The final chapter brings us back to the contemporary political dilemmas we face today and discusses how the recovery of premodern conceptions of the nation helps us think through the challenge of national pluralism and resurging nationalist sentiment. It encourages openness to some virtues of empire as a multinational form of politics, considers the merits of a pluralistic political order, and suggests new avenues for cultivating democratic solidarity in diverse polities. In particular, the chapter engages with liberal multiculturalist arguments to illustrate the advantages of medieval approaches to national diversity. In place of self-government rights, the book suggests legal pluralism and policies of recognitions as more fruitful arrangements for multinational polities. Moreover, the chapter applies the insights of the study to the European Union and the United States, respectively. It concludes by responding to a number of liberal nationalist concerns, especially the need for pre-political partnership to undergird democratic politics.

This framing chapter focuses on the nation’s founding and the salience of inequality and race that is baked into our founding documents. It also discusses the concept of democracy that prevailed at the time of the founding and why it represented a radical departure from the past influences of Anglo and French political thought. It introduces the concept of multiple political traditions within American democracy.

This chapter looks at the ways sf visions of the future published in the decades following World War II both challenge the dominant ideology of American exceptionalism – the notion that the United States is a single homogenous nation uniquely exempt from history – and the Program Era division between literary and genre fiction. Both Program Era realism and sf develop representations of the present. However, sf’s mirror is a distorting anamorphic one, presenting imaginary futures that help its readers cognize the contradictions, conflicts, and struggles that are always at work in any historical situation, and which naturalizing formulations such as American exceptionalism occlude. The chapter traces shifting practices of representing the future, beginning with 1950s dystopias, postapocalypses, and alternate histories through the radical visions of the New Wave and the new practices of postmodern cyberpunk and critical dystopia up to the recent wave of literary sf and climate change fiction.

The concluding chapter starts by very briefly summarizing key patterns in the litigation over judicial selection and then returns to the de Tocqueville quote and the issue of American exceptionalism. To assess the exceptionalism question, the chapter includes a discussion of litigation over judicial selection outside the United States, finding that it occurs in very few countries and where it does occur, is generally very limited. One exception is the recent burst of litigation in international courts over judicial selection in Poland. Another possible exception is Israel where there has been litigation concerning several judicial selection issues. Overall, the chapter concludes that American exceptionalism in litigation over judicial selection does not lie in the existence of such litigation but in the frequency of that litigation.

The book opens with a discussion of a case from Delaware challenging a long-standing requirement for partisan balance on state courts in the Delaware state constitution. The chapter goes on to note that substantively Marbury v. Madison (1803) was a case about the judicial appointment process. After a brief discussion of recent litigation over the appointment of federal administrative law judges, the chapter notes that litigation over judicial selection is consistent with Alexis de Tocqueville’s observation that “scarcely any political question arises in the United States that is not resolved sooner or later into a judicial question.” The chapter identifies several expectations, describes the data collection process, and briefly outlines the chapters that follow.

The Journal de Saint-Domingue joined the Affiches Américaines in encouraging White male colonists to consider themselves members of an “enlightened” and distinctively “American” citizenry devoted to reason and the common good. While acknowledging metropolitan precedents for a general-interest publication, its editors trumpeted their publication’s novelty, claimed all of “America” as their journalistic jurisdiction, and stated their intention to generate original content, not just reprint metropolitan articles. The monthly Journal fostered the creation of American “taste” by publishing reviews and critiquing poetry by colonists. With strong ties to the local Chambres d’Agriculture and strong support from planter subscribers, it also published extensively on agriculture (Chapter 11). With the Affiches, it created a forum where colonists could appropriate the intellectually respectable terms of “political economy,” combining them with a robust rhetoric of citizenship to respond to criticism from merchants and metropolitan chambers of commerce; debate the reimposition of the trade restrictions of the Exclusif and proposed limitations on sugar refining; and seek to redefine the colony-metropole relationship.

