"Who are we?" is the question at the core of these fascinating essays from one of the nation's leading intellectual historians. With old identities increasingly destabilized throughout the world the result of demographic migration, declining empires, and the quickening integration of the global capitalist economy and its attendant communications systems David A. Hollinger argues that the problem of group solidarity is emerging as one of the central challenges of the twenty-first century.
Building on many of the topics in his highly acclaimed earlier work, these essays treat a number of...

Margaret Fuller (1810 1850), a pioneering gender theorist, transcendentalist, journalist, and literary critic, was one of the most well-known and highly regarded feminist intellectuals of nineteenth-century America. With her contemporaries Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, she was one of the predominant writers of the Transcendentalist movement, and she aligned herself in both her public and private life with the European revolutionary fervor of the 1840s. She traveled to Italy as a foreign correspondent for the New York Tribune to cover the nascent revolutions, pursuing the...

Today a tourist mecca, the area now known as the Wisconsin Dells was once wilderness--and a gathering place for the region's Native peoples, the Ho-Chunk, who for centuries migrated to this part of the Wisconsin River for both sustenance and spiritual renewal. By the late 1800s their numbers had dwindled through displacement or forcible removal, and it was this smaller band that caught the attention of photographer Henry Hamilton Bennett. Having built his reputation on his photographs of the Dells' steep gorges and fantastic rock formations, H. H. Bennett now turned his camera upon the...

During the First World War it was the task of the U.S. Department of Justice, using the newly passed Espionage Act and its later Sedition Act amendment, to prosecute and convict those who opposed America s entry into the conflict. In Unsafe for Democracy, historian William H. Thomas Jr. shows that the Justice Department did not stop at this official charge but went much further paying cautionary visits to suspected dissenters, pressuring them to express support of the war effort, or intimidating them into silence. At times going undercover, investigators tried to elicit the unguarded...

Realizing the century-old dream of a passage to India, the building of the Panama Canal was an engineering feat of colossal dimensions, a construction site filled not only with mud and water but with interpretations, meanings, and social visions. Alexander Missal s Seaway to the Future unfolds a cultural history of the Panama Canal project, revealed in the texts and images of the era s policymakers and commentators. Observing its creation, journalists, travel writers, and officials interpreted the Canal and its environs as a perfect society under an efficient, authoritarian management...

In such popular television series as The West Wing and 24, in thrillers like Tom Clancy s novels, and in recent films, plays, graphic novels, and internet cartoons, America has been led by an amazing variety of chief executives. Some of these are real presidents who have been fictionally reimagined. Others are might-have-beens like Philip Roth s President Charles Lindbergh. Many more have never existed except in some storyteller s mind.
In The Presidents We Imagine, Jeff Smith examines the presidency s ever-changing place in the American imagination. Ranging across...

When Americans today think of the Religious Society of Friends, better known as Quakers, they may picture the smiling figure on boxes of oatmeal. But since their arrival in the American colonies in the 1650s, Quakers spiritual values and social habits have set them apart from other Americans. And their example whether real or imagined has served as a religious conscience for an expanding nation.
Portrayals of Quakers from dangerous and anarchic figures in seventeenth-century theological debates to moral exemplars in twentieth-century theater and film (Grace Kelly in High Noon, for...

Best known for his two-year sojourn at Walden Pond inMassachusetts, Henry David Thoreau is often considered a reclusewho emerged from solitude only occasionally to take a stand on theissues of his day. In Thoreau s Democratic Withdrawal, Shannon L. Mariotti explores Thoreau s nature writings to offer a new way ofunderstanding the unique politics of the so-called hermit of Walden Pond. Drawing imaginatively from the twentieth-century Germansocial theorist Theodor W. Adorno, she shows how withdrawal fromthe public sphere can paradoxically be a valuable part ofdemocratic politics.
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For many, "going back to the land" brings to mind the 1960s and 1970s-hippie communes and the Summer of Love, The Whole Earth Catalog and Mother Earth News. More recently, the movement has reemerged in a new enthusiasm for locally produced food and more sustainable energy paths. But these latest back-to-the-landers are part of a much larger story. Americans have been dreaming of returning to the land ever since they started to leave it. In Back to the Land, Dona Brown explores the history of this recurring impulse. ? Back-to-the-landers have often been viewed as nostalgic escapists or...

The Cross of War documents the rise of "messianic interventionism"-the belief that America can and should intervene altruistically on behalf of other nations. This stance was first embraced in the Spanish-American War of 1898, a war that marked the dramatic emergence of the United States as an active world power and set the stage for the foreign policy of the next one hundred years. Responding to the circumstances of this war, an array of Christian leaders carefully articulated and defended the notion that America was responsible under God to extend freedom around the world-by force,...