Stanford University Press

Ratifying the Republic
Antifederalists and Federalists in Constitutional Time

David J. Siemers

Ratifying the Republic explains how the United States Constitution made the transition from a very divisive proposal to a consensually legitimate framework for governing. This story has never been told in its entirety, mainly because the transition seemed so seamless. But the Federalists’ proposal had been bitterly opposed, and constitutional legitimation required a major transformation. The story of that transformation is the substance of this book.

The progression of constitutional contexts triggered new responses from participants in the ratification debate which led to legitimation. Antifederalists had been loath to scrap the Articles of Confederation because of their conservative approach to the rule of law. After ratification, this same conservative predisposition led them to agree to abide by the newly legalized Constitution and instruct their followers to do the same.

Implementation of the Constitution yielded other responses which bolstered the document. For instance, this progression in “constitutional time” exposed incomplete views within the Federalist camp about how a constitution should be treated in practice. James Madison believed the Constitution fairly clearly distinguished federal powers from those retained by the states; successful constitutionalism dictated preserving that division. In contrast, Alexander Hamilton thought that a constitution that split sovereignty between the states and the nation was inherently unstable. His hope was to salvage the Union by extending national power, a project directly contrary to Madison’s more static view.

Madison and these Federalists who agreed with him joined with the former Antifederalists to become the Republican party. This alliance held the remaining Federalists to their well-publicized ratification debate argument that the Constitution was a grant of limited, specific powers only. This new alliance had sufficient strength to contemplate taking the reins of government. With majority status a distinct possibility, incentives to replace the new regime were minimized, eclipsed by a state-centric interpretation of the Constitution.

The legislative process adopted by Congress was also satisfactory to the opposition, who were sticklers for proper procedures. Finally, the trying and financially unrewarding nature of service in the new government discouraged the best and the brightest from seeking national office, hindering institutional prestige and the growth of national power, developments which pleased those who favored dual sovereignty. Throughout, the author emphasizes the role fear, contingency, and happenstance played in the success and legitimation of the Constitution.

David J. Siemers is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin—Oshkosh.

312 pages, 1 map, 2002,
ISBN 080475103X paper ISBN 0804741069 cloth
The Gender of Freedom
Fictions of Liberalism and the Literary Public Sphere

Elizabeth Maddock Dillon

In a sweeping reassessment of early American literature, The Gender of Freedom explores the workings of the literary public sphere—from its colonial emergence through the antebellum flourishing of sentimentalism. Placing representations of and by women at the center rather than the margin of the public sphere, this book links modern forms of political identity to the seemingly private images of gender displayed prominently in the developing public sphere. The “fictions of liberalism” explored in this book are those of marriage and motherhood, sentimental domesticity, and heterosexual desire—narratives that structure the private realm upon which liberalism depends for its meaning and value. In a series of bold theoretical arguments and nuanced readings of literary texts, the author explores the political force of these private narratives with chapters on the Antinomian crisis in Puritan Massachusetts, early national models of gender and marriage in the works of Charles Brockden Brown and Hannah Webster Foster, infanticide narratives and nineteenth-century accounts of motherhood in the work of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Lydia Maria Child, and “re-arranging” marriage in the poetry of Emily Dickinson.

Won 1st place in the 2003 Samuel and Ronnie Heyman Prize, sponsored by Yale University.
Elizabeth Maddock Dillon is Assistant Professor of English and American Studies at Yale University.

328 pages, Forthcoming: Available in April,
ISBN 0804729417 cloth
hardcover price: $49.50
Hardcover: 336 pages
ISBN: 0804729417
Willing Obedience
Citizens, Soldiers, and the Progress of Consent in America, 1776-1898

Elizabeth D. Samet

This book highlights obedience as an American cultural motif by examining the ways in which citizens understand and dramatize the struggle between autonomy and allegiance. Willing Obedience tells the story of Americans who worked out the simultaneous demands of liberty and obedience in fiction, military memoir, and political writing from the Revolution through the nineteenth century. In contrast to the European model of a subject’s blind obedience to a monarch, Americans imagined an allegiance that preserved autonomy even as they consented to the constraints of a new republic. In particular, the book considers the case of the soldier, whose surprisingly complex relationship to authority is in fact representative of the situation of all citizens in a republic.

