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The Divided States
Wisconsin Studies in Autobiography
William L. Andrews
Series Editor
THE DIVIDED
STATES
Unraveling National Identities in
the Twenty-First Century
Edited by
Laura J. Beard and Ricia Anne Chansky
The University of Wisconsin Press

The University of Wisconsin Press
728 State Street, Suite 443
Madison, Wisconsin 53706
uwpress.wisc.edu
Gray’s Inn House, 127 Clerkenwell Road

London EC1R 5DB, United Kingdom
eurospanbookstore.com
Copyright © 2023
The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
All rights reserved. Except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles and reviews,
no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any
format or by any means—digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—
or conveyed via the Internet or a website without written permission of the University of Wisconsin
Press. Rights inquiries should be directed to rights@uwpress.wisc.edu.
Printed in the United States of America
This book may be available in a digital edition.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Beard, Laura J., 1962– editor. | Chansky, Ricia Anne, editor.
Title: The divided states : unraveling national identities in the twenty-first century /
edited by Laura J. Beard and Ricia Anne Chansky.
Description: Madison, Wisconsin : The University of Wisconsin Press, [2023] |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021061654 | ISBN 9780299338800 (hardcover)
Subjects: LCSH: American prose literature—21st century—History and criticism. |
Autobiography. | National characteristics, American.
Classification: LCC PS366.A88 D58 2022 | DDC 818/.08—dc23/eng/20220809
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021061654
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Contested Lives, Contesting Lives 3

Ricia Anne Chansky and Laura J. Beard
Dakobijigaade mii miinawaa Aaba’igaade Gichimookomaanakiing:

Tied and Untied in America 27
Margaret Noodin
Negotiating National Identity and Well-Being in US Black Women’s

Diaries 38
Joycelyn K. Moody
“Strange Juxtapositions”: Elliott Erwitt’s Visual Diary of Cold

War America 56
Steven Hoelscher
The Legacy of Conquest in Comics: Texas History Movies, Jack Jackson,

and Revision 90
Daniel Worden
We Have Never Been a Nation of Immigrants: Refugee Temporality

as American Identity 116
Elizabeth Rodrigues
v
vi Contents
Archival Intervention: Surviving the “Savage Splintering” in

Deborah Miranda’s Bad Indians 140
Hertha D. Sweet Wong
Juneteenth 156
Angela Ards
Moving Beyond the Urban/Rural Divide in Alison Bechdel’s

Fun Home 167
Katie Hogan
White Privilege and J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Eleg y 194

Stephanie Li
Indians in Monumental Places: Heid Erdrich and Jeff Thomas 211

Laura J. Beard
Getting Schooled: Responses to Education as Neoliberal

Identity-Formation in US Life Narratives 236
Megan Brown
Disabling Birth: Prognostic Certainty and the Gestating Citizen of the

Contemporary Midwifery Movement 253
Ally Day
“A small flashlight in a great dark space”: Elizabeth Warren,

Autobiography, and Populism 276
Rachael McLennan
Autobiographical Reckonings in America’s Restless

Twenty-First Century 296
Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson
Contributors 325
Index 331
Acknowledgments
The labor of constructing this book spanned two hurricanes, an earthquake

swarm, a global pandemic, and more. We are very grateful to the outstanding
scholars who have contributed to this volume and are especially thankful for
their patience, unwavering enthusiasm, and all-around good cheer. Thank you
to our anonymous peer reviewers for their generous reading of the manuscript;
their incredibly positive and insightful feedback helped shape the final draft of
this book. Bill Andrews and the University of Wisconsin Press extended gener-
ous support for this volume throughout the process, which we greatly
appreciate.
Laura would like to thank the Department of Modern Languages and Cul-
tural Studies at the University of Alberta for providing research assistant sup-
port that provided editorial assistance at critical stages of this volume, with
special appreciation to Malou Brouwer and Jordan Ashworth for their excellent
work at different stages of preparation. Laura thanks Ricia for her amazing
energy, commitment, and knowledge of the field of life narratives that have
guided this project throughout. She also gives particular thanks to Thomas T.
Barker and Murray John Beard for their support of lives lived across borders,
sometimes untied by distance and chaos, but always united by love.
One night in Cyprus, Laura knocked on Ricia’s hotel room door and they
had a good laugh over a hilarious typo (“Untied States”) and then sat down to
map out a book about the intersections of auto/biographical narratives and
American studies. And then there came a hurricane, and then an earthquake
swarm, and then a global pandemic. What began as two friends working
vii
viii Acknowledgments
together on a volume about contested identities in the twenty-first-century

United States became a lifeline from stratified disasters to joy, laughter, and ca-
maraderie. Ricia is very grateful to Laura for being a constant source of uplift
throughout that period. As always, Ricia feels lucky to have a partner who is
also first reader, most honest critic, and most enthusiastic supporter; thank you,
Eric D. Lamore. Thank you also to her parents, Patricia and Howard. Ricia
would like to acknowledge the generosity of the Centre for Research on Latin
America and the Caribbean at York University where she is a research associ-
ate. This appointment has generously supported her research for years.
As this book goes to press after the passing of Hurricanes Fiona and Ian, we
note that our world continues to be divided into those safe states, communities,
and countries that have reliable access to water, electricity, and other critical
resources and those that do not.
The Divided States
Contested Lives,
Contesting Lives
Ricia Anne Chansky and Laura J. Beard
The notion that there is some cultural totality of American experience,

whose origins could be traced and plotted, may prove in the end to be one
of the most enduring of Americanists’ illusions.
Paul John Eakin, American Autobiography: Retrospect and Prospect
T his book was borne of error. While editing together a

manuscript, we caught a finger slip that had the United States
mislabeled as the Untied States. The incorrect nomenclature stayed with us,
rattling around in our heads until we began to see it as an apt means of de
scribing what we were observing in these early years of the twenty-first century:
a disjuncture that emphasized interpersonal differences—historic and
contemporary—as a means of undermining concepts of national belonging
and creating multiple others positioned outside of the fabricated notion of a
homogeneous US citizenry. We wanted to know just who counted as the “We
the People” of our contemporary moment. Whose identities, lives, and life nar
ratives are included in both the widely propagandized lore of the great Ameri
can melting pot—and its incarnations as a mosaic or tapestry—and in the
counternarratives to the national imaginary that circulate in numerous multi
modal auto/biographical narratives and auto/biographical acts? Furthermore,
we wished to interrogate where the dominant mythologies of a single story of
US national identity intersect with the lived experiences of individuals and
communities as chronicled in their life stories. Where do they diverge from the
3
4 Chansky and Beard / Contested Lives, Contesting Lives
prescriptive national narrative, and how do those deviations complicate pro

