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  • Republican CentaursCrises of American Legitimacy and the Naming of a Mobile Nation
  • Len Von Morzé
Len Von Morzé
University of California, Berkeley

Footnotes

1. David Bruce, "To All Scots-Irishmen. Citizens of America," Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, Originally Written Under the Signature of the Scots-Irishman, by a Native of Scotland (Washington, Pa.: John Colerick, 1801), 40.

2. James Webb, Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America (New York: Broadway Books, 2004), 241.

3. The analysis made, for example, in David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001).

4. Thomas Frank, What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004).

5. Publishers Weekly provides anecdotal evidence of sales figures. Wide publicity through a story in the lowbrow newspaper supplement Parade—a publication for which Webb serves as contributing editor—"initiated [the book's] jump to 7 from 70,005 on Amazon.com." (Raya Kuzyk, "'Parade Picks' Promises Hits," Publishers Weekly 251, 44 [November 1, 2004]: 19.)

6. Webb, Born Fighting, 25. Immediately after the election of 2004, it was cited to explain the supposed prehistory of contemporary cultural divisions. See, for instance, John Tierney, "The Real Divide: Waterside Voters Versus Inlanders," New York Times, November 7, 2004, 4–5. On tour for his own book, Tom Wolfe ceaselessly promoted Webb as "the most cogent person" to explain the Bush victory. See Margaret Driscoll, "'Talk to Someone in Cincinnati?' Sunday Times (London), November 7, 2004, 15. As Ronald Reagan's secretary of the navy,Webb has considerable cultural stature, which leaves one all the more dismayed to find few dissenting reviews that challenge the facts—as opposed to the romantic tone—of Webb's book.

7. Webb, Born Fighting, 8.

8. Ned Landsman, Scotland and Its First American Colony, 1683–1765 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985), 6.

9. This retreat from American exceptionalism was already evident in James Leyburn's seminal history of the Scots-Irish. Whereas earlier histories such as Frederick Jackson Turner's had treated the Scots-Irish as existential aliens transformed by "the almost mystical influence of frontier life," Leyburn had paid serious heed to Old World conditions. See The Scotch-Irish: A Social History (Chapel Hill: University Press of North Carolina, 1962), 257.

10. Rogers Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999), 10.

11. James Salazar, "A Good Judge of Character?" American Quarterly 54, 2 (2002): 325.

12. Webb, Born Fighting, 289, 15, 8.

13. Edward C. Carter III, "A 'Wild Irishman' Under Every Federalist's Bed: Naturalization in Philadelphia, 1789–1806," Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 94 (1970): 331–46.

14. Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1967), 231–320.

15. Ned C. Landsman, "Nation, Migration, and the Province in the First British Empire: Scotland and the Americas, 1600–1800," American Historical Review (AHR) 104, 2 (April 1999): 463.

16. William Byrd, Commonplace Book 336, in Susan Manning, Fragments of Union: Making Connections in Scottish and American Writing (Palgrave: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 112.

17. For a voluminous exposition of this point, see especially Douglas Bradburn's brilliant analysis of trials and other public events throughout "Revolutionary Politics, Nationhood, and the Problem of American Citizenship, 1787–1804" (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 2003).

18. Christopher Looby, Voicing America: Language, Literary Form, and the Origins of the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 249.

19. Landsman, "Nation, Migration, and the Province," 474.

20. David Wilson, United Irishmen, United States: Immigrant Radicals in the Early Republic (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998), 63.

21. Patrick Griffin, The People with No Name: Ireland's Ulster Scots, America's Scots Irish, and the Creation of a British Atlantic World, 1689–1764 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), 4.

22. For this account, see especially Wilson, United Irishmen.

23. Bruce Burgett, Sentimental Bodies: Sex, Gender, and Citizenship in the Early Republic (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998).

24. Jeremy Belknap, A History of New-Hampshire, Volume...

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