Elizabeth D. Samet is Associate Professor of English at the United States Military Academy at West Point.

288 pages, 2004, ISBN 0804747253 cloth hardcover price: $55.00

Beasts of the Field
A Narrative History of California Farmworkers, 1769-1913

Richard Steven Street

Written by one of America’s preeminent labor historians, this book is the definitive account of one of the most spectacular, captivating, complex and strangely neglected stories in Western history—the emergence of migratory farmworkers and the development of California agriculture.

Street has systematically worked his way through a mountain of archival materials—more than 500 manuscript collections, scattered in 22 states, including Spain and Mexico—to follow the farmworker story from its beginnings on Spanish missions into the second decade of the twentieth century. The result is a comprehensive tour de force. Scene by scene, the epic narrative clarifies and breathes new life into a controversial and instructive saga long surrounded by myth, conjecture, and scholarly neglect.

With its panoramic view spanning 144 years and moving from the US-Mexico border to Oregon, Beasts of the Field reveals diverse patterns of life and labor in the fields that varied among different crops, regions, time periods, and racial and ethic groups.

Enormous in scope, packed with surprising twists and turns, and devastating in impact, this compelling, revelatory work of American social history will inform generations to come of the history of California and the nation.

Richard Steven Street is an independent scholar and writer. He has held a Guggenheim Fellowship and has also been a fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center. He earned his doctorate in American labor history at the University of Wisconsin, and has been an award-winning photographer and journalist specializing in California agriculture and agricultural labor. He is also the author of Organizing for Our Lives: New Voices from Rural Communities (1992). He is currently finishing a multivolume history of California farmworkers.

936 pages, 55 illustrations, Forthcoming,

ISBN 0804738807 paper ISBN 0804738793 cloth

The Not So Wild, Wild West
Property Rights on the Frontier

Terry L. Anderson and Peter J. Hill

Mention of the American West usually evokes images of rough and tumble cowboys, ranchers, and outlaws. In contrast, The Not So Wild, Wild West casts America’s frontier history in a new framework that emphasizes the creation of institutions, both formal and informal, that facilitated cooperation rather than conflict. Rather than describing the frontier as a place where heroes met villains, this book argues that everyday people helped carve out legal institutions that tamed the West.

The authors emphasize that ownership of resources evolves as those resources become more valuable or as establishing property rights becomes less costly. Rules evolving at the local level will be more effective because local people have a greater stake in the outcome. This theory is brought to life in the colorful history of Indians, fur trappers, buffalo hunters, cattle drovers, homesteaders, and miners. The book concludes with a chapter that takes lessons from the American frontier and applies them to our modern “frontiers”—the environment, developing countries, and space exploration.

Terry L. Anderson is the executive director of PERC, the Center for Free Market Environmentalism; senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University; and professor emeritus at Montana State University. He has published 28 books. P. J. Hill is professor of economics at Wheaton College, Illinois, and a PERC senior associate. This is his eleventh book.

256 pages, 13 tables, 10 illustrations, 5 maps, Forthcoming,

ISBN 0804748543 cloth
How to Write the History of the New World
Histories, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World

Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra

An Economist Book of the Year, 2001.

In the 18th century, a debate ensued over the French naturalist Buffon’s contention that the New World was in fact geologically new. Historians, naturalists, and philosophers clashed over Buffon’s view. This book maintains that the “dispute” was also a debate over historical authority: upon whose sources and facts should naturalists and historians reconstruct the history of the New World and its people. In addressing this question, the author offers a strikingly novel interpretation of the Enlightenment.

488 pages, 54 illustrations, 2001,
ISBN 0804746931 paper ISBN 0804740844 cloth
paper price: $24.95
hardcover price: $55.00

May 18, 2004