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Democracies in America collects twenty-five essays from a diverse group of contributors, each centred around a keyword from the language we use to discuss democracy. The relationship between "America" and "democracy" is examined from multi-disciplinary angles and at different moments in 19th century history, while glancing forward to our time.
List of contents
- Foreword
- Acknowledgements
- About the Editors and Contributors
- Democracies in America: A User's Guide
- I. Preamble
- 1: Danielle Allen: Democracy vs. Republic
- 2: Kyle G. Volk: Personal Liberty
- 3: Edlie Wong: Equality
- 4: James Sanders: Scale (or, Democracy in las Américas)
- II. Institutions and Arrangements
- 5: Jack Jackson: Constitution
- 6: Elizabeth Maddock Dillon: Representation
- 7: Padraig Riley: Citizenship
- 8: Ariel Elizabeth Seay-Howard: Anti-Black Violence
- 9: David Gold: Women's Suffrage
- 10: Sandra M. Gustafson: The Town Hall Meeting
- III. Feelings, Attitudes, and Interdependence
- 11: Christopher Castiglia: Belief
- 12: Mark Schmeller: Public Opinion
- 13: Vincent Lloyd: Charisma
- 14: John Funchion: Partisan
- 15: Jason Frank: Disgust
- 16: Jean Ferguson Carr: Moderation
- 17: Michelle Sizemore: Comfort
- IV. Ambitions and Distortions
- 18: Dana D. Nelson: The Commons
- 19: Angélica María Bernal: Tyranny
- 20: Derrick Spires: Sham
- 21: Tess Chakkalakal: Disfranchisement
- 22: Russ Castronovo: Security
- 23: Alaina E. Roberts: Settlement
- 24: William Duffy and John Pell: Doubt
- 25: Nancy Rosenblum: Neighbors
- Further Reading and Additional Resources
About the author
D. Berton Emerson is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Honors Program at Whitworth University in Spokane, Washington. His writing has appeared in American Literature, ESQ, Nineteenth-Century Literature, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. He has participated at various levels with the work of the Commission on Democratic Citizenship, sponsored by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and he is currently working on a book manuscript titled American Literary Misfits: Vernacular Aesthetics and Alternative Democracies, 1830-1860.
Gregory Laski is the author of Untimely Democracy: The Politics of Progress after Slavery (OUP 2017), which won the American Literature Association's 2019 Pauline E. Hopkins Society Scholarship Award. Formerly a visiting faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University, he is currently a civilian associate professor of English at the United States Air Force Academy, where he co-founded the American Studies program. He was a Mellon Fellow at the Newberry Library in 2021-22 and is at work on an intellectual history of revenge in the Reconstruction era. He holds a PhD in English from Northwestern University.
Summary
Democracies in America collects twenty-five essays from a diverse group of contributors, each centred around a keyword from the language we use to discuss democracy. The relationship between "America" and "democracy" is examined from multi-disciplinary angles and at different moments in 19th century history, while glancing forward to our time.
Additional text
In keeping with the project's avowed aim of serving larger initiatives in civics education and democratic citizenship, the essays are accessible, largely jargon-free, and accompanied by bibliographies of more extensive scholarship on their subjects; as such, the book will serve as an indisputably valuable research tool for any readership from high school onward.
