Storming the Bastille of Orthodoxy

After describing orthodox medicine and its alternatives in early America, this chapter discusses the rise of country’s earliest medical licensing laws, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. These schemes strove to exclude unorthodox practitioners from the medical profession. American arguments for freedom of therapeutic choice were born in opposition to these original licensing systems. The chapter examines in detail the medical liberty advocacy of Benjamin Rush, an influential Founding Father who was also the most prominent American physician of the early national period. The chapter analyzes the genesis during this time of various strains of medical freedom rhetoric that would persist, to varying degrees, throughout American history.

Harnessing Harmony

Following the creation of the United States, profound disagreements remained over how to secure the survival of the republic and unite its diverse population. In this pathbreaking account, Billy Coleman uses the history of American music to illuminate the relationship between elite power and the people from the early national period to the Civil War. Based on deep archival research in sources such as music periodicals, songbooks, and manuals for musical instruction, Coleman argues that a particular ideal of musical power provided conservative elites with an attractive road map for producing the harmonious union they desired. He reassesses the logic behind the decision to compose popular patriotic anthems like "The Star-Spangled Banner," reconsiders the purpose of early American campaign songs, and brings to life a host of often forgotten but fascinating musical organizations and individuals. The result is not only a striking interpretation of music in American political life but also a fresh understanding of conflicts that continue to animate American democracy.

The long road to accommodative central banking: the US case

For Basil Moore and post-Keynesians who have followed him in developing the theory of endogenous money, accommodative central-bank behavior is a logical necessity in credit-money economies. Such central banks have no choice but to accommodate the banking system's demand for liquidity. Accommodative central banking evolved through a historical process, as this paper shows for the specific case of the US economy. The road to accommodative central banking was a long one in the US, marked by failed experiments with alternative institutional regimes: the Second Bank of the US of the early national period, the urban clearing-houses of the late nineteenth century, and the early Federal Reserve.

Reproducing Music

Amateur musicians played an important role in the material reproduction of musical texts in the eighteenth century. Their work represents the coalescence of technological, bibliographical, and cultural forces in the early national period. Print and manuscript were mutually informing technologies for music reproduction, and both entailed manual and creative labor and expertise. Yet, unlike print, chirography (handwriting) focused attention on the creation of unique, personalized items; moreover, the practice of copying music by hand challenged the primacy of the author by emphasizing an effort to re-cord (to take material to heart). Thus, manuscript music books can be linked to earlier modes of book production, such as commonplace books. Yet they also align with other genres, such as anthologies. Finally, gendered expectations informed books’ creation: like other forms of handwork, musical penmanship expressed femininity. The work of copying music was subject to the same gendered evaluations that minimized the significance of (and yet relied on) women’s domestic work.

Voting Rights

The development of the voting rights of three American groups—white males, women, and African Americans—is described in this essay in order to account for differences in the patterns of enfranchisement, disfranchisement, and, in the case of African Americans, reenfranchisement. Despite property qualifications, white male suffrage was much broader during the colonial and early national period than is often realized. Black suffrage has always been inextricably intertwined with partisan advantage. Women’s suffrage took so long to attain and the movement had to narrow its goals so much to win that female votes made little impact on politics until many years after 1920. The Voting Rights Act, which reenfranchised many African Americans after 1965, has always depended for its impact on Supreme Court decisions, which have passed through repeated cycles of support and restriction and have recently severely undermined protections, leaving minority voting rights at the mercy of “voter suppression” laws passed by their partisan enemies.

Conclusion

This conclusion traces how early American political music was used throughout the nineteenth century. While political music in the early nation was often ephemeral, some of it proved surprisingly durable. Not only were songs from the early national period still performed, printed, and compiled in the following decades, but their melodies were used to carry new lyrics responding to later political developments. At times, early American political music was adapted and repurposed for sectional and election purposes. Focusing on the example of Joseph Hopkinson’s “Hail Columbia,” this conclusion highlights how political music created in the early American republic was circulated in song collections, performed on varied occasions, and used to create new music through the end of the nineteenth century.

Brown and Classicism

Charles Brockden Brown embraced the classical tradition in English literature, as can be seen from his many references to Greek and Roman historiographers, poets, and philosophers. His retellings of ancient events and his portraits of classical figures questioned central maxims in the writing of history which derived from Cicero and had been practiced by the later school of eighteenth-century exemplary historiography. While Brown’s classicism has been frequently interpreted along the line of the growing political tensions in the 1790s, this chapter shows that his adaptations of classical sources are motivated less by a partisan spirit than by Brown’s understanding of himself as a civic commentator and public intellectual. Brown’s Roman stories and his numerous essays on topics related to classical antiquity have to be seen as an intervention in the formation and enlargement of public opinion in the early national period.

✦ North American Saints ✦

This chapter traces saint-seeking from 1884 to 1925, providing short biographies of the early U.S. nominees for sainthood, most of whom were European missionaries to North America in the colonial and early national period. It argues that these prospective saints served as double symbols, proving to Rome that holiness had flourished on American soil and demonstrating to Protestant Americans that Catholics could be loyal U.S. citizens. This chapter highlights the connections between hagiography and historiography in the work of prominent church leaders like James Cardinal Gibbons and John Gilmary Shea, provides short biographies of the Jesuit Martyrs and other early nominees for sainthood, explains key terms such as postulator, and outlines the procedures for canonization and its precursor, beatification.

American and Catholic and Literature: What Cultural History Helps Reveal

This chapter focuses on the so-called “American Catholic literature” (in the form of diaries, journals, and descriptive accounts of their work intended for European sponsors). With the development of a print culture in the early national period, an American literature designed for a domestic audience began to emerge. The U.S. Catholic Church soon grew sufficiently well organized to generate its own separate literary apparatus meeting the varied needs of immigrants and acculturated readers alike. Catholics were melded into a parallel reading public by their common faith, largely insulated from a national literary industry supplying Protestant readers with tales of moral uplift and sentimental piety not so very different from the Catholic versions.