Histories of Democracy and Empire

Abstract

The field imaginary of American studies was until recently organized around a narrative of Puritan origins given scholarly form in the works of Perry Miller and infused with ideological critique by Sacvan Bercovitch. More recently a productive skepticism toward the Puritan origins thesis and other exceptionalisms has contributed to a divide between early and later periods of Americanist inquiry. As the nature of the relationship between America's past and present has been brought into question, a disciplinary schism has developed, producing two relatively discrete fields: "early Americanists" who work on the colonial period and the early republic; and those focused on the national period after 1835 who now often prefer the term "U.S.-Americanists." These scholarly communities have developed increasingly separate organizations, journals, and conversations. Despite the substantial lack of dialogue, the fields have developed along parallel lines of inquiry. Empire is an organizing concept in both early and U.S.-Americanist scholarship. Transnationalism, comparatism, and multilingualism are central elements in the study of both the early and later periods. In the absence of sustained dialogue, however, scholars in the two fields often talk past one another, separated principally, I want to suggest, by distinct concepts of history. This separation has notable consequences for discussions of two fundamental concepts in American studies that are also pressing current political concerns: democracy and empire. My purposes here include examining some reasons for and consequences of the schism; identifying the competing historical theories that contribute to it; and suggesting some reasons why it is useful to establish more of a dialogue between early and U.S. Americanists. I will then offer a reading of texts by Daniel Webster, Símon Bolívar, and James Fenimore Cooper that explores the conceptual development of democracy and empire and, in the process, may suggest an approach to help bridge the two fields of Americanist inquiry.

Not so long ago, the field imaginary of American studies was organized around a narrative of Puritan origins given scholarly form in the works of Perry Miller and infused with ideological critique by Sacvan Bercovitch.¹ More recently a productive skepticism toward the Puritan origins thesis and other exceptionalisms has contributed to a divide between early and later periods of Americanist inquiry. As the nature of the relationship between America's past and present has been brought into question, a disciplinary schism has developed, producing two relatively discrete fields: "early Americanists," who work on the colonial period and the early republic, and those focused on the national period after 1835, who now often prefer the term "U.S.-Americanists."² These scholarly communities have developed increasingly separate organizations, journals, and conversations. Despite the substantial lack of dialogue, the fields have developed along parallel lines of inquiry. Empire is an organizing concept in both early and U.S.-Americanist scholarship. Transnationalism, comparatism, and multilingualism are central elements in the study of both the early and later periods. In the absence of sustained dialogue, however, scholars in the two fields often talk past one another, separated principally, I want to suggest, by distinct concepts of history. This separation has notable consequences for discussions of two fundamental concepts in American studies that are also pressing current political concerns: democracy and empire. My purposes here include examining some reasons for and consequences of the schism, identifying the competing historical theories that contribute to it, and suggesting some reasons why it is useful to establish more of a dialogue between early and U.S.-Americanists. I will then offer a reading of texts by Daniel Webster, Simón Bolívar, and James Fenimore Cooper that explores the conceptual development of democracy and empire and, in the process, may suggest an approach to help bridge the two fields of Americanist inquiry.

The odd disjunction between the fields is in part a residual effect of the Puritan origins thesis and a general skepticism about unifying histories. It is also partly a consequence of theories of modernity that identify "massive human migrations, urban pluralism, and cultural globalization" as principally contemporary phenomena. Anna Brickhouse rightly notes that the history of the Americas has been characterized...