Peter S. Onuf

American Exceptionalism and National Identity

Historians are generally hostile to the idea of “American exceptionalism.” The history of American exceptionalist discourse, however, illuminates an ongoing process of identity formation as Americans have sought to determine the place of their nation in the larger world. This article focuses on the provincial Anglo-American sources of exceptionalist discourse and emphasizes Britain’s continuing centrality to national identity through the nineteenth century. Although the debate over who “we” are will never be definitively resolved, the debate itself is vitally important in sustaining the legitimacy and capacity of the regime.

Across the Continent : Jefferson, Lewis and Clark, and the Making of America

Introduction: Geopolitics, Science, and Culture Conflicts, Peter S. Onuf and Jeffrey L. Hantman, University of Virginia Jeffersons Pacific: The Science of Distant Empire, 1786-1811, Alan Taylor, University of California, Davis Securing America: Jeffersons Fluid Plans for the Western Perimeter, Jenry Morsman, University of Virginia Thomas Jeffersons Conflicted Legacy in American Archaeology, David Hurst Thomas, American Museum of Natural History A Nation Imagined, a Nation Measured: The Jeffersonian Legacy, Kenneth Prewitt, Columbia University Onates Foot: Histories, Landscapes, and Contested Memories in the Southwest, Douglas Seefeldt, University of Virginia

Who are “We The People”? Bruce Ackerman, Thomas Jefferson, and the Problem of Revolutionary Reform

Bruce Ackerman of the Yale Law School proposes new procedures for constitutional reform to supersede the amendment process set forth in Article V of the U.S. Constitution. He argues that the revolutionary character of regime changes in the 1780s, 1860s, and 1930s has been disguised by the fiction of constitutional continuity. Americans will not be prepared for future constitutional crises if they fail to develop new amendment procedures to facilitate future reform efforts.Thomas Jeffersons constitutionalism provides a critical perspective on Ackermans project. Like Jefferson, Ackerman sees constitutional change as an opportunity for the “People” to return to revolutionary first principles; unlike Jefferson, he equates American nationhood with the progressive concentration of power in the federal state.

The Transatlantic Republican: Thomas Paine and the Age of Revolutions

Thomas Paine burst on the American Revolutionary scene with the publication of his sensationally popular Common Sense in January 1776. Providing patriots with a devastating and demystifying critique of the vaunted British Constitution, Paine’s brilliant polemic prepared the way for the Declaration of Independence a few months later. No writer was more active and effective than Paine in the cause of American nation-making. A recent arrival from Britain with artisanal roots and deep-seated grievances against the metropolis’s government and class system, he was the right man in the right place at the right time. Yet, as French historian Bernard Vincent argues in this collection of essays first published in the 1980s and 1990s, Paine has never been accorded his proper place in the American pantheon. Indeed, hostile American officials denied that he was even an American citizen when he returned to the US in 1802 from war-torn Europe. Paine was instead ‘‘a citizen of nowhere, a man without a country, a voter forbidden to vote, a disenfranchised Founding Father’’ (114). But Paine has found an able and determined partisan in Vincent. The essays in The Transatlantic Republican focus on a few key Paine texts, notable Common Sense, The Letter to Abbé Raynal (1782), The Rights of Man (1791–1792), The Age of Reason (1794–1795), Agrarian Justice (1796) and Maritime Compact (1800). Written for various occasions and audiences, Vincent’s essays do not constitute a coherent or systematic exposition of Paine’s political thought or career. Instead, they seek to illuminate the broad intellectual contexts—the cosmopolitan milieus of the ‘‘Age of the Democratic Revolution’’—within which Paine made his mark. Paine himself is only a minor figure in two essays, one on the Masons (‘‘though he probably never belonged to any specific fraternity, he nevertheless actively sympathized with the Masonic movement and the philosophy it espoused,’’ 38), another on ‘‘Americans in Paris during the French Revolution.’’ But both enable us to understand better why Paine was attracted to world-wide revolution and why revolutionaries elsewhere found him such an attractive figure. Despite some perhaps unavoidable repetition and the inclusion of a few slight,