This chapter situates the documentary movement of the 1930s and its preoccupation with the folk within the larger history of American modernism. I show how “the culture concept” emerged within the overlapping fields of anthropology and folklore to guide the practice of ethnography and its “study of modernity’s others” in the age of US imperialism and world war. For some Black and Native ethnographers, the folk offered an avenue for staking a claim of history, contribution, and modern belonging. New Deal documentary projects repurposed the folk as stalwart protagonists of the past, the backstory to a centralized narrative of national culture and its constituent parts. By contrast, many documentary books destabilized representations of the folk, producing a more self-reflexive account of social relations of power. While some texts anticipated the Cold War turn to the plight of the individual, others took aim at the racial fault lines of American exceptionalism.

This chapter explores the contrasting role of proportionality discourse in the USA and in Latin America. Although the USA provided an important constitutional model for Latin American countries, the latter does not share the former’s disinterest in the proportionality framework, which is considered foreign to the legal tradition of the country despite the fact it is arguably harmonic with the approach to law creation in the common law tradition. The chapter seeks possible explanations for the contrast in four elements: the importance in Latin America of centralized, specialized constitutional jurisdiction; the tradition of borrowing constitutional jurisprudence from abroad; the openness to constitutional change and innovation; and sensitivity to the egalitarian potential of rights review, even if that potential remains largely unrealized, which favors experimentation around proportionality. The USA sits at the opposite end of the spectrum along each of the dimensions that support proportionality analysis.

Chapter 5 engages with a larger transhistorical discourse of female personhood, considering how the challenges that accompanied Austen’s public status are echoed in the reading and reception history of Mansfield Park. I move this discussion back to the 1772 Mansfield Decision, and forward to consider the controversy surrounding the far less momentous twenty-first century decision to place Austen on a British bank note. The open-ended, improvisatory, and uncontrollable nature of feelingly impactful speech links cultural and critical conversations to what J.L. Austin calls the perlocutionary realm of performative language. Perlocution, the dimension of language that most signals organizational breakdown, bogging down the progress of J.L. Austin’s official speech-act theory, is also the dimension or capacity of language through which paratextual literary encounters – allusions, conversations, revisions, and eventful readings – persist. This concern with doing things by our words as well as in them evokes a central feature of the enterprise of literary criticism altogether, I argue. For Cavell, the very mood and project of criticism is praise open to rebuke.

A fundamental challenge for the labor movement is the necessity to provide a message that resonates. This is a matter confused and hobbled by the fact that the problems posed for unions in employment relationships have their roots in history. The state plays a less ambitious role in the United States compared to Europe and Japan. The unions have stepped into a vacuum, occupied through the exercise of collective bargaining, and simultaneously attempted to promote state expansion so as to augment the bargaining process.

In the early part of the previous century, the American Federation of Labor provided funds for unemployment or distress suffered by their own members.1 This may help explain the fact that, at that time and for a while thereafter, the federation had little or no enthusiasm for unemployment compensation statutes mandated by the state. This tradition is reflected in the restricted scope and content of unemployment compensation law, a product of the Southern Democratic part of the New Deal coalition.

Scholars used to view “early American literature” primarily as little more than a rustic precursor to what American literature would become in its maturity. For many years as well, it was the cradle of the “New England Mind,” that place where America’s religious origins might be found and established. In recent years, however, the study of early American literature has expanded in several intriguing directions. From the perspective of temporality or period, scholars now consider “early America” to extend back into the fifteenth century and as far forward as the 1830s. Linguistically, the archive “early America” now speaks and records in a number of languages other than English. Socially and culturally, we consider the literatures of enslaved persons, women, and Indigenous persons formerly forgotten by such histories. Indeed, it is hard to imagine a single book or perspective adequately capturing the proliferation of the field’s recognition, which is why this multivoice volume is so needed as this point.

The first chapter offers a general overview of the interpretative framework that guides the selections and commentary in this volume. One thing has remained a constant fixture in American history: the enduring belief in an American exceptionalism. This book suggests that, besides the remarkable endeavor of leaving the Old World and of framing a new government by the people for the people, what has made American political thought exceptional is the unique combination of theoretical influences that were intertwined during the founding era. American statesmen combined two languages—liberalism and republicanism—and two conceptions of the people: the understanding of the people as a corporate entity and as a multitude of individuals. This paradigm of the people’s two bodies may be nothing more than a fiction, but it shaped American history and institutions profoundly. The guiding threat of the subsequent chapters is to trace the combination of republican and liberal ideas about the people and about representation in the primary sources from the Puritans’ arrival on the shores of New England to the Civil War.