ductively our understandings of the landscapes of national belonging in the
twenty-first century?1 In short, what divided the United States?
The ideas for this project germinated under the last years of President
Barack Obama’s administration as a means of parsing the growing backlash
against legal and social gains made by multiple marginalized communities. We
wanted to explore why immigration—both the idea of refugee resettlements and
pathways toward citizenship for the children of people without such paperwork—
struck such chords of unrest in a nation whose mythos emphasizes the immi
grant narrative as one of the main threads purportedly woven into its ideologies
of belonging. The two of us envisioned a space in which to grapple with the
building surge of gendered rhetorics aimed at rolling back marriage equality,
women’s rights over their own bodies, and protections for trans peoples that
was developing alongside the reemergence of openly racialized divisions and
persecutions that we had dared to hope were losing traction in the early years
of the Obama administration. This volume also came into being at a time
when Indigenous activists (and others) engaged in widely visible protests against
an oil pipeline that cut across reservation lands, protests which underscored ad
ditional divisions that can be traced back to how the country called the United
States came into being as well as the broken treaties that remain as untied
bonds and unkept promises on our lands. More and more people were unjustly
persecuted by representatives of systems put in place to protect citizens, and we
conceived of this project as part of the efforts to investigate and undermine such
antagonisms.
As we witnessed innumerable attacks on the significant gains made under
second-wave feminism and the civil rights movement, and other aggressions
contributing to the growing unrest surrounding us, we wondered what a study
of the texts of the current auto/biographical boom could tell us about this
backlash of exceptionalism impacting interpretations of the US national story.2
Within this complex moment, however, we were also curious as to how new
theoretical paradigms and methodological approaches to reading life narra
tives could help us understand the strands of exceptionalism and its counter
narratives interwoven into the history of the United States that have immense
bearing on the many challenging issues that we face today. This work is predi
cated on an understanding that the US national story has always erased the
stories of the nations that predate the establishment of the country currently
called the United States, the sovereign Indigenous nations whose histories, lan
guages, and cultures remain a vibrant part of the stories told of and on these
lands.
Chansky and Beard / Contested Lives, Contesting Lives 5
This nation is not and has never been one nation but has always been a
land of many nations, the Lakota Nation, the Navajo Nation, the Kiowa Na
tion, and many, many more Indigenous sovereign nations. The story of settler
colonialism has meant that first such colonizing powers as Spain, Portugal,
France, and England, and then the United States and Canada claimed authority
over the maps, the land, the peoples and “the commercial, economic, scientific,
intellectual, political and legal relations that travel with human interactions”
(75) on this land, as Lee Maracle notes in Memory Serves. But Maracle also re
minds us that, for her Salish people, stories serve as reminders that “we are re
sponsible for remembering from within our original context. Remembering is a
process of being fed by the past, not just my past but my ancestral past, the
earth’s past, and the past of other human beings. We are responsible for pulling
the best threads of our past forward to re-weave our lives together” (14). Mara
cle’s powerful invocation of how stories serve the Salish people and her Stó:loˉ
nation encourages us to ask if others might learn from such a generous and
generative notion of stories and whether the discussions of life stories in this
collection might start urging us down such a pathway.
Grappling with existing theoretical frameworks of the new American stud
ies is a useful way to begin deconstructing what we are reading and seeing in
nuanced and multifaceted identity performances. Auto/biographical narra
tives are and have been an essential component of American studies and the
various area studies that grew from a post–World War II dedication to analyz
ing the United States and what it means to identify on individual and commu
nity levels as a member of this nation.3 In 1977, Robert F. Sayre made the
foundational argument that auto/biographical narratives are indispensable to
American studies, as they “offer a broader and more direct contact with Ameri
can experience than any other kind of writing” (“Proper Study” 241).4 Jay Pa
rini has now famously referred to auto/biography as “a form of writing closely
allied to our national self-consciousness” (11). Therefore, we take as a ground
ing component of this collection an understanding that auto/biographical nar
ratives and acts are an appropriate means of reading the state of the nation,
with the understanding that “nation” for our purposes is indicative of the mul
tiplicities of this geographic space that we now refer to as the United States.
This recognition of the interrelationship between narration and nation
hood, however, may be even more illuminating within the contours of the
United States. “After all, the United States is the result of a radical speech act: a
nation created by a declaration” (955), explains Anna Mae Duane. And this
originary act of writing the nation into being through the Declaration of Inde
pendence has left an irrefutable impression on the US imaginary.5 If a speech
act can create a nation, what power is held by those who speak of the nation?
The ongoing history of a nation space written (or otherwise narrated) into exis
tence is both recorded in and emergent from the life stories of its peoples as
auto/biographies become mechanisms essential to the incessant re/structuring
of the national imaginary: sites in which to build, reinforce, wrestle with, and
undermine concepts of belonging.6 Sayre refers to the “peculiarly linked” tra
jectories of the United States and formalized ideas of self-narration in the West
(“Autobiography” 147)—a connection that we in turn tie to the long and continu
ous tradition of narrating the nation into being. In other words, the stories we tell
contribute to making, sustaining, and remaking the nation, for good or ill.7
The speech act that rendered the nation, however, must also be read as an
other aspect of the US creation story that erases the violence inherent within
this inception. That originary declaration establishes a new nation that is forci
bly superimposed over other preexisting sovereign nations at the expense of
those nations and peoples. The Declaration of Independence is, therefore, an
act of hostility that creates by destroying, erasing, and silencing. The work of
this volume, then, is to parse radical acts of listening and witnessing as multiple
narrative threads begin to be untangled and rewoven into a national story.
What most interests us in this framework is the ways in which auto/biogra
phers have the power to contribute to narrating the nation into being. What
abilities do they hold to speak themselves into the weave of this nation? Life
narratives can function as signifiers of belonging, or what Sidonie Smith de
scribes as “occasion[s] for assembling and claiming identities” (565) on national
levels. It becomes imperative, then, to understand who has the ability or oppor
tunity to tell their stories and who does not, just as it is important to interrogate
the circulation and promotion (or lack thereof) of certain life stories. Just what
are we narrating into being in the United States and to what purpose?
The new American studies is a helpful framework to consider as we begin
to answer these questions. Scholars engaged in this discourse community strive to
recognize intranational, transnational, and comparative components of national
identity constructions that supersede the traditional boundaries of nationhood—
geographic and imagined—for their potential to revise and destabilize the insu
larities of exceptionalism.8 As John Carlos Rowe explains, the new Americanists’
objective must be to “construct . . . the terms of intracultural and intercultural
affiliation by means of which we can transcend successfully the monolingual
and monocultural myth of ‘America’ that is both a political and an intellectual
anachronism” (New 4). In 2004, Shelley Fisher Fishkin expanded this line of in
quiry with her query, “What would the field of American studies look like if the
transnational rather than the national were at its center?” (“Crossroads” 23).9
And, while we intend to bring into dialogue together the study of narrated lives
in and related to the United States with elements of this new American studies,
we recognize that aspects of this discourse are simultaneously vital to and un
stable within the spaces of our uncertain geopolitical times.10
Complications with applying the theoretical contexts of the new American
studies to a contemporary study of US auto/biographical narratives arise in
the current institutional backlashes against the postnational turn that urge a
return to identities that embrace notions of exceptionalism. In the early stages
of our planning for The Divided States, we learned the results of the 2016 US
presidential election in which a candidate won based on his rhetorical promo
tions of exclusionary practices that seek to ostracize multiple marginalized oth
ers. And, while the 2020 election ousted that populist politician and his
administration, divisive Trumpian rhetoric malingers, perhaps the undermin
ing of bodily autonomy and the right to privacy propagated by the US Supreme
Court being one of the most tangible examples of this perpetuation. This col
lection, then, has had to evolve as the national rhetoric encouraged by this pop
ulism has likewise been transformed. The issues that were of concern to us as
the repercussions from perceived revisions to the national narrative—moving
toward a more multidimensional, inclusive story—have exploded into frequent
instances of outright persecution. These occasions have often erupted in vio
lent exchanges, such as the murder of George Floyd, culminating in the armed
insurrection at the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021. Our interests nec
essarily widened from academic inquiry into the constitution of a dis/unifying
national narrative to include a deeper understanding that the lives in life narra
tives have active roles to play in molding this tempestuous era and how the na
tion will emerge from this contemporary crisis, one made all the more volatile
by a global pandemic left unchecked in the United States by the Trump admin
istration.11 The essays included in this volume, then, are situated as an explora
tion of self-narration in the United States that traces the interplay of the
national narrative and the frequent departures from it in a time of backlash
against pluralism and a concurrent rise of popularism, while pointing to some
of the possible futures of auto/biography studies as they pertain to studying
and even influencing identity constructions in the United States.
Donald E. Pease and Robyn Wiegman, among others, have pointed to the
fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of global democracies in the wake of the
Cold War as the spark that ignited the postnational turn in American studies.12
This premise suggests that the reemergence of global Russian influence—
including interference in the 2016 and 2020 US elections as well as the 2022 in
vasion of Ukraine—would signal the beginning of a new chapter in American
studies and the ways in which we engage with auto/biographies in and about
the United States. It remains to be seen, though, at the time of writing this in
troduction how these events will reshape American studies.13 What seems cer
tain, however, is that these incidents will have a deep and sustained impact on
how US national identities are performed and how we approach the life stories
that explore such individual and communal identity constructions. It is clear
that a paradigm shift is in order.14 While by no means exhaustive, this collection
of essays functions as an entry point into discussions regarding US national
identity formations in the twenty-first century as they are shaped by the hap
penings of our contemporary moment and the manifestations of historical
complexities in the dualities of acceptance and rejection faced by the multitu
dinous peoples who compose the United States. Reading and rereading nar
rated lives serves as our measure of difficult—and frequently conflicting—ideas
of belonging in a nation marked by instability and mutability.
National narratives are eternally fluctuating. There are events so momen
tous that their influence alters ideations of appropriate performances of be
longing: the perceived depth of the incident influencing the level at which it
pervades and reforms interpretations of national identity, at times shifting irrev
ocably concepts of belonging. In American Autobiography after 9/11, for example,
Megan Brown comments on the “intense anxiety about identity” after the ter
rorist attacks on September 11, 2001, as “Americans wondered who they were
individually and collectively” (4).15 She ascribes the ubiquity of reality televi
sion series, social media, and the publication and consumption of memoirs
post-9/11 to the pressures to redetermine what it means to be American in an
era of national insecurity. She suggests that these auto/biographical texts—
with special attention to memoir—can be read as the record of the nation as
“the genre addresses many and multiple aspects of identity . . . symptomizing
contemporary US tensions about these same aspects of identity” (5). In other
words, the trend in the US popular media is to focus on identities of belonging
triggered by the collective trauma of undermined perceptions of exceptional
ism enacted by the attacks against the nation on 9/11.16
Likewise, the election of an African American president in 2009 impacted
dramatically interpretations of belonging in the United States; this event seemed
to signal, at least for some observers, the dawning of an age of possibility in
which inherited biases were slowly dissolving. In commentary on the shifting
landscapes of opportunity, Robert Stepto wonders how our approaches to and
reading contexts for African American literatures shifted “knowing . . . that an
African American writer is our president” (3).17 We suggest that Stepto’s query
has far broader implications. A rephrasing of his question might interrogate

