The Long Affair: Thomas Jefferson and the French Revolution
Conor Cruise O'Brien
Cloth COBE/EEC $29.95 0-226-61653-3
Certain to be as controversial and explosive as it is elegant and learned, The Long Affair is Conor Cruise O'Brien's examination of Thomas Jefferson, as man and icon, through the critical lens of the French Revolution.
Unable to speak the language, endowed with few close friends or colleagues, and curiously detached from Parisian intellectual life, Thomas Jefferson seemed an alienated and somewhat homesick Virginia farmer during most of his tenure as American minister to France. But the advent of the French Revolution seized Jefferson with a new fervor, and in 1789 he returned to the United States an ardent admirer and ally of that cause.
O'Brien argues that Jefferson, though enthralled with the ideological mystique of the French Revolution, nevertheless retained a shrewd political pragmatism, skillfully exploiting the Revolution's popularity with the American public. Ultimately, O'Brien suggests, Jefferson's egalitarian ideals came into conflict with his staunch political support for the slave-based southern economy. Following the French inspired slave insurrection in Santo Domingo, his revolutionary zeal was tempered and began to cool.
Concluding with an evaluation of Jefferson's current role in the system of American political beliefs, O'Brien seriously questions whether we can sustain Jefferson's lofty status in an increasingly multiracial America, and he suggests a disturbing link between Jefferson's vision and white supremacist, survivalist extremists. A provocative analysis of the supreme symbol of American history and political culture, The Long Affair will challenge our traditional perceptions of both Jeffersonian history and the Jeffersonian legacy.
A diplomat and politician as well as a prolific scholar, Conor Cruise O'Brien has served as a member of both the Irish Delegation to the United Nations and the Senate of the Republic of Ireland. A visiting scholar to universities around the world, he is the author of more than twenty books including Ancestral Voices: Religion and Nationalism in Ireland and The Great Melody: A Thematic Biography of Edmund Burke, both available from the University of Chicago Press.
Calvinists Incorporated: Welsh Immigrants on Ohio
Anne Kelly Knowles
Paper $24.00tx 0-226-44853-3
Bringing immigrants onstage as central players in the drama of rural capitalist transformation, Anne Kelly Knowles traces a community of Welsh immigrants to Jackson and Gallia counties in southern Ohio. After reconstructing the gradual process of community-building, Knowles focuses on the pivotal moment when the immigrants became involved with the industrialization of their new region as workers and investors in Welsh-owned charcoal iron companies. Setting the southern Ohio Welsh in the context of Welsh immigration as a whole from 1795 to 1850, Knowles explores how these strict Calvinists responded to the moral dilemmas posed by leaving their native land and experiencing economic success in the United States.
Knowles draws on a wide variety of sources, including obituaries and community histories, to reconstruct the personal histories of over 1,700 immigrants. The resulting account will find appreciative readers not only among historical geographers, but also among American economic historians and historians of religion.
Anne Kelly Knowles is lecturer in geography at the Institute of Earth Studies in the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, and is a member of the editorial advisory board for Historical Geography.
Voicing America: Language, Literary Form ...
Christopher Looby
Cloth $29.95sp 0-226-49282-6
How is a nation brought into being? In a detailed examination of crucial tex
Christopher Looby is assistant professor of English at the University of Chicago
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1: Logocracy in America
2: "The Affairs of the Revolution Occasion'd the
Interruption": Self,
Language, and Nation in Franklin's Autobiography
3: "The Very Act of Utterance": Law, Language, and
Legitimation in
Brown's Wieland
4: "Tongues of People Altercating With One Another":
Language, Text and
Society in Brackenridge's Modern Chivalry
5: Coda: The Voice of Patrick Henry
March 26, 2000