The Man Without a Country, by Edward Everett Hale

ELH, 2010

This essay examines the generic and political underpinnings of the tradition of negative (non-imitative) instruction in U.S. literature through a reassessment of Edward Everett Hale's patriotic tale, "The Man Without a Country" (1863). I argue that, despite the story's reputation for political dogmatism, it evinces extraordinary ambivalence about both the culpability of its treacherous protagonist and the justness of the government that refuses his pardon. Hale's story of an outcast turned patriot, I argue, suggests that patriotism is not the natural expression of civic participation, but a sentiment conditioned by the imagination of political dispossession.

History of Education Quarterly, 2009

Immediately after the American Revolution, the founders set about the task of ensuring the continued existence of the fledgling republic. Facing a host of problemsFeconomic, social, and governmentalF some founders promoted a concept of schooling that would inculcate patriotism and forge a uniquely American identity. Noah Webster wanted to create an American language, and Benjamin Rush wanted schools to ''convert men into republican machines.'' 1 Webster, Rush, Thomas Jefferson, and others all wanted to use some version of common schooling to instill in children a sense of nationalism. Textbooks used in these common schools would be a likely way to further promote a sense of American identity. What that identity should be, though, and what the ''good citizen'' of the new republic should look like, was sharply contested, and textbooks of this period reflect many of the fissures in the work of nation building. This paper reexamines texts published during the period of the initial formation of the nation, from 1783 to 1815, or from the end of the American Revolution through the War of 1812. If textbook authors had sought to help create a sense of unified American nationhood, we would find messages of commonality over difference, Americanism over Europeanism, and the promotion of a clearly defined sense of patriotism. Instead, this examination of thirty-one textbooks (sixteen geographies and history texts, and fifteen readers and grammar books), most written by New Englanders but also sold widely in the South,

Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 2016

This essay places the issue of patriotism at the heart of Charles Johnson's Middle Passage (1990). The first part looks at the three political systems against which the young protagonist, Rutherford Calhoun, is going to forge his own political beliefs while aboard the slaver the Republic. And the second part argues that Calhoun's unexpected claim toward the end of the story that he is a patriot can be best understood when compared to the decision of the nameless protagonist in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952) to come out of his hiding place and be a responsible, active citizen. Calhoun and the Invisible Man's belief in the values of equality and tolerance on which the nation was built, as well as their eagerness to play their part to make it work, exemplify, the essay concludes, what political theorists call constitutional patriotism.

Benjamin E. Park’s American Nationalisms: Imagining Union in the Age of Revolutions, 1783-1833 is an introductory analysis of different local and regional ideas of nationalism during the first few decades of the American republic. The monograph focuses on highlighting how local concerns, often at a state level, were vital in the construction of competing American ideas of nationalism that led to later justifications for disunion.

Even though the lecture was given to a general audience and thus makes no explicit reference to Husserl or phenomenology, it is a systematic phenomenological analysis of the national form of group belonging and, as such, makes a substantial contribution to phenomenological sociology and political science, grounding that contribution in phenomenological philosophy. Bell describes the essence of the nation as an organic spiritual unity that grows or develops, and is thus not a product of will, and which becomes a unity by surmounting its parts. This unity is instantiated in a given nation by tradition. The particular character of a nation's tradition gives it a tendency to act in one way rather than another.

The History Teacher, 2006

Citizenship Studies, 2004

Treating nationhood as a political claim rather than an ethnocultural fact, this paper asks how “nation” works as a category of practice, a political idiom, a claim. What does it mean to speak “in the name of the nation”? And how should one assess the practice of doing so? Taking issue with the widely held view that “nation” is an anachronistic and indefensible or at least deeply suspect category, the paper sketches a qualified defence of inclusive forms of nationalism and patriotism in the contemporary American context, arguing that they can help develop more robust forms of citizenship, provide support for redistributive social policies, foster the integration of immigrants, and even serve as a check on the development of an aggressively unilateralist foreign policy.

The Southern Literary Journal, 2013

Fordham Law Review, 2021

Messent/A Companion, 2007