Producing America's Enemies and the Contested Rhetorics of Nationhood in the United States, 1775--1815

Abstract

331 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2006.To build a nation, Americans had to renege on their history. Once the American Revolution was won, the types of mob violence and citizen participation that brought victory in the war were no longer desirable. Hence, this dissertation investigates how the radical democracy of the Revolutionary War was tamed in the founding years of the United States. I conclude that Americans were brought under the control of government through the rhetoric of "enemyship," which calls on citizens to defend their nation from the threats of enemies who are often discursively fabricated. This historical dissertation has implications for the present, for politics during the Cold War and also following 9/11 have been characterized by a similar rhetorical strategy.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD