Cathcart’s moves through the slave hierarchy to a position of relative comfort and prosperity were accomplished partly through his ability to navigate—or manipulate—complex relationships and partly through the power of literacy.

Despite its dramatic potential, however, the War of 1812 has suffered from a relative paucity of narrative attention.

Oral tradition, nationalism, and the invention of history

“This flag is the first foreign banner that was ever carried through the great city.”

“It is worth considering why Americans have invested their flags with such importance and how the United States has become more saturated with patriotic color than any other country in the world. The comparative intensity of American loyalties is less noteworthy than the country’s fixation on a single symbol, which has come to be associated with a remarkably wide range of emotions.”

Congress sought to impose frugality and economic restraint as a means to unite a divergent people.

Bostonians of all political and economic factions came to identify themselves in opposition to the soldiers.

Upon the subject of education, not presuming to dictate any plan or system respecting it, I can only say that […]

I want to begin to sketch out a definition of loyalism that is not inherently prejudicial…

The case appears closed. But was Dr. Church really a spy for the British?

For Cheney, the Imperial Presidency is a matter of personal and ideological conviction.

Is Columbus truly the moral equivalent of Hitler, as some of his critics argue? Was the ‘first Thanksgiving’ merely a pretext for the bloodshed, enslavement, and displacement that would follow in later decades?

Nationalists […] aimed to rally Americans with the cry that the young nation could teach Old Europe a lesson or two about the industrial age on its own turf.

Notwithstanding Turkish students’ lack of knowledge about the deep American past, their familiarity with American culture has grown since the end of the cold war and the expansion of cable television and the Internet…

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and even in more recent times, international trade by sea simultaneously created conditions of intense isolation and exhilarating social interaction.

Should America serve solely as a model republic for others to emulate, or should it involve itself directly in their struggles?

The sovereign vacuum created by the inability of any power to serve the needs of backcountry settlers politicized the early national West.

Though hard to fathom in a twenty-first century devoid of such an entrenched dance ethos, in 1804, the French and Americans continued to battle over the form and shape of public musical life.

The birth of a nation is not only or always a national story.

U.S. citizenship and suffrage have not always been two sides of the American coin. . . . the voters who elected presidents from George Washington to Abraham Lincoln included many thousands who were not United States citizens.

Misery is the new black.

Since the doleful events of September 11, one of the points made by almost everyone, from the president to television […]

For an Americanist, one of the strangest developments of the past few years has been to hear the phrase “American […]

The American Jeremiad passes at least one test of really important work: it forces you to reconsider beliefs that you […]

McIntosh championed the soprano-led ensemble, softer singing style, proper enunciation, and a more affected style of performance characteristic of both liturgical-based denominations such as Episcopalians, Catholics, and Lutherans, as well as members of polite society.

Presented as part of the Special Literature Issue

This special issue of Common-place gives us a chance to step back from the earnest defensiveness that has sometimes characterized early American literary history and delight publicly in the strange and wonderful books that are our American legacy.

Who, in our own post-postmodern age, would dare to ask a question as simple as: What does America mean?

I’ve found myself feeling restless, and even irritated, with the reluctance on the part of some smart students to make any kind of active value judgments at all.

Presented as part of the Special Issue: Money

The dollar provided Americans with a common numeraire, a uniform way of expressing economic value … Only over the course of the nineteenth century, though, did a truly national economy, with a high degree of regional specialization, emerge.

Who were these intrepid, incestuous, robust pioneers of whom Bemiss spoke? They were Americans, of course, whose, “extraordinary activity and energy” were “due to the composite nature of their blood.”

What Columbus discovered was less a new world than a new ocean.

Unbecoming British offers an ambitious and interdisciplinary history of identity formation in the United States between the Revolutionary War and the […]

By the late eighteenth century, Americans were well on their way to understanding democracy as a process, really the process, for pursuing politics.

What makes American music American? Is there a distinctive American music? What is the relationship between American music and music […]

My two little boys love the kids’ sections of megabookstores, so a trip to Borders to get out of the […]

Franklin figures prominently in Jon Butler’s Becoming America, a wide-ranging and spirited book that describes the emergence of the first modern culture in a way that will satisfy many readers and provoke others.

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