arose out of a mixture of skepticism regarding perfectionist impulses, a desire to explore the nature and limits of violence, and fear of civil conflict. The volume also explores fiction engaged with problems that arose in the aftermath of that war, including novels by Henry Adams and John Hay on political corruption and class conflict; works on the failures of Reconstruction by Albion Tourgée and Charles Chesnutt; and the varied treatments of Indigenous experience in Helen Hunt Jackson's Ramona and Simon Pokagon's Queen of the Woods. All of these writers focused on issues related to the cause of peace, expanding its thematic reach and anticipating key insights of twentieth-century peace scholars.

Alone in America

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Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674070704
Total Pages : 176 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (74 download)

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Book Synopsis Alone in America by : Robert A. Ferguson

Download or read book Alone in America written by Robert A. Ferguson and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2013-01-14 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Robert A. Ferguson investigates the nature of loneliness in American fiction, from its mythological beginnings in Rip Van Winkle to the postmodern terrors of 9/11. At issue is the dark side of a trumpeted American individualism. The theme is a vital one because a greater percentage of people live alone today than at any other time in U.S. history. The many isolated characters in American fiction, Ferguson says, appeal to us through inward claims of identity when pitted against the social priorities of a consensual culture. They indicate how we might talk to ourselves when the same pressures come our way. In fiction, more visibly than in life, defining moments turn on the clarity of an inner conversation. Alone in America tests the inner conversations that work and sometimes fail. It examines the typical elements and moments that force us toward a solitary state—failure, betrayal, change, defeat, breakdown, fear, difference, age, and loss—in their ascending power over us. It underlines the evolving answers that famous figures in literature have given in response. Figures like Mark Twain’s Huck Finn and Toni Morrison’s Sethe and Paul D., or Louisa May Alcott’s Jo March and Marilynne Robinson’s John Ames, carve out their own possibilities against ruthless situations that hold them in place. Instead of trusting to often superficial social remedies, or taking thin sustenance from the philosophy of self-reliance, Ferguson says we can learn from our fiction how to live alone.

From Slave Cabins to the White House

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Publisher : University of Illinois Press
ISBN 13 : 025205220X
Total Pages : 358 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (52 download)

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Book Synopsis From Slave Cabins to the White House by : Koritha Mitchell

Download or read book From Slave Cabins to the White House written by Koritha Mitchell and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2020-08-31 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Koritha Mitchell analyzes canonical texts by and about African American women to lay bare the hostility these women face as they invest in traditional domesticity. Instead of the respectability and safety granted white homemakers, black women endure pejorative labels, racist governmental policies, attacks on their citizenship, and aggression meant to keep them in "their place." Tracing how African Americans define and redefine success in a nation determined to deprive them of it, Mitchell plumbs the works of Frances Harper, Zora Neale Hurston, Lorraine Hansberry, Toni Morrison, Michelle Obama, and others. These artists honor black homes from slavery and post-emancipation through the Civil Rights era to "post-racial" America. Mitchell follows black families asserting their citizenship in domestic settings while the larger society and culture marginalize and attack them, not because they are deviants or failures but because they meet American standards. Powerful and provocative, From Slave Cabins to the White House illuminates the links between African American women's homemaking and citizenship in history and across literature.

Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination

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Publisher : NYU Press
ISBN 13 : 1479891258
Total Pages : 376 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (798 download)

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Book Synopsis Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination by : Henry Jenkins

Download or read book Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination written by Henry Jenkins and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2020-02-04 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How popular culture is engaged by activists to effect emancipatory political change One cannot change the world unless one can imagine what a better world might look like. Civic imagination is the capacity to conceptualize alternatives to current cultural, social, political, or economic conditions; it also requires the ability to see oneself as a civic agent capable of making change, as a participant in a larger democratic culture. Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination represents a call for greater clarity about what we’re fighting for—not just what we’re fighting against. Across more than thirty examples from social movements around the world, this casebook proposes “civic imagination” as a framework that can help us identify, support, and practice new kinds of communal participation. As the contributors demonstrate, young people, in particular, are turning to popular culture—from Beyoncé to Bollywood, from Smokey Bear to Hamilton, from comic books to VR—for the vernacular through which they can express their discontent with current conditions. A young activist uses YouTube to speak back against J. K. Rowling in the voice of Cho Chang in order to challenge the superficial representation of Asian Americans in children’s literature. Murals in Los Angeles are employed to construct a mythic imagination of Chicano identity. Twitter users have turned to #BlackGirlMagic to highlight the black radical imagination and construct new visions of female empowerment. In each instance, activists demonstrate what happens when the creative energies of fans are infused with deep political commitment, mobilizing new visions of what a better democracy might look like.

Democracies in America

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Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0192635174
Total Pages : 410 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (926 download)

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Book Synopsis Democracies in America by : D. Berton Emerson

Download or read book Democracies in America written by D. Berton Emerson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-01-04 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ask someone their thoughts about "democracy" and you'll get many different responses. Some may presume it a thing once established yet now under threat. Others may believe that democracy has always been compromised by the empowered few. In the contemporary United States, marked by constituencies across the political spectrum believing that their voices have gone unheard, "democracy" gets wielded in so many divergent directions as to be rendered nearly incoherent. Democracies in America reminds us that this reality is nothing new. Focusing on the various meanings of "democracy" that circulated in the long nineteenth century, the book collects twenty-five essays, each taking up a keyword in the language we use to talk about democracy. Penned by a group of diverse intellectuals, the entries tackle terms both commonplace (citizenship and representation) and paradigm-stretching (disgust and sham). The essays thus consider the relationship between "America" and "democracy" from multiple disciplinary angles and from different moments in a major historical period-amidst the vitality of the revolutionary epoch, in the contentious lead-up to the Civil War, and through the triumphs and failures of Reconstruction and the early reforms of the Progressive Era-while making both forward and backward glances in time. The book frames its keywords around a series of enduring democratic dilemmas and questions, and provides extensive resources for further study. Ultimately the volume cultivates, for students and teachers in classrooms, as well as citizens in libraries and cafés, a language to deliberate about the possibilities and problems of democracy in America.

In Bad Faith

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Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780674445284
Total Pages : 276 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (452 download)

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Book Synopsis In Bad Faith by : Forrest Glen Robinson

Download or read book In Bad Faith written by Forrest Glen Robinson and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1986 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Something is not right in the world of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. The unease is less evident to Tom, the manipulator, than to the socially marginal Huck. The trouble is most dramatically revealed when Huck, whose "sivilized" Christian conscience is developing, faces the choice between betraying his black friend Jim--which he believes is his moral duty--and letting him escape, as his heart tells him to do. "Bad faith" is Forrest Robinson's name for the dissonance between what we profess to believe, how we act, and how we interpret our own behavior. There is bad faith in the small hypocrisies of daily living, but Robinson has a much graver issue in mind--namely slavery, which persisted for nearly a century in a Christian republic founded on ideals of freedom, equality, and justice. Huck, living on the fringes of small-town society, recognizes Jim's humanity and understands the desperateness of his plight. Yet Huck is white, a member of the dominant class; he is at once influenced and bewildered by the contradictions of bad faith in the minds of his fully acculturated contemporaries. Robinson stresses that "bad faith" is more than a theme with Mark Twain; his bleak view of man's social nature (however humorously expressed), his nostalgia, his ambivalence about the South, his complex relationship to his audience, can all be traced back to an awareness of the deceits at the core of his culture--and he is not himself immune. This deeply perceptive book will be of interest to students of American literature and history and to anyone concerned with moral issues.