A01=David Waldstreicher
American festivals
American identities
American politics
Author_David Waldstreicher
Category=JBCC6
Category=JHB
Category=JPA
Category=JPHC
Category=NHK
class
early American republic
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Fourth of July
gender
national identity
Ohohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture
patriotic celebrations
race
region
Product details
- ISBN 9780807846919
- Weight: 589g
- Dimensions: 155 x 238mm
- Publication Date: 24 Nov 1997
- Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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In this innovative study, David Waldstreicher investigates the importance of political festivals in the early American republic. Drawing on newspapers, broadsides, diaries, and letters, he shows how patriotic celebrations and their reproduction in a rapidly expanding print culture helped connect local politics to national identity. Waldstreicher reveals how Americans worked out their political differences in creating a festive calendar. Using the Fourth of July as a model, members of different political parties and social movements invented new holidays celebrating such events as the ratification of the Constitution, Washington's birthday, Jefferson's inauguration, and the end of the slave trade. They used these politicized rituals, he argues, to build constituencies and to make political arguments on a national scale. While these celebrations enabled nonvoters to participate intimately in the political process and helped dissenters forge effective means of protest, they had their limits as vehicles of democratization or modes of citizenship, Waldstreicher says. Exploring the interplay of region, race, class, and gender in the development of a national identity, he demonstrates that an acknowledgment of the diversity and conflict inherent in the process is crucial to any understanding of American politics and culture. |Together, and separately, black and white Baptists created different but intertwined cultures that profoundly shaped the South. Adopting a biracial and bicultural focus, Paul Harvey works to redefine southern religious history, and by extension southern culture, as the product of such interaction--the result of whites and blacks having drawn from and influenced each other even while remaining separate and distinct. In tracing the growth of Baptist churches from small outposts of radically democratic plain-folk religion in the mid-18th century to conservative and culturally dominant institutions in the 20th century, Harvey explores one of the most impressive evolutions of American religious and cultural history.
David Waldstreicher is professor of history at Temple University.
