Deliberation, in recent years, has emerged as a form of civic engagement worth reclaiming. In this persuasive book, Sandra M. Gustafson combines historical literary analysis and political theory in order to demonstrate that current democratic practices of deliberation are rooted in the civic rhetoric that flourished in the early American republic. Though the U.S. Constitution made deliberation central to republican self-governance, the ethical emphasis on group deliberation often conflicted with the rhetorical focus on persuasive speech. From Alexis de Tocqueville’s ideas about the deliberative basis of American democracy through the works of Walt Whitman, John Dewey, John F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr., Gustafson shows how writers and speakers have made the aesthetic and political possibilities of deliberation central to their autobiographies, manifestos, novels, and orations. Examining seven key writers from the early American republic—including James Fenimore Cooper, David Crockett, and Daniel Webster—whose works of deliberative imagination explored the intersections of style and democratic substance, Gustafson offers a mode of historical and textual analysis that displays the wide range of resources imaginative language can contribute to political life.

Peace in the US Republic of Letters, 1840-1900 explores the early peace movement as it captured the imagination of leading writers. The book charts the rise of the peace cause from its sources in the works of William Penn and John Woolman, through the founding of the first peace societies in 1815 and the mid-century peace congresses, to the postbellum movement's consequential emphasis on arbitration. The Civil War is the central axis for the book, with three chapters organized around readings of novels by James Fenimore Cooper, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Nathaniel Hawthorne spanning the period from 1840 to 1865. Cooper had personal connections to the movement and thought deeply about the issues it addressed. Literary interest in peace at times overlapped with abolitionism, as was true for Stowe. And, in the case of Hawthorne, attention to peace advocacy arose out of a mixture of skepticism regarding perfectionist impulses, a desire to explore the nature and limits of violence, and fear of civil conflict. The volume also explores fiction engaged with problems that arose in the aftermath of that war, including novels by Henry Adams and John Hay on political corruption and class conflict; works on the failures of Reconstruction by Albion Tourgée and Charles Chesnutt; and the varied treatments of Indigenous experience in Helen Hunt Jackson's Ramona and Simon Pokagon's Queen of the Woods. All of these writers focused on issues related to the cause of peace, expanding its thematic reach and anticipating key insights of twentieth-century peace scholars.

The drafting and ratification of the federal constitution between 1787 and 1788 capped almost 30 years of revolutionary turmoil and warfare. The supporters of the new constitution, known at the time as Federalists, looked to the new national government to secure the achievements of the Revolution. But they shared the same doubts that the Anti-federalists had voiced about whether the republican form of government could be made to work on a continental scale. Nor was it a foregone conclusion that the new government would succeed in overcoming parochial interests to weld the separate states into a single nation. During the next four decades the institutions and precedents governing the behavior of the national government took shape, many of which are still operative today. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of the Early American Republic contains a chronology, an introduction, appendixes, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 500 cross-referenced entries on important personalities, politics, economy, foreign relations, religion, and culture. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about American history.

The twenty-first century is characterized by the global circulation of cultures, norms, representations, discourses, and human rights claims; the arising conflicts require innovative understandings of decision making. Deliberative Acts develops a new, cogent theory of performative deliberation. Rather than conceiving deliberation within the familiar frameworks of persuasion, identification, or procedural democracy, it privileges speech acts and bodily enactments that constitute deliberation itself, reorienting deliberative theory toward the initiating moment of recognition, a moment in which interlocutors are positioned in relationship to each other and so may begin to construct a new lifeworld. By approaching human rights not as norms or laws, but as deliberative acts, Lyon conceives rights as relationships among people and as ongoing political and historical projects developing communal norms through global and cross-cultural interactions.

An authoritative and lively account of the development of the genre, by leading experts in the field.

Albion W. Tourgée (1838–1905) was a major force for social, legal, and literary transformation in the second half of the nineteenth century. Best known for his Reconstruction novels A Fool’s Errand (1879) and Bricks without Straw (1880), and for his key role in the civil rights case Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), challenging Louisiana’s law segregating railroad cars, Tourgée published more than a dozen novels and a volume of short stories, as well as nonfiction works of history, law, and politics. This volume is the first collection focused on Tourgée’s literary work and intends to establish his reputation as one of the great writers of fiction about the Reconstruction era arguably the greatest for the wide historical and geographical sweep of his novels and his ability to work with multiple points of view. As a white novelist interested in the rights of African Americans, Tourgée was committed to developing not a single Black perspective but multiple Black perspectives, sometimes even in conflict. The challenge was to do justice to those perspectives in the larger context of the story he wanted to tell about a multiracial America. The seventeen essays in this volume are grouped around three large topics: race, citizenship, and nation. The volume also includes a Preface, Introduction, Afterword, Bibliography, and Chronology providing an overview of his career. This collection changes the way that we view Tourgée by highlighting his contributions as a writer and editor and as a supporter of African American writers. Exploring the full spectrum of his literary works and cultural engagements, Reimagining the Republic: Race, Citizenship, and Nation in the Literary Work of Albion Tourgée reveals a new Tourgée for our moment of renewed interest in the literature and politics of Reconstruction.

Democracy requires a connection to the 'will of the people'. What does that mean in a world of 'fake news', relentless advocacy, dialogue mostly among the like-minded, and massive spending to manipulate public opinion? What kind of opinion can the public have under such conditions? What would democracy be like if the people were really thinking in depth about the policies they must live with? If they really 'deliberated' with good information about their political choices? This book argues that 'deliberative democracy' is not utopian. It is a practical solution to many of democracy's ills. It can supplement existing institutions with practical reforms. It can apply at all levels of government and for many different kinds of policy choices. This volume speaks to a recurring dilemma: listen to the people and get the angry voices of populism or rely on widely distrusted elites and get policies that seem out of touch with the public's concerns. Instead, there are methods for getting a representative and thoughtful public voice that is really worth listening to. Democracy is under siege in most countries, where democratic institutions have low approval and face a resurgent threat from authoritarian regimes. Deliberative democracy can provide an antidote and can reinvigorate our democratic politics. Democracy When the People Are Thinking draws on the author's research with many collaborators on 'Deliberative Polling'-a process conducted in 27 countries on six continents. It contributes both to political theory and to the empirical study of public opinion and participation. It should interest anyone concerned about the future of democracy and how it can be revitalized.