Catherine O'Donnell

Literature and Politics in the Early Republic Views from the Bridge

This essay surveys recent scholarship on secular literature and politics in the early republic. The work of Jurgen Habermas and Benedict Anderson has influenced scholarship focusing on the constitutive power of print during this era. Gender scholarship has contributed investigation of the implicit and explicit exclusions of print communities, as well as of the contributions of women authors and readers to the national imaginary. Research into literary networks has made visible the human infrastructure of print capitalism and political parties. Other scholars have explored the relationship between literature and politics through periodicals and childrens literature, attempting to use those sources to penetrate the mystery of how texts were read. In general, the scholarship of literature and politics has emphasized nation-building and national distinctiveness, even as American exceptionalism has been criticized in other realms. But recent work on the Atlantic world and on Latin American–United States connections, as well as on African American counterpublics, has brought the relevance of transnational and subnational communities to the fore. The essay concludes by calling for more attention to the imaginative and emotional purposes of politics and literature, as well as to the development of separate cultural and political elites during the early republican era.

Performing the Temple of Liberty: Slavery, Theater, and Popular Culture in London and Philadelphia, 1760–1850 by Jenna M. Gibbs (review)

study of the formation of an underclass intent on the performance of whiteness or Matthew Rebhorn’s exploration of the vanishing Indian in Jacksonian America or Gay Gibson Cima’s mapping of women’s roles as cultural critics in spheres of Atlantic performance. Dillon ends her study with the figurative “closure” of the performative commons in the wake of the 1849 Astor Place Riots in New York, suggesting that in its history this commons “engaged in acts of erasure as much as representation” (260). Her study of two centuries of performance in the Atlantic world, keyed to specific cities, theaters, and texts, is thoughtful in synthesizing the past decade and a half of scholarship on American theater and the ways in which the theater engaged with issues of race and class. It offers a powerful vocabulary and point of entry for scholars beyond the fields of theater studies and performance studies looking for new ways to juxtapose the elusive realm of performance with the tangible world of print culture.

Collegiate Republic: Cultivating an Ideal Society in Early America by Margaret Sumner (review)

Collegiate Republic: Cultivating an Ideal Society in Early America By Margaret Sumner. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014. Pp. 272. Cloth or ebook,

Empowering Words: Outsiders and Authorship in Early America by Karen A. Weyler (review)

45.00.)Reviewed by Catherine ODonnellDickinson, Washington, Bowdoin, Williams: They are small colleges, but there are those who think they shaped the republic. In this lovely, smart book, Margaret Sumner depicts the ambitious regional liberal arts colleges founded at the start of the nineteenth century as both an idealistic nationalist project and a lucrative family business. Those who ran them sought to create an orderly scheme for the world, in which collective harmony and virtuous self-interest would bring about success (139). In a nation of unsettling political and economic competition, graduates would exert a new form of collective virtuous power (6). From the well-regulated classrooms and greens of Lexington, Kentucky; Carlisle, Pennsylvania; and Williamstown, Massachusetts, young men would set forth prepared to enter the worlds of commerce, politics, and society in waves, and determined to work together to redirect the republics path toward a more virtuous and regulated definition of success (53).In college world, as Sumner wittily dubs the overlapping networks of kin, professors, and trustees, one could do well while striving to do good. Families settling developing regions of the republic quickly seized upon educational institutions as the main channel through which they could secure a stable future for themselves and their communities, she explains (20). Although families depended for their livelihood on the colleges, the profit motive was unacknowledged or assertively repudiated. Rather than being understood as commercial exchanges, the private donations and legislative grants on which colleges depended were cast as selfless gifts to selfless places. All such economic activity, Sumner writes, was carried out in the name of the common good, and the continued liberality of the people was [college worlds] only form of insurance (27). The result was a commercial and career network that believed itself to be a community of friends. Each bond strengthened the other.Every chapter of this delightful book bears witness to Sumners deep archival work and humane but sharp-eyed contemplation of her subjects. We learn about the new nations small colleges rather as we learn about English minor gentry in Jane Austen: through coming to know men and women as they are slowly revealed to us by an expert and wryly sympathetic narrator. Thus we have the Cleaveland women, who used their status as the wife and daughters of a Bowdoin professor to judge the talents and virtues of all those around them, even as their own ambitions were constrained; and Albert and Mark Hopkins, who struggled to believe that their lives as college professors matched the manly vigor they ascribed to their farmer brother Harry. Through the life of John Russwurm, a mixed-race graduate of Bowdoin College, readers learn not only of Russwurms extraordinary achievements but also of college families desire to exercise their benevolence by educating black genius-only to sponsor colonization schemes so that the racial regime in which they themselves thrived would not be disrupted. Rather than staggering through abstract discussions of place and space, readers find deft sketches of the mix of familial, professional, and intellectual life contained in a professors parlor, and revealing tableaus that demonstrate the layers of class and racial privilege daily displayed and subverted on a college green. …

Rethinking Early American Thought

Empowering Words: Outsiders and Authorship in Early America. By Karen A. Weyler. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2013. Pp. 311. Paper,

A Nation of Speechifiers: Making an American Public after the Revolution. By Carolyn Eastman. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. xii, 290 pp.

