An expert on presidential history and national identity explores the complicated and conflicted ways Americans remember Thomas Jefferson and what these impressions reveal about the nation he helped to found.Thomas Jefferson is everywhere. In Washington, DC, and on Mount Rushmore. In history textbooks and children’s picture books. On Broadway and HBO. Jefferson is even on our money—both the ubiquitous nickel and the rare $2 bill. The many different ways that America...

Since it was published in 1776, the Declaration of Independence has been used to advocate for social justice and to maintain inequitable social hierarchies; it has served as a model for justifying revolutions in other nations and for the Confederacy’s secession from the US federal government. But as we approach its 250th anniversary, this book asks: Does the Declaration still matter?In this volume, leading scholars explore how this remarkably pliable document has been used for prog...

National parks are widely revered as “America’s best idea”—they are abundantly popular and remarkably noncontroversial in the United States. American presidents use these parks to stake their claims to environmentalism, assert a singular national history, and define a unified national identity, often doing so inside the parks themselves. However, the establishment and history of almost every national park has been riddled with conflict over competing claims to land, knowledge, and economic...

Winner: Bruce E. Gronbeck Political Communication AwardWinner: APSA Presidents and Executive Politics Legacy AwardAndrew Jackson spoke to Americans in ways that reflected the concerns of a young nation. Grover Cleveland helped citizens redefine themselves after the havoc of the Civil War era. FDR confronted widespread hardship with hope and determination, while Eisenhower spoke to our fears of the Communist menace. Throughout our history, p...

Political campaigns in the United States, especially those for the presidency, can be nasty—very nasty. And while we would like to believe that the 2020 election was an aberration, insults, invective, and yes, even violence have characterized US electoral politics since the republic’s early days. By examining the political discourse around nine particularly deplorable elections, Mary E. Stuckey seeks to explain why.From the contest that pitted Thomas Jefferson against John Adams in...

Rhetoric is among the most important and least understood elements of presidential leadership. Presidents have always wielded rhetoric as one tool of governance—and that rhetoric was always intended to facilitate political ends, such as image building, persuasion of the mass public, and inter-branch government persuasion. But as mass media has grown and then fragmented, as the federal bureaucracy has continued to both expand and calcify, and as partisanship has heightened tensions both wit...

No modern president has had as much influence on American national politics as Franklin D. Roosevelt. During FDR’s administration, power shifted from states and localities to the federal government; within the federal government it shifted from Congress to the president; and internationally, it moved from Europe to the United States. All of these changes required significant effort on the part of the president, who triumphed over fierce opposition and succeeded in remaking the American pol...

Political Vocabularies: FDR, the Clergy Letters, and the Elements of Political Argument uses a set of letters sent to Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1935 by American clergymen to make a larger argument about the rhetorical processes of our national politics. At any given moment, national politics are constituted by competing political imaginaries, through which citizens understand and participate in politics. Different imaginaries locate political authority in different places, and so p...

The 1932 election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt seemed to hold the promise of Democratic domination for years to come. However, leading up to the 1936 election, persistent economic problems, a controversial domestic agenda, and the perception of a weak foreign policy were chipping away at public support. The president faced unrelenting criticism from both the Left and the Right, and it seemed unlikely that he would cruise to the same clear victory he enjoyed in 1932. But 1936 was yet anothe...

This edited collection explores ways to better understand the rhetorical workings of political executives, especially the United States president. Scholars of the presidency, rhetorical theorists and critics, and various authors examine the ways in which presidents use the institution, the media, and popular culture to instantiate, expand, and wield executive power.

Women, Feminism, and Pop Politics: From "Bitch" to "Badass" and Beyond examines the negotiation of feminist politics and gendered political leadership in twenty-first century U.S. popular culture. In a wide-ranging survey of texts—which includes memes and digital discourses, embodied feminist performances, parody and infotainment, and televisual comedy and drama—contributing authors assess the ways in which popular culture discourses both reveal and reshape citizens’ understanding...

"A must-own title." — National Review OnlineAmerican Conservatism: An Encyclopedia is the first comprehensive reference volume to cover what is surely the most influential political and intellectual movement of the past half century. More than fifteen years in the making—and more than half a million words in length—this informative and entertaining encyclopedia contains substantive entries on those persons, events, organizations, and concepts of ma...