BiblioVault - Books about Ideological Origins

The Ideological Origins of African American Literature

Phillip M. Richards

University of Tennessee Press, 2024

Inquiry into African American literature in recent decades has neglected to probe the intellectual structure of the tradition’s aesthetics and its underlying ideology. In The Ideological Origins of African American Literature, Phillip M. Richards begins this reconstructive work, illuminating the dialectical backstory of black prose and poetry in America. Richards argues that the social and political forces that influenced white literature were uniquely reacted to, absorbed, and often times rejected by African American literary figures—from the eighteenth-century Puritan notions of a God-centered history to the onset of Romanticism and Modernism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Building his case for ideological continuity, Richards surveys a profoundly creative period of 125 years launched by an African American reaction against a racist, mid-eighteenth-century American culture. This epoch in African American literature saw a fusion of Puritan-Protestant culture into a religious and secular worldview, drawing in the poetry of Phillis Wheatley, antebellum slave narratives, Richard Allen, and the periodicals of the ambitious African Methodist Episcopalian movement—all of which would form the underlying foundation of a Black Victorian culture. A rising black middle class, Richards argues, would later be secularized by an eroding religious tradition under the pressures of nineteenth-century modernity, the trauma of Jim Crow, and the emerging northern ghetto. Richards further traces the emergence of Romanticism which appeared with white American authors such as Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman, but would not take shape in African American literature until the likes of W.E.B. Du Bois and Langston Hughes took stock of Anglo-European culture at the end of the nineteenth century. The Ideological Origins of African American Literature illustrates a pattern of black writing that eschews the hegemonic white culture of the day for an evolving black culture that would define an American literary landscape.

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The Ideological Origins of American Federalism

Alison L. LaCroix

Harvard University Press, 2011

Federalism is regarded as one of the signal American contributions to modern politics. Its origins are typically traced to the drafting of the Constitution, but the story began decades before the delegates met in Philadelphia.

In this groundbreaking book, Alison LaCroix traces the history of American federal thought from its colonial beginnings in scattered provincial responses to British assertions of authority, to its emergence in the late eighteenth century as a normative theory of multilayered government. The core of this new federal ideology was a belief that multiple independent levels of government could legitimately exist within a single polity, and that such an arrangement was not a defect but a virtue. This belief became a foundational principle and aspiration of the American political enterprise. LaCroix thus challenges the traditional account of republican ideology as the single dominant framework for eighteenth-century American political thought. Understanding the emerging federal ideology returns constitutional thought to the central place that it occupied for the founders. Federalism was not a necessary adaptation to make an already designed system work; it was the system.

Connecting the colonial, revolutionary, founding, and early national periods in one story reveals the fundamental reconfigurations of legal and political power that accompanied the formation of the United States. The emergence of American federalism should be understood as a critical ideological development of the period, and this book is essential reading for everyone interested in the American story.

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The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution

Enlarged Edition

Bernard Bailyn

Harvard University Press, 1992

To the original text of what has become a classic of American historical literature, Bernard Bailyn adds a substantial essay, ”Fulfillment,” as a Postscript. Here he discusses the intense, nation-wide debate on the ratification of the Constitution, stressing the continuities between that struggle over the foundations of the national government and the original principles of the Revolution. This detailed study of the persistence of the nation’s ideological origins adds a new dimension to the book and projects its meaning forward into vital present concerns.

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The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution

Fiftieth Anniversary Edition

Bernard Bailyn

Harvard University Press, 2017

The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, awarded both the Pulitzer and the Bancroft prizes, has become a classic of American historical literature. Hailed at its first appearance as “the most brilliant study of the meaning of the Revolution to appear in a generation,” it was enlarged in a second edition to include the nationwide debate on the ratification of the Constitution, hence exploring not only the Founders’ initial hopes and aspirations but also their struggle to implement their ideas in constructing the national government.

Now, in a new preface, Bernard Bailyn reconsiders salient features of the book and isolates the Founders’ profound concern with power. In pamphlets, letters, newspapers, and sermons they returned again and again to the problem of the uses and misuses of power—the great benefits of power when gained and used by popular consent and the political and social devastation when acquired by those who seize it by force or other means and use it for their personal benefit.

This fiftieth anniversary edition will be welcomed by readers familiar with Bailyn’s book, and it will introduce a new generation to a work that remains required reading for anyone seeking to understand the nation’s historical roots.

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