Introduction

This forum asks what the study of democracy in the long nineteenth century can teach us at present. Contributors consider the relationship between "America" and "democracy" from multiple disciplinary angles (history, literary studies, and political theory); from different moments in this historical era (from the revolutionary epoch to the ostensible failures of the post-Reconstruction United States); and from different methodological perspectives (affect theory, close reading, hemispheric studies). Collectively, the essays explore the scholarly, political, and pedagogical stakes of attempts, on the one hand, to bring "democracy" and "America" into proximity and, on the other, to mark the gaps inhering between them.