Democracies in America: Keywords for the 19th Century and Today

Ask someone their thoughts about "democracy" and you'll get many different responses. Some may presume it a thing once established yet now under threat. Others may believe that democracy has always been compromised by the empowered few. In the contemporary United States, marked by constituencies across the political spectrum believing that their voices have gone unheard, "democracy" gets wielded in so many divergent directions as to be rendered nearly incoherent.

Democracies in America reminds us that this reality is nothing new. Focusing on the various meanings of "democracy" that circulated in the long nineteenth century, the book collects twenty-five essays, each taking up a keyword in the language we use to talk about democracy. Penned by a group of diverse intellectuals, the entries tackle terms both commonplace (citizenship and representation) and paradigm-stretching (disgust and sham). The essays thus consider the relationship between "America" and "democracy" from multiple disciplinary angles and from different moments in a major historical period-amidst the vitality of the revolutionary epoch, in the contentious lead-up to the Civil War, and through the triumphs and failures of Reconstruction and the early reforms of the Progressive Era-while making both forward and backward glances in time.

The book frames its keywords around a series of enduring democratic dilemmas and questions, and provides extensive resources for further study. Ultimately the volume cultivates, for students and teachers in classrooms, as well as citizens in libraries and cafés, a language to deliberate about the possibilities and problems of democracy in America.


Author: D. Berton Emerson
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 03/15/2023
Pages: 336
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.10lbs
Size: 8.90h x 6.40w x 1.10d
ISBN: 9780192871879

About the Author

Gregory Laski, Civilian Associate Professor of English, United States Air Force Academy, D. Berton Emerson, Associate Professor of English, Whitworth University

D. Berton Emerson is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Honors Program at Whitworth University in Spokane, Washington. His writing has appeared in American Literature, ESQ, Nineteenth-Century Literature, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. He has participated at various levels with the work of the Commission on Democratic Citizenship, sponsored by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and he is currently working on a book manuscript titled American Literary Misfits: Vernacular Aesthetics and Alternative Democracies, 1830-1860.

Gregory Laski is the author of Untimely Democracy: The Politics of Progress after Slavery (OUP 2017), which won the American Literature Association's 2019 Pauline E. Hopkins Society Scholarship Award. Formerly a visiting faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University, he is currently a civilian associate professor of English at the United States Air Force Academy, where he co-founded the American Studies program. He was a Mellon Fellow at the Newberry Library in 2021-22 and is at work on an intellectual history of revenge in the Reconstruction era. He holds a PhD in English from Northwestern University.