Enfilade

From UP of Kansas:

Nathaniel Green, The Man of the People: Political Dissent and the Making of the American Presidency (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas: 2020), 408 pages, ISBN: 978-0700629954, $50.

Donald Trump’s election has forced the United States to reckon with not only the political power of the presidency, but also how he and his supporters have used the office to advance their shared vision of America: one that is avowedly nationalist, and unrepentantly rooted in nativism and white supremacy. It might be easy to attribute this dark vision, and the presidency’s immense power to reflect and reinforce it, to the singular character of one particular president—but to do so, this book tells us, would be to ignore the critical role the American public played in making the president ‘the man of the people’ in the nation’s earliest decades.

Beginning with the public debate over whether to ratify the Constitution in 1787 and concluding with Andrew Jackson’s own contentious presidency, Nathaniel Green traces the origins of our conception of the president as the ultimate American: the exemplar of our collective national values, morals, and ‘character’. The public divisiveness over the presidency in these earliest years, he contends, forged the office into an incomparable symbol of an emerging American nationalism that cast white Americans as dissenters—lovers of liberty who were willing to mobilize against tyranny in all its forms, from foreign governments to black ‘enemies’ and Indian ‘savages’—even as it fomented partisan division that belied the promise of unity the presidency symbolized. With testimony from private letters, diaries, newspapers, and bills, Green documents the shaping of the disturbingly nationalistic vision that has given the presidency its symbolic power.

This argument is about a different time than our own. And yet it shows how this time, so often revered as a mythic ‘founding era’ from which America has precipitously declined, was in fact the birthplace of the president-centered nationalism that still defines the contours of politics to this day. The lessons of The Man of the People contextualize the political turmoil surrounding the presidency today. Never in modern US history have those lessons been more badly needed.

Nathaniel C. Green is professor of history at Northern Virginia Community College.

From UNC Press:

Mark Boonshoft, Aristocratic Education and the Making of the American Republic (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2020), 296 pages, ISBN: 978-1-469659541 (ebook), $23 / ISBN: 978-1469661360 (paperback), $30 / ISBN: 978-1469659534 (hardcover), $95.

Following the American Revolution, it was a cliché that the new republic’s future depended on widespread, informed citizenship. However, instead of immediately creating the common schools–accessible, elementary education—that seemed necessary to create such a citizenry, the Federalists in power founded one of the most ubiquitous but forgotten institutions of early American life: academies, privately run but state-chartered secondary schools that offered European-style education primarily for elites. By 1800, academies had become the most widely incorporated institutions besides churches and transportation projects in nearly every state.

In this book, Mark Boonshoft shows how many Americans saw the academy as a caricature of aristocratic European education and how their political reaction against the academy led to a first era of school reform in the United States, helping transform education from a tool of elite privilege into a key component of self-government. And yet the very anti-aristocratic critique that propelled democratic education was conspicuously silent on the persistence of racial and gender inequality in public schooling. By tracing the history of academies in the revolutionary era, Boonshoft offers a new understanding of political power and the origins of public education and segregation in the United States.

Mark Boonshoft is assistant professor of history at Duquesne University.

C O N T E N T S

List of Figure and Tables
Acknowledgments

Introduction: Why Academies?: Aristocratic Education in Revolutionary America

Part I. From Denominational Schools to Nationalist Institutions, 1730–1787
1  The Emergence of Academies: The Great Awakening and Colonial Elite Formation
2  The Academy Effect: Civic Education and the American Revolution
3  Rebuilding Academies: Education and Politics in the Confederation Era

Part II. The Culture of Academies, 1780–1800
4  Defining Merit: Academies and Inequality
5  Diplomacy and Dance: The Geopolitics of Ornamental Education

Part III. From Aristocratic Education to Reform, 1787–1830
6  Creating Consensus: The Politics of State Support for Academies
7  The First Era of School Reform: War, Panic, and Popular Education

Epilogue: The Legacy of Aristocratic Education

Appendix
Notes
Bibliography

From UNC Press:

Jeffrey Alan Erbig, Where Caciques and Mapmakers Met: Border Making in Eighteenth-Century South America (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2020), 280 pages, ISBN: 978-1469655055 (ebook), $20 / ISBN: 978-1469655048 (paperback), $25 / ISBN: 978-1469655031 (hardcover), $90.

During the late eighteenth century, Portugal and Spain sent joint mapping expeditions to draw a nearly 10,000-mile border between Brazil and Spanish South America. These boundary commissions were the largest ever sent to the Americas and coincided with broader imperial reforms enacted throughout the hemisphere. Where Caciques and Mapmakers Met considers what these efforts meant to Indigenous peoples whose lands the border crossed. Moving beyond common frameworks that assess mapped borders strictly via colonial law or Native sovereignty, it examines the interplay between imperial and Indigenous spatial imaginaries. What results is an intricate spatial history of border making in southeastern South America (present-day Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay) with global implications.

Drawing upon manuscripts from over two dozen archives in seven countries, Jeffrey Erbig traces on-the-ground interactions between Ibero-American colonists, Jesuit and Guaraní mission-dwellers, and autonomous Indigenous peoples as they responded to ever-changing notions of territorial possession. It reveals that Native agents shaped when and where the border was drawn, and fused it to their own territorial claims. While mapmakers’ assertions of Indigenous disappearance or subjugation shaped historiographical imaginations thereafter, Erbig reveals that the formation of a border was contingent upon Native engagement and authority.

Published with support provided by the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas.

Jeffrey Alan Erbig Jr. is assistant professor of Latin American and Latino studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

C O N T E N T S

List of Figures, Maps, and Tables
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations

Introduction
1  An Archipelago of Settlements and Tolderías
2  Projecting Possession
3  Mapping the Tolderías’ Mansion
4  Simultaneous Sovereignties
5  Where the Lines End
Conclusion

Notes
Bibliography