what Obama’s presidency means to re/reading a highly racialized, exclusion
ary national narrative containing ideas of who is important within the compo
sition of the United States, and how the election of a Black man to the highest
office of the nation impacts these notions of who counts and who does not.
The positive and negative reactions to President Obama’s tenure have con
clusively affected the United States and forced—often contradictory—rewrites
to the national narrative. And, while it is an exciting period in which to be edit
ing a book situated at the intersections of auto/biography studies and Ameri
can studies, there are certain challenges that emerge from this labor as the field
of American studies and the nation it reflects are in states of ongoing fluctua
tion. There have been other systematized attempts to understand contempo
rary cultural production in the United States through the discourses of
American studies in the “Age of Trump.”18 The Journal of Transnational American
Studies, for example, published a special issue in 2017 on “Transnational Ameri
can Studies in the ‘Age of Trump,’” in which the guest editors point out that “a
central theme of Trump administration discourse is its strident defense of
physical borders and its general attack on undocumented workers, immigrants,
and refugees” (Kim and Robinson 2). This positionality stands in direct con
frontation to the transnational turn and one that we see as reactionary to steps
made toward inclusion and equity across borders.
Fishkin reminds us that US literatures have always been and always will be
in transit, ones perpetually moving back and forth across borders, no matter
who sits in the White House (“Transnational” 483). As she states, the migratory
nature of text is indisputable—more than ever in our digitally driven Web 2.0
world. However, of greater concern to this project is what diminished interpre
tations of transnational and intranational selves might mean to the creation
and consumption of auto/biographical texts. This apprehension grows in
magnitude under our assertion that the textual transactions of life stories are
one of the means through which the nation is narrated into being. What futures
are possible under restrictions geared toward reifying assertions of a singular
national narrative that privileges dominant Eurocentric models at the expense
of the realities of an extremely diverse US population? How is the national
narrative impacted by recognitions of conflicting and contested perspectives?
If we begin to recognize the stratified impact that repercussions against in
clusionary practices have on US identity constructions in this ongoing “Age of
Trump”—both domestically and internationally—how do our strategies for
reading auto/biographies need to change? How, for example, do we relate to
the inherent promises of truth values in Philippe Lejeune’s influential theory of

