Peter%20Thompson: List of publications

Even after a century of intense “nation talk” in Europe and the Americas, the French philosopher Ernest Renan felt moved to ask in 1882 “What is a Nation?” There yet remained he said questions that a “thoughtful person would wish to have settled in order to put his mind at rest.” In particular, Renan puzzled at the relationship between principles of nationality and principles of race. Treating race in terms synonymous with ethnicity Renan asked how it was that Switzerland, with three languages, two religions and three or four “races” was a nation. Why did Europeans continue to find “Poland” a meaningful term even though any such national territory had been partitioned out of existence? Why were nations not synonymous with races and states not synonymous with nations? In the United States questions concerning the relationship between race, nationality and the political state were as far from being settled by the Constitution as they were in the Europe that emerged from the Napoleonic Wars. As the descendants of enslaved, coerced or voluntary migrants drawn from two continents neither white nor black Americans could follow the organic path to nationhood described in the late eighteenth-century by Romantic nationalists like Johann Gottlieb Fichte: a model wherein peoples, acting on their own cultural characteristics, seamlessly created nations reflecting their particular qualities. (America’s native peoples were the only inhabitants of the continent who could lay claim to form of national development). For many white Americans the continued enslavement of African-Americans, buttressed as it was by attributions of racial inferiority and superiority, transcended their ethnic, religious and political divisions and held “their” country together. But the institution of slavery, and the racial thinking it reflected and promoted, also introduced destabilising definitions of nationality to the white republic.

<a href=""></a>

Thomas Jefferson read Latin and Greek authors throughout his life and wrote movingly about his love of the ancient texts, which he thought should be at the core of America's curriculum. Yet at the same time, Jefferson warned his countrymen not to look to the ancient world for modern lessons and deplored many of the ways his peers used classical authors to address contemporary questions. As a result, the contribution of the ancient world to the thought of America's most classically educated Founding Father remains difficult to assess. &lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;This volume brings together historians of political thought with classicists and historians of art and culture to find new approaches to the difficult questions raised by America's classical heritage. The essays explore the classical contribution to different aspects of Jefferson’s thought and taste, as well as examining the significance of the ancient world to America in a broader historical context. The diverse interests and methodologies of the contributors suggest new ways of approaching one of the most prominent and contested of the traditions that helped create America's revolutionary republicanism.

In 1679, on the eve of his departure for England, Henry Drax drew up a meticulously detailed document describing how he wished his overseer, Richard Harwood, to run the Drax plantations and manage the three hundred slave laborers. Drax was among the first planters on Barbados to integrate all aspects of sugar production on a single site and to employ “cane-hole” planting techniques; both practices came to characterize the industry across the Caribbean as a whole. This piece offers a critical edition of Drax’s document and an interpretive essay stressing the role played by environmental and agronomic factors in shaping labor relations within what Drax referred to as his “family” of workers. Drax’s “Instructions,” reproduced in full, offers a wealth of detail of interest to historians of Barbados and to historians of plantation slavery.

Cassell's Dictionary of Modern American History is a guide to the people, events, movements and ideas that have shaped modern America. Taking as its starting point the period immediately preceding the American Revolution, the dictionary guides the reader through the birth of the United States and its 19th-century territorial expansion, examines the traumatic impact of the Civil War and America's rapid ascent to great-power status, and goes on to consider the economic consequences of the Great Depression, America's decisive role in two world wars and the many domestic upheavals of the 20th century, from the Civil Rights Movement to the Lewinsky Scandal. The dictionary contains over 1000 articles focusing not only on major political, diplomatic and military topics but also on economic, social and cultural matters. Extensive thematic articles on core subjects such as the Civil War and Reconstruction blend clear and readable narrative with trenchant analysis, whilst a wealth of briefer entries define essential terms from baby boom to bussing, provide biographical data on public figures as diverse as Eleanor Roosevelt and Sitting Bull, deliver key facts about battles, treaties and acts of Congress from the Banking Act to the Bay of Pigs, and explain the significance of crucial Supreme Court verdicts from Marbury vs. Madison to Roe vs. Wade.