Robert W. Johannsen, professor emeritus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is one of the leading Jacksonian- and Civil War-era historians of his generation. Works such as his Stephen A. Douglas and To the Halls of the Montezumas have cemented his place in period scholarship. He also has mentored literally dozens of professional historians. In his honor, eleven of his students have gathered to contribute new essays on the period's history. On display here are cutting-edge examinations of thought and culture in the late Jacksonian era, new considerations of Manifest Destiny, and fascinating interpretations of the lives of the two political giants of the period, Stephen A. Douglas and Abraham Lincoln. Democratic Party politics and Civil War-era religion also come into play.

The contributors to Situation Critical argue for the continued importance of critique to early American studies, pushing back against both reductivist neo-empiricism and so-called postcritique. Bringing together essays by a diverse group of historians and literary scholars, editors Max Cavitch and Brian Connolly demonstrate that critique is about acknowledging that we are never simply writing better or worse accounts of the past, but accounts of the present as well. The contributors examine topics ranging from the indeterminacy of knowledge and history to Black speculative writing and nineteenth-century epistemology, the role of the unconscious in settler colonialism, and early American writing about masturbation, repression, religion, and secularism and their respective influence on morality. The contributors also offer vital new interpretations of major lines of thought in the history of critique—especially those relating to Freud and Foucault—that will be valuable both for scholars of early American studies and for scholars of the humanities and interpretive social sciences more broadly. Contributors. Max Cavitch, Brian Connolly, Matthew Crow, John J. Garcia, Christopher Looby, Michael Meranze, Mark J. Miller, Justine S. Murison, Britt Rusert, Ana Schwartz, Joan W. Scott, Jordan Alexander Stein