the autobiographical pact—and the many responses to the concept that both
extend and contest his ideas—in a “postfactual” era, one in which, while
Trump might be out of office, his ideals live on in numerous groups formed in
support of nationalism, exceptionalism, and even domestic terrorism? Duane
suggests that “Trumpism’s sustained attack on authority—in academia, in
journalism, in government itself—has forced us all to reassess, if not realign,
our own relationship to truth, and our own methodologies for excavating it”
(954). Writers and scholars of life narratives may find reading auto/biographi
cal narratives and acts particularly challenging during this “Age of Trump” in
part because Trump himself, as Tim O’Brien points out, is “constantly narrat
ing his own reality television series, and it now just happens to be the presi
dency” (quoted in Parker and Costa). This former president, however, not only
narrates his accounts of world events through his own heavily colored filters
but revises and renarrates events to suit his whims. What futures are he and his
followers talking into being as they narrate and renarrate the nation?19
Rowe encourages researchers to “consider our academic work as part of . . .
a resistance” (“Trump” 17) against populism. “As rational, historically informed
scholars,” he states, “we have an obligation to continue to teach and write the
truth” (“Trump” 17). This assertion seems particularly apropos to the study of
multiple and diverse life stories. In this fragile moment, reexamining whose sto
ries, particularly whose life stories, we see, hear, read, and tell seems critically
important, especially in light of the numerous catastrophes we have encoun
tered in the twenty-first century. Cherokee scholar and author Daniel Heath
Justice speaks of the importance of finding “the strength and the trust to tell
different kinds of stories[.] Stories that are truthful about who we are, stories that
connect us to the world, one another, and even ourselves” (4). For in the end,
“stories govern us” (Maracle 35). We want to reflect on whose stories are gov
erning us now and could more attention to a broader weave of life narratives,
to the brilliant threads across these life stories, allow us to weave anew the com
munities and the nations within the Divided States?
It is vital to remember, however, that this too shall pass; that even the vitriol
of the Trump presidency will ultimately transition into history. Perhaps more
imperative and persistent than questions of how this presidential administra
tion has impacted the production, consumption, and study of life narratives in
and about the United States is a move toward understanding the repeating cy
cles of history that allow for such a person to win an election. “It is tempting to
read Trump as an anomaly,” Duane cautions. “But those of us charged with
engaging and translating the past that Trumpists evoke with such unabated
nostalgia find much that forces the painful realization that Trump’s rise, in a
nation founded on bold declarations that obscure a host of truths, ‘makes
sense’” (955). Any maneuvers that we might undertake to fix a static national
identity are therefore unsustainable because what we define as the United
States is itself unstable and vulnerable to cyclical changes. This mutability is
perhaps the lasting area of investigation emergent from our collection. Rem
nants of this populist insurgence will remain imbedded in the US collective
psyche; just as other events of great magnitude have made their indelible mark.
These remains will meet and mix with the periodic reappearances of exclu
sionism and exceptionalism that historically arise during times of national inse
curity, and they will likewise shadow the times that we move forward into spaces
of inclusion and equity. Any study of US identity constructions, therefore,
needs to be one that encompasses the duality of belonging and not belonging
that is indicative of the trajectory of this place called united.
We hope that future studies of the auto/biographical will benefit from our
initial ventures into contending with these ideas of just who are counted as “We
the People” in our contemporary moment as one that is inescapably shaped by
competing histories of the United States. Regardless of the political era, how
ever, we commit to this project about the diversity of life narratives in the coun
try we are calling divided because we believe that life narratives matter within
the fluctuations of national identity. Stories about lives matter. Justice writes el
oquently that “diverse stories can strengthen, wound, or utterly erase our hu
manity and connections, and how our stories are expressed or repressed, shared
or isolated, recognized or dismissed” (xvii) always matters.
Some of the contributors to this book engage directly with the complexities
of reading auto/biographical narratives and acts in this unrelenting “Age of
Trump,” while others comment on historic and contemporary cyclical recur
rences of rejections from sites of national belonging that have in some way led
to this era of exclusionary practices. Stephanie Li, for instance, situates her
analysis of J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy squarely within Trump’s exclusionary
rhetoric implied by his “Make America Great” campaign slogan, while Steven
Hoelscher’s chapter on photographer Elliott Erwitt examines visual traces of
inclusion and exclusion born in the Cold War that signify recurring movements
within US history.
Our volume follows the model laid out in Eakin’s American Autobiography: Ret-
rospect and Prospect in that it traces some of the historical underpinnings of the
trends in life narratives on which we are commenting in order to both under
stand this contemporary moment of conflicting national identity constructions
and speculate on the futures of life stories and the lives they chronicle in the
contested space known as the United States. In light of this approach, we have
organized the essays to emphasize their interconnectedness in contemporary
ways of reading narrated lives and new textual production in and about the
United States as well as to encourage dialogue among the contributions.
Readers will note that woven throughout the collection is sustained atten
tion to cultural or human geography with a focus on the physical places and
imagined spaces that narrators occupy and how that drives their interpreta
tions of their selves as related to the United States. In their indispensable over
view of the field, Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives,
Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson build connections among place, space, and life
narrative—including material surrounds, social spaces, geopolitical spaces, in
teriority, and memory and spatialization (42–49)—as well as point to the inter
sections of critical geographies and life narrative as an underexplored praxis
that promises to yield fruitful study of the craft of self-representation (222). Pa
mela Moss wonders if “autobiography inevitably brings with it notions of
space and place. Perhaps space is already always present in autobiography”
(194). These observations lead Moss to suggest that “a spatial understanding is
fundamental to any social relation” (194). This point is apropos to our argu
ments in that the physical and imagined relationships to the land of the United
States—as well as the ideas and impressions of this geographic mass—figure
heavily into the life stories studied in this volume. These collected essays on the
means by which we create a contemporary awareness of belonging and not
belonging to the nation are imbedded in understandings of situatedness that
are tied to the landscapes of an imagined United States. Katie Hogan’s chapter
on Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, for example, contextualizes her analysis of this
graphic memoir in rural queer studies to document how complex attachments
to land, region, folkways, and nature become vital factors in LGBTQIA2S+
identity constructions; while Angela Ards situates her self-reflexive study of
oral histories of Black migrations in the contexts of urban histories to deter
mine the culturally specific ways residents occupied and produced space, a
sense of home.
Also built into the theoretical foundations of our collection is an under
standing that the field of auto/biography studies is multimodal and interdisci
plinary. The international field of auto/biography studies has a long history of
recognizing the multimodality of life narratives, especially the need to compre
hend the numerous and varied means by which subjects narrate their lives.20
Smith and Watson, among others, have long advocated for inclusionary theo
retical frameworks that favor multigenre approaches, such as automediality;
they maintain that “in approaching life storytelling in diverse visual and digital
media, we need to expand our conceptualization of the media in life writing”

