Awards

• Winner of Gustave O. Arlt Award in the Humanities 2018 (United States)

Overview

Citizenship defines the U.S. political experiment, but the modern legal category that it now names is a relatively recent invention. There was no Constitutional definition of citizenship until the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868, almost a century after the Declaration of Independence. Civic Longing looks at the fascinating prehistory of U.S. citizenship in the years between the Revolution and the Civil War, when the cultural and juridical meaning of citizenship-as much as its scope-was still up for grabs. Carrie Hyde recovers the numerous cultural forms through which the meaning of citizenship was provisionally made and remade in the early United States. Civic Longing offers the first historically grounded account of the formative political power of the imaginative traditions that shaped early debates about citizenship. In the absence of a centralized legal definition of citizenship, Hyde shows, politicians and writers regularly turned to a number of highly speculative traditions-political philosophy, Christian theology, natural law, fiction, and didactic literature-to authorize visions of what citizenship was or ought to be. These speculative traditions sustained an idealized image of citizenship by imagining it from its outer limits, from the point of view of its ""negative civic exemplars""-expatriates, slaves, traitors, and alienated subjects. By recovering the strange, idiosyncratic meanings of citizenship in the early United States, Hyde provides a powerful critique of originalism, and challenges anachronistic assumptions that read the definition of citizenship backward from its consolidation in the mid-nineteenth century as jus soli or birthright citizenship.

Full Product Details

9780674976153

Table of Contents

Reviews

Astute...Hyde is particularly adept at using interdisciplinary, sociohistorical materials to uncover the ways in which the concept of citizenship evolved from the late eighteenth century to the nineteenth...Offer[s] new ways to suggest how evolving concepts of belonging were formed across different forms of media, including court cases, novels, short stories, and newspapers.--Kacy Dowd Tillman Early American Literature (11/01/2020) Hyde makes a persuasive case for the importance of literature to the development of American understandings of citizenship...Hyde's book is one that historians will need to ponder.--Andrew Diemer American Historical Review (06/01/2019) Hyde takes the reader on an intellectual grand tour of citizenship as it has applied to the American context. That tour includes references to Western 'contract' theorists, the founders, the Declaration of Independence, U.S. Supreme Court decisions, and anti-slavery writers.-- (06/01/2018) Hyde's excellent book makes a strong case for the role of culture and literature in shaping American understandings of what it meant to be a member of the nation in the era before the 14th amendment asserted law's authority.--Johann N. Neem Civil War Book Review (09/01/2018) Impressive...Traces the retroactive and fluctuating ways in which citizenship has been defined in the United States since the days of the Founding Fathers.--Paul Giles Australian Book Review (12/01/2018) How did Americans imagine citizenship before the Fourteenth Amendment? By attending to philosophy, religion, law, literature, and education, Carrie Hyde's smart, sharp, and unique book provides a new history (perhaps even a prehistory) for a central but often undefined term in American political life.--Eric Slauter, University of Chicago Civic Longing is a meticulously researched, elegantly written, and timely study of the early American conception of citizenship. Carrie Hyde shows persuasively how literature and literary analysis help to fashion the categories through which we imagine our affiliations. At a time when the humanities are under attack from a variety of sources, these carefully articulated and demonstrated claims are especially salient.--Priscilla Wald, Duke University In this provocative interdisciplinary study, Carrie Hyde explores the various ways that U.S. citizenship was imagined and reimagined prior to the Fourteenth Amendment. One of her great contributions is to show how writings by Hawthorne, Douglass, Stowe, and many others played a fundamental role in shaping pre-1868 notions of U.S. citizenship. Beautifully written and brilliantly argued, Civic Longing offers fresh insights into the nineteenth century while speaking to vexing issues in our own time.--Robert S. Levine, University of Maryland Civic Longing provides an exciting new framework for evaluating the political influence of literature in the antebellum nation...Conceptualizing citizenship through literary renderings of displacement marks this book's most significant contribution to the field. By shifting our understanding of citizenship from an experience of collective belonging to an imaginative experience of longing, Hyde's work provides a new way to think about the political influence of literature and the sentimental dynamics of national affiliation.-- (06/01/2019) Civic Longing is extremely valuable for its exploration of genres that legal scholars would not traditionally turn to when tracing the ancestry of our modern conception of citizenship. These alternative sources offer some important insights into how imagined citizenship affects the development of legal constructs...Hyde's analysis is sophisticated and detailed. Her mastery of her selected sources is impressive, and the conclusions she draws from these sources are persuasive.-- (05/01/2019)

