Rude Republic
Americans and Their Politics in the Nineteenth Century
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- $44.99
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- $44.99
Publisher Description
What did politics and public affairs mean to those generations of Americans who first experienced democratic self-rule? Taking their cue from vibrant political campaigns and very high voter turnouts, historians have depicted the nineteenth century as an era of intense and widespread political enthusiasm. But rarely have these historians examined popular political engagement directly, or within the broader contexts of day-to-day life. In this bold and in-depth look at Americans and their politics, Glenn Altschuler and Stuart Blumin argue for a more complex understanding of the "space" occupied by politics in nineteenth-century American society and culture. Mining such sources as diaries, letters, autobiographies, novels, cartoons, contested-election voter testimony to state legislative committees, and the partisan newspapers of representative American communities ranging from Massachusetts and Georgia to Texas and California, the authors explore a wide range of political actions and attitudes. They consider the enthusiastic commitment celebrated by historians together with various forms of skepticism, conflicted engagement, detachment, and hostility that rarely have been recognized as part of the American political landscape. Rude Republic sets the political parties and their noisy and attractive campaign spectacles, as well as the massive turnout of voters on election day, within the communal social structure and calendar, the local human landscape of farms, roads, and county towns, and the organizational capacities of emerging nineteenth-century institutions. Political action and engagement are set, too, within the tide of events: the construction of the mass-based party system, the gathering crisis over slavery and disunion, and the gradual expansion of government (and of cities) in the post-Civil War era. By placing the question of popular engagement within these broader social, cultural, and historical contexts, the authors bring new understanding to the complex trajectory of American democracy.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Nineteenth-century Americans, Cornell professors Altschuler and Blumin argue, were political animals, and politics did not stop at the voting booth--it encroached upon everyday life, with references to elections and political parties popping up in plays, songs, parades and teatime small talk. If there were Americans before 1860 who doubted the importance of politics, the Civil War drove home the relevance of congressional votes and presidential elections. One local newspaper reported that two women ended a decades-long friendship because they disagreed about Lincoln. After the Civil War, politics, which had occupied a peripheral role in fiction before the war, took center stage in such bestsellers as Albion Tourgee's A Fool's Errand (1880), a novel about the politics of Reconstruction. (Altschuler and Blumin often exaggerate the extent to which politics' pervasiveness was a new phenomenon. When they write that during the Civil War, politics invaded the pulpit, with preachers offering their opinions not just of the Bible but of the president as well, readers may recall the highly politicized sermons from the Revolutionary era. The authors constantly complicate the story they tell: just after convincing readers that politics dominated every novel written after 1870, they show that a close reading of diaries from the era indicates that some men were increasingly detached from electoral politics--a tension that is never satisfactorily resolved. Still, theirs is a rich and entertaining study. 22 b&w illustrations.