(168). “Through heterogeneous media,” they explain, “the archive of the self
in time, in space, and in relation expands and is fundamentally reorganized”
(190). In light of these acknowledgments and the countless other projects recog
nizing the multimodality of life narratives, we have constructed this text with
the assumption that it is now agreed on within the field that the auto/biograph
ical is genre-breaking in that it spans any means by which a subject can self-
narrate, directly or referentially. Hertha D. Sweet Wong further asserts that
“interart autobiography forms and creates a matrix of American identity in all
its plurality, creativity, and messiness” (10). We would like to extend this com
ment to suggest that the diversity of personhood in the United States is perhaps
best represented through the dynamic interrelations of the many modes of self-
expression employed in narrating lives. In our collection, we have placed into
conversation analyses of memoirs and other more traditional forms of auto/
biographical narration with essays that engage with visual culture, digital texts,
graphic narratives, epistolary exchanges, diaries, oral histories, and self-reflexive
manuals, among others.
What is perhaps somewhat newer to the field is a recognition that as auto/
biography surpasses the borders of literary studies to include multiple other
genres, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary ways of practicing biographical
research likewise become crucial to the study of narrated lives, including the
exchange, inclusion, and incorporation of various methodological approaches
emergent from a host of discourse communities situated within and outside the
humanities.21 Wong notes that, while the lines between areas of study have
been historically rigid, “disciplinary borders and medium-specific art practices
have become increasingly permeable,” which is reflected in the contemporary
study of “hybrid forms of autobiography that blur disciplinary boundaries”
(1–2). Alfred Hornung observes, “The increasing interest in the social sciences
and the media in life writing has led to a number of innovative interdisciplinary
approaches” (American x). He notes, as well, that “the United States of America
seems to be at the forefront of such new interdisciplinary approaches to the
subject of life” (xi). Again, we suggest that it is the plurality of US identity con
structions and the rejection of notions of a fixed or static identity that lend
themselves particularly well to transgressing the boundaries of disciplinary
methodologies.
A 2017 special issue of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, “What’s Next? The Fu
tures of Auto/Biography Studies,” coedited by Emily Hipchen and Ricia Anne
Chansky, for example, includes contributions from anthropologists, linguists,
psychologists, historians, an art historian, a sociologist, a geneticist, and an
archaeologist as well as scholars located in departments of literature, educa

tion, cultural studies, media studies, performance studies, and gender studies.
Hipchen and Chansky emphasize in the introduction to this special issue that
their objective is to encourage academic discourse to move toward a state of
“radical inclusion” that engages multidisciplinary methodological approaches
and multimodal understandings of the textualities and genres of narrated lives
in tandem with scholarly interactions that emphasize inclusivity across geo
graphic, cultural, linguistic, generational, and disciplinary boundaries (140–41).
In our volume, we have committed to continue the work of constructing inter
disciplinary engagements initiated in this special issue and several other collec
tions with the added layer that we see this transmethodological approach as
particularly pertinent to a study of the United States.
This volume opens with Margaret Noodin’s work on naming and the ways
in which learning a language—such as Anishinaabemowin—offers new ways
of thinking about national identity. Her chapter, “Dakobijigaade mii miinawaa
Aaba’igaade Gichimookomaanakiing: Tied and Untied in America,” traces
the power of naming as a tool to make and unmake “federal laws and social
norms that impact traditional relationships with water, land, and all life.” Ideas
related to Duane’s assertion that the United States was talked and written into
being emerge as Noodin traces some of the ways in which various Native lan
guages name the United States: Gichimookomaanakiing (Land of the Long
Knives), xwelitem (starving people), so:ya:po: (those of the “upside down face,”
a reference to white men who had bald heads but wore beards). She asserts that
“America is a name, a place, a constructed identity. Ideas about being Ameri
can depend on diverse personal experiences and existential notions of geopo
litical identity.” For Noodin, naming and renaming are practices that remake
identities, and she asserts that “to imagine a future in America, we must exam
ine accidental and intentional connections through recollection and reconcilia
tion. We need to untie, or retie, ideas of identity, equity, and responsibility
relative to place and time.”
In the following chapter, “Negotiating National Identity and Well-Being in
US Black Women’s Diaries,” Joycelyn K. Moody furthers the idea of develop
ing languages of self-identification that resituate the self through the explora
tion of the “social, psychic, and even physical sicknesses” plaguing African
American women. Moody explains that “even when Black women write pre
sumably for an audience of one—that is, themselves alone—they nonetheless
demonstrate a commitment to ending national myths and replacing devastat
ing stories with narratives to foster greater equity and peace across multiple
communities.” Moody’s analysis encourages us to see the private space of the
diary as a record of internal struggles to resituate identity within the scope of

