Critical Patriots: The Contested Declaration of Independence and the Political Thought of James Fennimore Cooper, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman

John E. Alvis (1944–2019) was a beloved Professor of English at the University of Dallas where he joined the university as a Freshman in 1962 and stayed for over fifty years. Alvis’s books include Shakespeare’s Understanding of Honor (1990), Divine Initiative and Heroic Response (1995), and Nathaniel Hawthorne as Political Philosopher: Revolutionary Principles Domesticated and Personalized (2011). He also edited Areopagitica and Selected Political Writings of John Milton (1999) and coedited Shakespeare as Political Thinker(2000) with Thomas G. West. His essays appeared regularly in The Southern Review, Modern Language Quarterly, VoegelinView, Law & Liberty, and the Claremont Review of Books.

Samuel Postell is the Assistant Director and a professor at the Lyceum Program at Clemson University. He teaches and writes about American Political Thought, with a particular emphasis on legislative statesmanship and politics and literature. He has a forthcoming book entitled Prophet and Fulfiller, One: Philosophy, Politics, and Impiety in Melville's Moby-Dick.