A01=Laura Rigal
Age of Enlightenment
Ambivalence
American Enlightenment
American studies
Anecdote
Apprenticeship
Author_Laura Rigal
Bank of North America
Benjamin Rush
Birch's Views of Philadelphia
Capitalism
Carpentry
Category=DSB
Category=DSBF
Category=JBCC
Category=NHK
Charles Willson Peale
Commodity
Cordwainer
Criticism
David Rittenhouse
Dichotomy
Division of labour
E pluribus unum
Emblem
Engineering
Engraving
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Eric Foner
Exhumation (geology)
Forging
History painting
Hostility
Household
Illustration
Industrialisation
Institution
John Neagle
John Trumbull
Joseph Dennie
Journeyman
Laborer
Literature
Manufacturing
Masonry
Master craftsman
Mechanization
Memoir
Miscellany
Mode of production
Narrative
Nation-building
Newspaper
Notes on the State of Virginia
Ornithology
Pamphlet
Peale Museum
Pennsylvania Constitution
Physician
Political economy
Politics
Printing
Publication
Ratification
Rembrandt Peale
Republicanism
Rhetoric
Satire
Scaffolding
Shipbuilding
Slavery
Technology
The Other Hand
The Port Folio
Travel literature
Writing
Product details
- ISBN 9780691089515
- Weight: 397g
- Dimensions: 152 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 24 Sep 2001
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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This cultural history of American federalism argues that nation-building cannot be understood apart from the process of industrialization and the making of the working class in the late-eighteenth-century United States. Citing the coincidental rise of federalism and industrialism, Laura Rigal examines the creations and performances of writers, collectors, engineers, inventors, and illustrators who assembled an early national "world of things," at a time when American craftsmen were transformed into wage laborers and production was rationalized, mechanized, and put to new ideological purposes. American federalism emerges here as a culture of self-making, in forms as various as street parades, magazine writing, painting, autobiography, advertisement, natural history collections, and trials and trial transcripts.
Chapters center on the craftsmen who celebrated the Constitution by marching in Philadelphia's Grand Federal Procession of 1788; the autobiographical writings of John Fitch, an inventor of the steamboat before Fulton; the exhumation and museum display of the "first American mastodon" by the Peale family of Philadelphia; Joseph Dennie's literary miscellany, the Port Folio; the nine-volume American Ornithology of Alexander Wilson; and finally the autobiography and portrait of Philadelphia locksmith Pat Lyon, who was falsely imprisoned for bank robbery in 1798 but eventually emerged as an icon for the American working man. Rigal demonstrates that federalism is not merely a political movement, or an artifact of language, but a phenomenon of culture: one among many innovations elaborated in the "manufactory" of early American nation-building.
Laura Rigal is Associate Professor of English and American Studies at the University of Iowa.