“US national unremitting racialized violence, its white supremacy and hetero
normative patriarchal threat to embodied Blackness and Black intersectional
experience.”
In his chapter, “‘Strange Juxtapositions’: Elliott Erwitt’s Visual Diary of
Cold War America,” Steven Hoelscher interweaves several examples of photo
graphs from Erwitt’s postwar oeuvre—images of Jim Crow, the Rosenberg ex
ecutions, ecological destruction, among others—to argue that the discerning
eye of the photographer captures a starker reality behind the glossy façade of
US harmony and prosperity during the Cold War era. “Overt politics are oc
casionally highlighted,” explains Hoelscher, “but more often, a recognition of
social fractures, economic inequality, and uneven geographic development
hide just beneath the surface, informing the photographic depiction of sur
faces.” Hoelscher argues that the experiential situatedness of Erwitt as a refu
gee and the only child of displaced Jewish Russians who immigrated to the
United States in 1939 honed his focus on “dislocation and outsider identities.”
As Hoelscher maintains, Erwitt’s visual diary, constructed from his unique per
spective, “documents a splintering world, where dreams of an idyllic, postwar
America are shown to be wishful thinking.”
Underground comix artist Jack Jackson is the focus of Daniel Worden’s
chapter, “The Legacy of Conquest in Comics: Texas History Movies, Jack Jack
son, and Revision.” Worden situates Texas History Movies—a comic strip pub
lished in the Dallas Morning News in the 1920s and then republished as a book for
the public schools of Texas from 1928 to 1961—as a comic dedicated to “cham
pioning the commercial development accomplished in Texas by Anglo set
tlers.” Assigned to read Texas History Movies as a child, Jackson “writes back” to
this decidedly one-sided text in his own biographical comix that “detail the
lives of Anglos, Mexicans, Native Americans, and Chicanos in Texas as in
volved in an uneven, violent process of colonization.” Retelling histories in and
across this genre, argues Worden, encourages readers to think “of history as a
progressive story . . . in which individuals figure only fleetingly,” which allows
Jackson (and others) to contest and complicate the hegemonic conceptions of
settler colonialism and imperial violence.
Sparked by Barack Obama’s 2014 missive that “we are and always will be a
nation of immigrants,” Elizabeth Rodrigues interrogates the historic trajectory
of immigration and assimilation contrasted against contemporary waves of
refugees seeking asylum in her chapter, “We Have Never Been a Nation of Im
migrants: Refugee Temporality as American Identity.” Critiquing the over
coming narrative in which “the United States is always . . . the physical and
metaphysical end to the refugee’s flight rather than the scene of its continua
tion,” Rodrigues suggests that the “geographic and temporal cropping of the
immigrant narrative frame acts to obscure the role that the United States has
played in both the violent beginnings of many migrant subjects’ movements
toward the United States and their ongoing captivity.” Rodrigues concludes
that “it is not the crossing of a national border or a period of itinerancy that
defines the subject of refugee temporality. It is the disinvestment from a narra
tive that portrays movement across and within the US border as a telos of
agential self-betterment.”
“Place, especially in Indigenous contexts, is wed to time,” explains Hertha D.
Sweet Wong in her chapter, “Archival Intervention: Surviving the ‘Savage Splin
tering’ in Deborah Miranda’s Bad Indians.” Wong clarifies that “to know a place,
to belong to a place, to be defined by a place, one has to know its history, the
stories that arise from it, the lived experience in it.” Using the larger story of Na
tive American peoples in California to parse through her own family history,
Miranda’s visual-verbal memoir “critique[s] photographic and ethnographic
documentation of Indigenous people . . . [in order] to claim a contemporary In
digenous subjectivity, while acknowledging the impossible history it survived.”
Perhaps the larger issue at stake in Wong’s chapter, is, as she articulates, the fact
that in Bad Indians, Miranda lays bare Indigenous counternarratives that, though
they have always existed, were (temporarily) suppressed by settler-colonial sto
ries of entitlement and exceptionalism. Miranda, then, helps dismantle the mas
ter narratives of the nation, highlighting how the United States has always
been divided—a collection of competing, violently suppressed stories—of In
digeneity, enslavement, and violence against women.
Angela Ards’s autoethnographic chapter on the Black neighborhood of
Hamilton Park, Texas, “Juneteenth,” interweaves cultural geography and oral
history “to consider how residents defined themselves and their community
through ritual and tradition.” Resisting a “scholarly focus on moving popula
tions” that “has obscured the everyday lived experiences of Black Americans
who never left the US South,” Ards instead choses to focus on a story of “lived
Black history transforming the South.” Her homecoming and participation in
the annual Juneteenth parade—particularly meaningful in Texas—is a cause to
reflect on the cross-generational signifiers of national identities constructed in
this “close-knit community of 750 families in the heart of Dallas . . . the first
planned enclave for Black Americans in the city.” Her work demonstrates the
urgency of a roof of one’s own—a committed space of belonging—especially
within the contested spaces and places of American idealism tied to the
neighborhood.
Drawing from a framework of rural queer studies, Katie Hogan incorpo

rates cultural geography into her complication of the implied binaries of space
and place in her chapter, “Moving Beyond the Urban/Rural Divide in Alison
Bechdel’s Fun Home.” Arguing that “numerous texts and images in the memoir
reveal how the life-changing impact of rural and metropolitan queer cultures
on Alison and her father . . . suggest spatial interconnections—instead of fixed
borders,” Hogan asserts that “Fun Home’s hybrid spatial imaginary and contem
porary rural-based activism” in the Trump era suggest “how the rural-and-
urban divide that continues to animate the current political environment is rooted
in the same dangerous dualities that Bechdel . . . and other scholars try to dis
mantle.” Beyond political rhetorics that might build sweeping generalizations
regarding the impact of space and place on identity constructions, however,
Hogan’s work reminds us of the dangers of collapsing individuals into region
alized oversimplifications.
In her contribution, “White Privilege and J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy,”
Stephanie Li argues that Vance “seeks to chronicle a population in decline,
victim not only of deindustrialization and shifts in globalized economies but
also of a pervasive and most often self-induced isolation. This isolation is em
blematic of certain racial assumptions and desires that maintain the tacit enti
tlements of whiteness.” While Li acknowledges the cycles of poverty, substance
abuse, abandonment, and displacement that Vance situates as roadblocks in his
overcoming narrative—positioned within the context of Trumpian rhetoric
that suggests making America great “again” is a means of resituating the
crafted exceptionalism of white men—she concludes that “despite his best ef
forts to avoid or dismiss the role of race in his life, Vance remains a white man
in a white man’s world” suggesting that “to confront and reverse the crisis he
observes, Vance and others need to first acknowledge how the value and nature
of whiteness has changed in the United States.”
Understanding the ways in which contemporary self-narration can make,
unmake, and remake established ideas of national belonging is paramount to
Laura J. Beard’s contribution, “Indians in Monumental Places: Heid Erdrich and
Jeff Thomas.” Calling on recent movements to reimagine national monuments—
and the resistance to doing so under the Trump administration—Beard posits
that these locations “were increasingly recognized as sites for public reckoning
with present and past injustices.” Studying Heid Erdrich’s poetry in National
Monuments and the photography of Jeff Thomas, she explores the role of public
memorials in upholding the “false narratives that we perpetuate at the basis of
our nation’s formation.” Positioning the US Capitol building as a monument in
her conclusion, Beard situates the storming of the Capitol by an insurrectionist
mob—“carrying Confederate flags and raising other alternative (Trumpian)