24.95.)Reviewed by Catherine ODonnellDont let the word outsiders fool you. There are no giant, handmade whirligigs in this book, no fantastical scenes painted on bedroom walls and discovered only after the homeowners death, no statues of Frankenstein made entirely of Band-Aids. Outsiders and authorship in early America it turns out, is quite different from outsider art. Study of the latter has in recent decades brought us work from people who cared little for audience and not at all for convention. By contrast, in this insightful and informative new book, Karen Weyler is considering the participation of working people in print culture from 1760 to 1815, exploring authors for whom writing . . . was always an act of connection (2). Participation and connection, then. The subjects of Weylers study may have been outsiders to power and status, but they wanted in. Rather than bending language or distorting fonts to express some irreducibly singular vision, they used print-along with conventions of genre and grammar-to render their ideas and arguments comprehensible to others.Weyler defines as outsiders those Americans without the advantages of an elite education, social class, or connections, who relied largely on their own labor for subsistence (4). Within her rubric she places such figures as Clementina Rind, a white Virginian woman who took over her husbands press after his death; the Mohegan minister Samuel Occam; the enslaved, African-born poet Phillis Wheatley; and John Howland, president of the Rhode Island Historical Society and a direct descendant of a signer of the Mayflower Compact. Weyler is interested in exploring not only the texts these authors created but also the collaborative processes and human networks they used to bring their texts into print. Print, she argues, offered outsiders a route to acquiring symbolic and cultural capital and to belonging to something bigger than themselves, whether that was a community of Christian believers, the united colonies, or a nation-state (6).Weylers definition of outsiders is capacious, to say the least. If everyone other than those bom white, male, and wealthy are outsiders, there are truly, as my grandmother used to say, more out than in. By Weylers definition, even the most famous printer in American history, Benjamin Franklin, would be an outsider. He is not included, alas, despite the fact that his genius for networking would seem also to fit within Weylers framework. Which raises the question: How many authors in the late colonial and early national eras did not rely on collaboration? Whether in the form of clubs, salons, or shared efforts at subscription gathering, the life of a writer was usually a life of conversation and cooperation. Even for the well-educated young men who scribbled for newspapers and literary journals, it usually required a day job.Weylers organizing conceit is thus less than entirely satisfying, and there are points at which she is too reticent about the way her work builds on recent treatments of non-elite speech and writing. …

37.50, ISBN 978-0-22618019-9.)

In three recent books, scholars of early America pose the question: “What were they thinking?” Jonathan Beecher Field explores Rhode Island dissidents and their metropolitan readers. Eran Shalev investigates American patriots’ use of the classics. Seth Cotlar unearths radical ideas shared by newspaper editors in the 1790s. Together, the books add to our understanding of the transnational nature of thought and argument across centuries of colonial, early republican, and early national history. The books also offer the opportunity to watch three skilled scholars grappling with the problem of how to think about thought. Cotlar and Shalev are trained as historians, Field as a literary scholar. All take printed texts as their sources, but each makes a different kind of argument about the relationship between those texts and the true object of his study. Shalev seems the most at ease. His goal is “to understand American Catherine o’donnell Arizona State University

John Carroll and the origins of an American Catholic church, 1783-1815

Atlantic history, hemispheric history, global history: recent scholarly shifts in scale have shown that the Revolution, far from creating a distinctive national identity, instead marked a political transition in a society that remained defined by transcultural contacts, exchanges, and affinities. In the context of the ever-expanding geography of our discipline, Carolyn Eastman’s account of the early republic is striking because it questions the nationalized mythology of the Revolutionary War from within. A Nation of Speechifiers draws entirely on evidence from the United States to demonstrate that a shared national identity did not emerge for decades after independence, much later than the nationalistic rhetoric of the era would suggest. Eastman argues that ordinary Americans “learned to think of themselves as members of a public” before they could inhabit a sense of national belonging.