In the decades after the American Revolution, inhabitants of the United States began to shape a new national identity. Telling the story of this messy yet formative process, Carolyn Eastman argues that ordinary men and women gave meaning to American nationhood and national belonging by first learning to imagine themselves as members of a shared public. She reveals that the creation of this American public—which only gradually developed nationalistic qualities—took place as men and women engaged with oratory and print media not only as readers and listeners but also as writers and speakers. Eastman paints vibrant portraits of the arenas where this engagement played out, from the schools that instructed children in elocution to the debating societies, newspapers, and presses through which different groups jostled to define themselves—sometimes against each other. Demonstrating the previously unrecognized extent to which nonelites participated in the formation of our ideas about politics, manners, and gender and race relations, A Nation of Speechifiers provides an unparalleled genealogy of early American identity.

Nations and Capital: The Missing Link in Global Expansion is a groundbreaking analysis of the ultimate reasons for the emergence of nations and nationalism, as a socio-political and geopolitical instrument in the global expansion of capitalism. The author provides the missing link in the relationship between nationalism and capitalism and offers a comprehensive critique of classical theories of nationalism, well illustrated by historical examples. He develops an original theory of nations and nationalism, relying on the assumption that the incessant widening of the gap between the capitalist elites and the labouring masses inevitably makes the endless accumulation of capital socially unsustainable. Bridging that gap without changing the structure of society becomes the paramount task for the system, which has to introduce nationalism as a social glue tailored to conceal, but also to cement, the actual polarisation of society. This book will be of great interest to advanced undergraduate students, postgraduate students, and researchers in political science, sociology, history, international relations, security studies, social and political theory, and nationalism studies.

This edited collection examines the role that language has played in forming modern European nations. With language an omnipresent issue within the European Union, the importance languages have played within the histories and present situations of member nations is a crucial topic. Drawing on an international cast of contributors, the book explores the issues of monolingualism vs. plurilingualism within individual nations, the revival of languages in nations such as former soviet republics, and concludes with a look at language in the electronic age.

Language, Nation and Power provides students with a discussion of the ways in which language has been (and is being) used to construct national (or ethnic) identity. It focuses on the processes by which a language can be planned and standardized and what the results of these processes are. Particular emphasis is given to the historical and social effects which nationalism has had on the development of language since the French Revolution. For students of linguistics, sociology and politics.

This book examines how the nation – and its (fundamental) law – are ‘sensed’ by way of various aesthetic forms from the age of revolution up until our age of contested democratic legitimacy. Contemporary democratic legitimacy is tied, among other things, to consent, to representation, to the identity of ruler and ruled, and, of course, to legality and the legal forms through which democracy is structured. This book expands the ways in which we can understand and appreciate democratic legitimacy. If (democratic) communities are “imagined” this book suggests that their “rightfulness” must be “sensed” – analogously to the need for justice not only to be done, but to be seen to be done. This book brings together legal, historical and philosophical perspectives on the representation and iconography of the nation in the European, North American and Australian contexts from contributors in law, political science, history, art history and philosophy.

The First Nations Version (FNV) recounts the Creator's Story—the Christian Scriptures—following the tradition of Native storytellers' oral cultures. While remaining faithful to the original language of the New Testament, the FNV is a dynamic equivalence translation that captures the simplicity, clarity, and beauty of Native storytellers in English.