flags”—as exemplative of the conflicting relationships to monuments that “un
derscore . . . the divisive nature that national monuments, symbols, and naming
practices have always held in the United States.”
Three memoirs—Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, Kiese Lay
mon’s Heavy, and Tara Westover’s Educated—inform Megan Brown’s analysis in
her chapter, “Getting Schooled: Responses to Education as Neoliberal Identity-
Formation in US Life Narratives,” in which she argues that contemporary neo
liberal focus on the overcoming narrative is tied to the myth that formalized
postsecondary education automatically equates a form of institutionalized suc
cess. “In the United States,” Brown reminds readers, “the dominant discourses
about, and structures of, education (from preschool to graduate and profes
sional programs) perpetuate neoliberal ideologies by inculcating these same
values” and insist that “society is a meritocracy: that hard work will bring de
served rewards.” Interrogating these elements interwoven in the American
Dream provide “a necessary and productive challenge to even the most cher
ished ideals” of education being a great equalizer that automatically resituates
the circumstances of those accepted to institutions of higher education and
those who have graduated from them. Suggesting that each of the narrators in
each of the memoirs with which she engages collectively undermine the single
story of an overcoming narrative pinned to a college education, Brown ulti
mately proposes that “we can celebrate what education can do for individuals
and communities but also criticize pedagogies and structures which, in their
adherence to neoliberal principles, perpetuate systemic inequalities.”
Reading through a disability studies theoretical lens, Ally Day examines
auto/biographical texts in the midwifery movement—including her own self-
reflexive narrative of her experiences with the curriculum for the ToLabor
doula certification network—in her chapter, “Disabling Birth: Prognostic Cer
tainty and the Gestating Citizen of the Contemporary Midwifery Movement.”
Day’s analysis “explore[s] how birth narratives function as a means for promot
ing a particular kind of citizen-body based on an ideology of prognostic cer
tainty” that monitors—and excludes based on—the potential for physical and
mental ability. Proponents of both natural and medical birth, she argues, em
ploy rhetoric of the need to produce able-bodied citizens as a means of nation
building, each eschewing the other for its disabling potential. “Disability,” Day
concludes, “plays an important role in the pedagogical materials and underly
ing philosophy of the contemporary midwife movement.”
Encouraging readers to think through the tension between populism and
pluralism, Rachael McLennan explores the ways in which these terms and the
ideologies they represent are manipulated within political rhetorics in her essay,
“‘A small flashlight in a great dark space’: Elizabeth Warren, Autobiography,
and Populism.” Suggesting that this quotation from Warren’s autobiographical
narrative and political manifesto, This Fight Is Our Fight, positions the United
States as the great dark space and the senator as the one who is able to shine the
light into it, McLennan posits that the life narrator’s “depiction of herself
wielding the flashlight in the ‘great dark space’ aligns herself with the people,
on whose behalf she is trying to uncover operations of power working against
their interests and to show how their lives have been affected.” This foray into
populism, however, is convoluted, clarifies McLennan, as Warren continually
balances her “alignment with the people” with her role as a member of the
political elite. Situating her as an extremely knowledgeable writer who meticu
lously crafts her narrative for public consumption in the United States, McLennan
surmises that “it would be a grave mistake to think that Warren is not extremely
sophisticated in her employment of her own life story and her manipulation of
some of the features of autobiography, particularly in its American forms,” to sit
uate herself as a member of the populace, eager to lead on their behalf. This is
more of an observation of a particularity of US dualities, though, than a criti
cism of the senator as duplicitous.
This volume concludes with a contribution from Sidonie Smith and Julia
Watson focused on the futures of auto/biographical narratives in and about
the United States, “Autobiographical Reckonings in America’s Restless Twenty-
First Century.” Broken into six categories—pandemic precarity; Black Lives
Matter revaluations; ecocrisis, environmental justice, and survival; the plight of
migrants and refugees; feminisms at the suffrage centennial; and new-model
addictions and recoveries—Smith and Watson reflect on expected and neces
sary avenues of inquiry that will occupy auto/biographical consumption and
the study of auto/biographical narratives in the coming years, warning that this
moment is without parallel, “a turning point of as-yet unclear forks in the con
tested paths of American democracy.” In light of this, they attest that “not only
are different kinds of stories being narrated; a new paradigm of investigation
may be required to listen to and assess them.”
Reading the essays in this volume underscores that the United States is not
only a divided nation in this specific moment of the early twenty-first century
but is, rather, a nation that has always been defined by multiplicity. Perhaps the
only constant, then, is the instability of a national narrative that vacillates be
tween movements tied to inclusion and exclusion, belonging and not belong
ing, thus making the search for a static, singular story of unified identity an
exercise in futility. And, if we peel back this carefully crafted and highly
propagandized story of assimilation and its fabricated and enforced cohesion,

