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Events
Jun. 30 | 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies due
Jun. 30 | 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies Teaching, Advising, and Program Development due
Oct. 1 | Travel Grants for Graduate Students
For submission guidelines, click here
Resources: Abstracts of American Studies Dissertations
By University | By Year
Archuleta, Micki. "A Covenant of Struggle: Constitutional Discourse and Ideological Debate in Antebellum America," American Studies, Washington State University, May 2000.
This study focuses on a set of literary voices that struggled to influence political culture in antebellum America. Drawing on Rogers Smith’s formulations of three fundamental ideological traditions in American politics, the study examines the implicitly constitutional visions and foundational ideologies of writers concerned with women’s rights and the issue of slavery. The study examines texts by Margaret Fuller and Henry David Thoreau which function within a republican ideological paradigm in order to critique the nation for failing to live up to transcendental ideals; the Lockean tradition of liberalism as it is represented in the writings of Frederick Douglass, showing his changing political attitudes toward the ideology of liberalism and its emphasis on individual rights, the importance of community and the constitution itself; two ideologically opposed texts by Harriet Beecher Stowe and George Fitzhugh, both of whom work in a Christian exceptionalist tradition; placing Mellville’s fiction of the 1850s in dialogue with these perspectives and argues that his skepticism about the viability of absolute guides to personal and community relations undermines all foundational grounds for reform; the speeches of Abraham Lincoln to suggest that his constitutional positions offer procedural, process-oriented principals for containing ideological debate; and finally sampling post-Civil War literary perspectives on this emergent, procedural constitutionalism, focusing on Walt Whitman’s troubled 1871 meditation on expansion of suffrage and political corruption by the forces of capital.
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