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Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the Political History of the Early American Republic presents a collection of cultural essays. The goal of each piece recognizes the shifting differences from old political history, from the top down, towards new social history, from the bottom up. While this was sorely attempted by Sim in A Union Forever, this collection provides the background context of its founding settings to explore foundation nation ideals through the cultural history historical lens. While not a main point in the introduction to the collection, reading them, I located a common theme throughout some of the ideas: Grassroot ideologies. While I would consider this a modern term in explaining how the marginalized communities to grant authority, and contributed to the community narrative. Beyond take this authority to illustrate how the community ‘outsiders’ were main players America’s framework, creating the first party system (chapter 4 with women strategically building male political alliances), and then a bifurcated party system (chapter 13 and the anti-renters providing the ideologies of the Republican platform). Walsticher, Newman, Pasely and Huston all point to some grassroots movement shaping the cultural identity if America’s framework. Throughout the collection of essays, I am often reminded of Camp’s work (notably in the Dress and Mobilization, Women in Party Conflict chapters) BeckertRockman’s book (Dress and Mobilization), Gould’s law of nations (Dress and Mobilization, Consent, Civil Society, and the Public Sphere ‘tactic consent’ chapters) in this collection of essays. While Gould focuses on law and how this formed our transatlantic foreign relations, I could not help but connect his argument in a ‘cultural’ sense when reading how our new American dress shaped how foreign countries viewed us as a new nation.
Beyond classifys the cultural essays into the following sections:
- Section I Democracy and Other Practices; Examines cultural politics/studies to understand how politics how partisan strategies shape founding American politics (Page 10).
- Section II Gender, Race, and other Identities; Studying the politics of identity is a legacy of the early republic (page 13).
- Section III Norms and Forms; Rethinking how political language within the Revolutionary era, constitution/law formations are important in shaping the nation (page 15).
- Section IV Interests, Spaces, and Other Structures; Viewing the cultural-historical ‘other’ and how these groups contribute to events, institutions, thus shaping the nation’s identity (page 16). The writers agree the other groups are the less successful than other working frame workers.
Drawing on the same ideas of David S. and andrewjarralkelly, I agree that the reader needs to understand what the essay author is trying to challenge. This makes some of the essay’s great, but not very assertive on what top-down perspective problem it is trying persuade the reader to rethink. The introduction of the book makes it very clear that these essays will challenge traditional ‘founding’ epistemologies (Pg 18). However, while all of the essays do not come out and argue what area they are challenging, I often found myself spending longer times in the footnotes of the articles, trying to grasp an understanding of why the essay was written. The variety of sources utilized in each essay provided a starting point and new key terms to source search for my annotated bibliography.