Yale’s class of 1776 graduated two weeks after the Continental Congress formally announced America’s independence from Great Britain. These were times of exhilaration. These were times that tried men’s souls. Most of the new states lacked formal constitutions, tax structures, or courts of law. The Continental Congress was a self-authorized gathering of attainted rebels. The document authorizing their meetings, the Articles of Confederation, would not be ratified for another five years. The Continental army was a ragamuffin collection of local militias; the United States Navy, four fishing boats to which a few cannon had been hastily added. The campaign to...

From Maine taverns to Charleston mansions, citizens joyfully celebrated George Washington’s defeat of General Cornwallis at Yorktown. British military might had been vanquished, freedom secured. Bells rang and cannons fired as people toasted liberty, Independence, and the united thirteen states. Peace was nigh, and with peace, European Americans assured themselves, prosperity would quickly salve the wounds of war.¹

Popular joy was short-lived, however. Economic and political uncertainties soon destabilized the new Republic. Within a year, the commercial boom that had followed the war’s end collapsed. Unsold cargoes rotted on wharves in Philadelphia and New York. Bankruptcy toppled merchant princes and...

The American Revolution threw wide the door of radical political promise. Political authority no longer resided in the will of the king. “The People,” having declared themselves free, equal, and endowed with inalienable rights, had become the ultimate source of political authority. A national identity built around the image of the new American–as–republican citizen began to take form. But what precise form would this new citizenship assume?

Enveloped in an aura of unlimited possibilities as citizens of the first modern republic, European Americans faced momentous—and bitterly contested—decisions. They had to resolve which rights and responsibilities citizenship...

When we think of America’s Revolutionary patriots, we think of farmers, muskets drawn, defending the road between Lexington and Concord, of Paul Revere’s “midnight ride” and Patrick Henry’s bold oratory. Male patriots, however, did not act alone. European American women were also children of the Enlightenment and the Revolution. Their ideals were borne aloft by the same intellectual winds that buoyed the image of the European American man as freedom-loving and endowed with inalienable rights. The tides of war that swept up struggling farmers and mechanics, leading them to assert their right to a political voice, ebbed and flowed around...

On July 21, 1790, with much fanfare—a flotilla of ships dotting New York harbor, eminent citizens gathered, rounds of military salutes—a delegation of Creek warriors stepped ashore in New York City, then still the nation’s capital. They had been invited by President Washington to sign a treaty of friendship with the new United States. Prominent among those greeting the Creek delegates were officers and members of New York City’s Tammany Society. Carrying bows, arrows, and tomahawks and bedecked in “Indian” costumes, they proudly proclaimed themselves “sachems” and “braves.” So attired, they had marched from their “Great Wigwam”...

The western frontier has long played a central role both in the construction of the United States as a modern nation-state and in the formation of a mythic American national identity. On the most practical level, without the West, the thirteen states would have remained just that: thirteen small, semiautonomous states crammed between the Atlantic and the Appalachian Mountains. The United States’ control of the West opened a vast continent to European American settlement, foreclosed other empires’ claims to that continent, and secured access to an abundant reservoir of natural resources. Management of western lands created administrative challenges and a...

European American women played a complex role in the construction of the Native Americans as savage and inhuman and of European Americans as men of reason and heirs of the Enlightenment. In so doing, these women both constructed a national and political identity for themselves and participated in the process by which Native American women in nations as distinct and widespread as the Wampanoags and Narragansetts, the Iroquois, Creeks, and Cherokees, lost their rights to landownership, their control of agricultural production, their right to a significant political and religious voice in tribal affairs. The process that Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak referred...

On July 15, 1782, patriot and physician Benjamin Rush described an elaborate state ball given by Anne-César, Chevalier de La Luzerne, minister of France to the United States, in the new national capital, Philadelphia. The chevalier’s proclaimed purpose was to simultaneously celebrate the birthday of the dauphin and the birth of the new American Republic. The chevalier’s ball was one of the first public recognitions of Independence. (The date, July 15, is significant: formal peace talks had just begun in Paris.) The excitement with which the new Americans embraced the ball was, consequently, intense. A sense of wonder and spectacle,...

Was the image of the European American–as–republican gentleman, a man of wealth, education, and politesse, stable enough to ground the identity of the emerging new Republic? Or did the inherent theatricality of the role render it precisely that—a role, learned in the act of its performance? The shifting winds of fashion spun its meanings like a weather vane in a storm, while the disparate desires of its multiple players—elite planters like George Washington, ambitious but illegitimate West Indian boys like Alexander Hamilton, the equally ambitious poor farming boys seeking a niche within the new urban middle...

Self-consciously emulating London’s fashionableGentleman’s MagazineandCritical Review, the editors and publishers of America’s new magazines announced that their publications were designed to appeal to the “discerning publick,” to “men of ability,” “men of genius, and erudition”—in short, to gentlemen. To attract this discerning audience, publishers announced that their periodicals would be “fertile in literary productions . . . weighty in matter, pure in sentiment, elegant in style, and entertaining to the fancy.” On their pages, “the philosopher may . . . communicate the result of his researches, the moralist lay down rules of ethics and discipline—the...

Blackness, the blackness of night and of dungeons; secrets, masked and festering; duplicity and the spectral—all lie at the heart of the gothic novel, a genre that emerged in England in the mid-eighteenth century and, crossing the Atlantic, remained popular through much of the nineteenth.¹ No language, no vision could be more unlike republican discourses. The celebration of virtue, civil and individual, constitutes the heart of republican discourses, as do the valorization of reason and the transparency of language and intention. Republicanism is the discourse of the agora. Fused with liberalism, it celebrates an enlightened public sphere and a...