Astute...Hyde is particularly adept at using interdisciplinary, sociohistorical materials to uncover the ways in which the concept of citizenship evolved from the late eighteenth century to the nineteenth...Offer[s] new ways to suggest how evolving concepts of belonging were formed across different forms of media, including court cases, novels, short stories, and newspapers.--Kacy Dowd Tillman Early American Literature (11/01/2020) Hyde makes a persuasive case for the importance of literature to the development of American understandings of citizenship...Hyde's book is one that historians will need to ponder.--Andrew Diemer American Historical Review (06/01/2019) Hyde takes the reader on an intellectual grand tour of citizenship as it has applied to the American context. That tour includes references to Western 'contract' theorists, the founders, the Declaration of Independence, U.S. Supreme Court decisions, and anti-slavery writers.-- (06/01/2018) Hyde's excellent book makes a strong case for the role of culture and literature in shaping American understandings of what it meant to be a member of the nation in the era before the 14th amendment asserted law's authority.--Johann N. Neem Civil War Book Review (09/01/2018) Impressive...Traces the retroactive and fluctuating ways in which citizenship has been defined in the United States since the days of the Founding Fathers.--Paul Giles Australian Book Review (12/01/2018) How did Americans imagine citizenship before the Fourteenth Amendment? By attending to philosophy, religion, law, literature, and education, Carrie Hyde's smart, sharp, and unique book provides a new history (perhaps even a prehistory) for a central but often undefined term in American political life.--Eric Slauter, University of Chicago Civic Longing is extremely valuable for its exploration of genres that legal scholars would not traditionally turn to when tracing the ancestry of our modern conception of citizenship. These alternative sources offer some important insights into how imagined citizenship affects the development of legal constructs...Hyde's analysis is sophisticated and detailed. Her mastery of her selected sources is impressive, and the conclusions she draws from these sources are persuasive.-- (05/01/2019) Civic Longing provides an exciting new framework for evaluating the political influence of literature in the antebellum nation...Conceptualizing citizenship through literary renderings of displacement marks this book's most significant contribution to the field. By shifting our understanding of citizenship from an experience of collective belonging to an imaginative experience of longing, Hyde's work provides a new way to think about the political influence of literature and the sentimental dynamics of national affiliation.-- (06/01/2019) In this provocative interdisciplinary study, Carrie Hyde explores the various ways that U.S. citizenship was imagined and reimagined prior to the Fourteenth Amendment. One of her great contributions is to show how writings by Hawthorne, Douglass, Stowe, and many others played a fundamental role in shaping pre-1868 notions of U.S. citizenship. Beautifully written and brilliantly argued, Civic Longing offers fresh insights into the nineteenth century while speaking to vexing issues in our own time.--Robert S. Levine, University of Maryland Civic Longing is a meticulously researched, elegantly written, and timely study of the early American conception of citizenship. Carrie Hyde shows persuasively how literature and literary analysis help to fashion the categories through which we imagine our affiliations. At a time when the humanities are under attack from a variety of sources, these carefully articulated and demonstrated claims are especially salient.--Priscilla Wald, Duke University

How did Americans imagine citizenship before the Fourteenth Amendment? By attending to philosophy, religion, law, literature, and education, Carrie Hyde's smart, sharp, and unique book provides a new history (perhaps even a prehistory) for a central but often undefined term in American political life.--Eric Slauter, University of Chicago In this provocative interdisciplinary study, Carrie Hyde explores the various ways that U.S. citizenship was imagined and reimagined prior to the Fourteenth Amendment. One of her great contributions is to show how writings by Hawthorne, Douglass, Stowe, and many others played a fundamental role in shaping pre-1868 notions of U.S. citizenship. Beautifully written and brilliantly argued, Civic Longing offers fresh insights into the nineteenth century while speaking to vexing issues in our own time.--Robert S. Levine, University of Maryland Civic Longing is a meticulously researched, elegantly written, and timely study of the early American conception of citizenship. Carrie Hyde shows persuasively how literature and literary analysis help to fashion the categories through which we imagine our affiliations. At a time when the humanities are under attack from a variety of sources, these carefully articulated and demonstrated claims are especially salient.--Priscilla Wald, Duke University

How did Americans imagine citizenship before the Fourteenth Amendment? By attending to philosophy, religion, law, literature, and education, Carrie Hyde's smart, sharp, and unique book provides a new history (perhaps even a prehistory) for a central but often undefined term in American political life.--Eric Slauter, University of Chicago In this provocative interdisciplinary study, Carrie Hyde explores the various ways that U.S. citizenship was imagined and reimagined prior to the Fourteenth Amendment. One of her great contributions is to show how writings by Hawthorne, Douglass, Stowe, and many others played a fundamental role in shaping pre-1868 notions of U.S. citizenship. Beautifully written and brilliantly argued, Civic Longing offers fresh insights into the nineteenth century while speaking to vexing issues in our own time.--Robert S. Levine, Distinguished University Professor, University of Maryland, author of The Lives of Frederick Douglass Civic Longing is a meticulously researched, elegantly written, and timely study of the early American conception of citizenship. Carrie Hyde shows persuasively how literature and literary analysis help to fashion the categories through which we imagine our affiliations. At a time when the humanities are under attack from a variety of sources, these carefully articulated and demonstrated claims are especially salient.--Priscilla Wald, Duke University

Author Information

Carrie Hyde is Assistant Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles.

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