Despite the centrality of place to H. P. Lovecraft and Jeff VanderMeer’s fiction, weird regionalisms have largely been ignored in literary criticism. This essay not only reads The Southern Reach trilogy through the lens of region, but also reads region through the lens of The Southern Reach trilogy. It contrasts Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu” with VanderMeer’s trilogy to highlight how they both develop a weird aesthetics of the Plantationocene. The chapter argues that weird fiction in the U.S. has always been underwritten by racialized and regionalized ideologies that derive from slavery and the plantation. The New England exceptionalism Lovecraft endorses is founded on concepts of personhood, nature, and region that legitimate the dehumanization of African Americans and other people of color. In contrast, VanderMeer presents the indisputably southern terrain of the Gulf Coast in a way that does not rely on “the South” as a significant framework. The Southern Reach portrays a sparsely populated Gulf Coast that is not so much post-southern as it is post-Earth: VanderMeerian Florida camouflages something very different, and much more weird, than region as southern studies scholars often think of it.

We pivot in this part to discussing the other key player in the judicial tug of war – political elites. Chapter 4 begins by considering how the interests of political actors and those of the bar clash over the captured judiciary. Specifically, over time, political actors and lawyers have drifted apart ideologically, resulting in tension. This mismatch, we argue, sets the stage for contemporary fights over the politicization of the judiciary, over activist judges, and over the meritocracy of the judiciary – the judicial tug of war. We also note in this chapter that an increased interjection of “politics” into the selection of judges, although perhaps unappealing to many Americans, need not necessarily be undesirable; after all, having a judiciary that represents a greater variety of political and ideological interests (including conservative ones), and not just the bar’s, might be the most desirable from a normative perspective.

We start in Chapter 2 by discussing how the bar – the nation’s attorneys – occupies a historically prominent place within American politics. As we show, the United States is quite unusual in this respect. Unlike European countries, where governments have (historically at least) been populated by members of an aristocratic class, the United States had no entrenched nobility; the bar emerged as an educated, wealthy class, and, as some historical observers noted, occupied the role that in other countries had been assumed by the nobility. Over time, the organized bar emerged, and it developed fairly conservative policy interests and economic and regulatory interests. As we document via a series of novel empirical findings, this has contributed to American exceptionalism in several policy areas, most pronounced in those areas relevant to the bar and its interests.

The Afterword brings together the contributions of the individual chapters in this collection and draws out what they have in common. It explains the shift in puritan studies through what does not appear (American exceptionalism, typology, and jeremiads), and it maps the current state of the field through two dueling frameworks: the puritan imaginary and the puritans’ world. The “puritans’ world” designates the way that historical, circumstantial, interconnected people and events affected how the puritans came to their ideas and how those ideas came to be written down. The “puritan imaginary” means the ideas themselves – the ways in which puritans tried to make sense and meaning out of the world in which they lived. Puritan literature requires scholars who come at the subject through both perspectives – those who seek to see as the puritans saw and those who look askance at puritan literature for the world that kept intruding and reshaping it. As the Afterword makes clear, that principle of combined perspectives is on full display in the book’s collection of essays, which revisit puritan literature from multiple angles of vision.

The Introduction explains what we are doing when we claim to write American puritan literary history. It shows the development of that field – particularly as it was rooted in American exceptionalism and guided the construction of American literature anthologies – then explains the turn away from exceptionalism and the current state of the field. In the process we define each of the key terms in the title of this book: “American,” “puritan,” “literary,” and “history,” offering a general overview and summary of puritanism. Finally, the introduction lays out the three broader goals of the volume: (1) to introduce teachers, scholars, and new students to the complicated and nuanced tradition of puritan literature in America, set within broad historical, methodological, and geographical contexts; (2) to bring together new methodologies for, approaches to, and analyses of this literature; and (3) to suggest new directions and next steps in the field, including what the contours of such a field ought to include.