what remains? How do enduring questions regarding how the nation is made,
unmade, and remade over time persist when we understand the United States
as always comprising an infinite range of experiences, knowledges, ways of
being, and narratives and never a homogeneous sameness?
The armed insurrection at the United States Capitol in 2021 was a manifes
tation of Donald Trump’s inflammatory slogans urging followers to “Make
America Great” and then make it great “again,” which encouraged people to
actively and violently fight for a past that never existed. Failure to teach and dis
seminate the innumerable different but intersecting life stories that talk the na
tion into being—in often competing, challenging, and even confrontational
ways—is in part to blame for this and other such eruptions in which those who
believe that their exclusive right to a singular national identity is at peril. The
editors of this volume are therefore not interrogating how we do the work of
reweaving the unraveling mythos of homogeneity in the United States but
rather seeking to resituate ideations of the nation to one composed of multiple
lives and life stories. The continuing work needed at the crossroads of life nar
rative and American studies, then, if we hope to continue this experiment
known as democracy, is to consider how we move forward together at the points
of intersection, not uniformity. What we next talk into being for the nation has
to be a recognition of how—historically and in this contemporary moment—
difference defines us. And with this acknowledgment comes a necessary reck
oning with how we still choose to be connected, responsibly and reciprocally,
across these distinctions.
Notes
1. Our own positionalities as editors of this collection influence how we engage with
this material. While we both lived and completed our academic training within the con
tinental United States, we now are positioned as both inside and outside the United
States to various degrees. Ricia is currently located at the University of Puerto Rico at
Mayagüez, where she is directing a large-scale public humanities project, “Mi María:
Puerto Rico after the Hurricane,” which employs oral history and other biographical
methodologies to narrate stories of Hurricane María and its aftermaths amid the failure
of government relief efforts. Laura is a settler scholar living and working at the Univer
sity of Alberta on Treaty Six and Métis territory. These locations position us geographi
cally and politically in other kinds of relationships to, and other kinds of daily discus
sions about, the nation called the United States. We bring our own lived experiences to
this work, but we are aware that the lived experiences of others would create disparate
approaches to this volume. To point to one example, Laura highlights the short essay by
Deanna Reder, a Cree-Métis scholar in Canada, “Awina Maga Kiya (Who is it that you
really are)? Cree and Métis Autobiographical Writing,” in which Reder notes that she
no longer uses postcolonial or other Western academic paradigms to discuss Cree and
Métis autobiographical writings but tries always to be guided by Cree paradigms and
Cree values.
2. Certainly, there were limitations and disappointments with both second-wave
feminism and the civil rights movement; however, a number of legal gains were made
that are under direct attack in this backlash.
3. From his vantage point in the late 1970s, James Olney commented that autobiog
raphy has a significant and sustained relationship with area studies as a “focalizing liter
ature” (“Autobiography and the Cultural Moment,” 13).
4. Rachael McLennan (among others) notes a strange gap in approaches to the
study of US auto/biographies, with several critics endeavoring to address patterns
within the entirety of the oeuvre in the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s but none attempt
ing to do so again until the 2010s. McLennan points to this break as indicative of diffi
culties associated with defining auto/biography in the United States and as particularly
“American” as well as with the rise in favor of anti-essentialist texts that read US identi
ties under specific group markers (18). She further points to those earlier works as both
“provocative . . . and problematic” (19). While we agree with this assessment, we also
find it useful to turn to some of these earlier analyses of US life narratives for founda
tional ideas in the hopes of building bridges between valuable aspects of these argu
ments that remain beneficial and relevant in our contemporary contexts. At the same
time, it is necessary to clarify that we reject canonicity on the basis of its functionality as
exclusionary practice, promotions of essentialism, and the troubling exceptionalist idea
that the auto/biographical is somehow particularly “American” or specifically emergent
from the United States. Instead, we suggest that the relationship to the auto/biographi
cal in the United States has important roles and specific functions for meaning making
particular to the trajectory of this nation space that was written and continues to be
written into being.
5. One can also argue that the United States came into being as a contractual agree
ment. The nation was not formed from any particularly organic ties. The thirteen colo
nies in rebellion did not share a common history, language, religion, or ethnicity. The
colonists were occupying the lands of Indigenous peoples, but they themselves had not
been on the continent long enough to feel it was their homeland. Nor did they yet have a
shared story of who they were. We have since gone back and created a mythic story of
who they were and what they believed in order to justify our own occupation of these
lands and to create our own “American” identity.
6. James M. Cox notes that the term autobiography entered the English lexicon within
the timeframe of the Revolutionary War and points to ideations of selfhood tied to this
specific type of recognition and visibility of “self-life-writing” as inextricable from the
trajectory of the nation (255–56).
7. Sayre, adapting F. Scott Fitzgerald, suggests that the United States is an idea and
that auto/biographers both reflect and shape the idea(s) of the nation (“Autobiography,”
156). Countless Americanists also suggest that the myths of America need continually to
be talked into existence. Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera’s discussion in his 2018 book, After American
Studies, is one of the more recent examples of this perspective. He states in his introduc
tion that “the myths that uphold the image of figures like [George] Washington are a
language. They must be repeated through various media so that they exist” (3).
8. The New Americanists book series published by Duke University Press includes a
volume on American literatures—National Identities and Post-Americanist Narratives, edited
by Donald E. Pease (1994)—which, surprisingly, does not include sustained attention to
auto/biographical narratives in its treatment of literature as a key component of US
identity constructs.
9. Herlihy-Mera productively critiques transnational American studies as a theoret
ical framework that can be indicative of dominant cultural norms crossing geographic
and cultural borders to enter other arenas with aspects of exceptionalist perspectives in
hand, such as monolingual publications in English without regard to relevant commu
nal language practices and preferences (2). In other words, the work of transnational
American studies scholars must be undertaken in recognition of and resistance to incli
nations to map the self onto the experience of others while working to undermine aca
demic norms that historically situate scholarly articulations and modes of dissemination
within select structures of exclusivity.
10. There have certainly been forays into the crossroads between the new American
studies and auto/biography studies, and new American studies has likewise impacted
the study of auto/biographies when explicit connections have not been made. Paul John
Eakin’s 1991 book, American Autobiography: Retrospect and Prospect, and James Robert Payne’s
1992 book, Multicultural Autobiography: American Lives, anticipate comparatist American
studies and its intranational aspects as they interrelate with life narratives. Eakin pro
poses that “the true history of American autobiography and the culture in which it is
produced and consumed may turn out to be the history of identifiable groups within the
culture and of the network of relations among them” (12). Positioning her work as a re
sponse to Paul Lauter and other Americanists, Begoña Simal states that her 2011 collec
tion, Selves in Dialogue, “owes much to the pressing need for a comparative approach to
US literatures” (10). Alfred Hornung has done exceptional work on the intersections of
life narrative and American studies over the course of a long career that elegantly spans
both disciplines. In the preface to the 2013 encyclopedic American Lives, he reaffirms that
the study of narrated lives in the United States needs to forefront the cyclical patterns of
migration that forged and continue to mold it (ix). Situated within the British Associa
tion for American Studies series, Rachael McLennan’s 2013 book, American Autobiography,
is informed by several points emergent from new American studies. “Ideologies of
American exceptionalism have . . . limited the critical study of autobiography,” con
tends McLennan, an oversight that she proposes to rectify by “foreground[ing] an un
derstanding of America and autobiography as transnational” (10).
11. Commenting on the purposefulness of her work as a climate activist, Greta

Thunberg, for example, includes the personal aspect of her self-identification as neuro
divergent. She tweeted that before climate activism became a central component of her
identity construction, “I had no energy, no friends and I didn’t speak to anyone. I just sat
alone at home, with an eating disorder,” but since “school striking” she has “found a
meaning, in a world that sometimes seems shallow and meaningless to so many people.”
She now believes that her Asperger’s is equivalent to having a “super-power” that allows
her to focus her energies (@GretaThunberg, August 31, 2019). Comments from readers
would suggest that the personal aspects of Thunberg’s tweets build connectivity to the
issue at hand and incite further activism. One Twitter follower writes in her reply to
Thunberg that “my daughter is an aspie girl. . . . You’re a wonderful role model to her”
(@jadehawk15, September 2, 2019).
12. See, for example, the introduction to The Futures of American Studies by Donald E.
Pease and Robyn Wiegman.
13. In his first thirty days in office, President Biden and his administration took sig
nificant steps to curb the Russian global presence—including action in Ukraine, Crimea,
and Syria—as well as motions toward holding Russia accountable for interference in the
2016 and 2020 US elections, the massive SolarWinds hack, the reported bounties on US
soldiers in Afghanistan, and the poisoning of Aleksey Navalny. At the time of writing
this introduction, though, Russia has mounted a violent invasion of Ukraine in an ap
parent attempt to assert a new global dominance. Biden’s administration has worked
diligently to rebuild NATO and present a united front against such aggressions that is
being fought on economic and digital fronts as well as on the ground. US foreign policy
post-Trump, however, is unfolding before our eyes, and it remains to be seen how US-
Russian relations will take shape after this event and when and if Vladimir Putin is re
moved from office. What is a given, though, is that this new era of international rela
tions will impact our understandings of ourselves both within and outside the boundaries
and ideas of the United States.
14. In a 2017 essay, John Carlos Rowe asserts that “national borders are obviously
fictions, sustained by complex ideological and cultural narratives that invent and rein
vent notions of America and Americans. Understood in this way, Comparative Ameri
can Studies [is] by no means diminished by isolationist policies and jingoist slogans, such
as ‘Make America Great Again,’ but provides instead useful terms and methods for un
derstanding such political phenomena while avoiding their provincialism” (“Trump
Today,” 19). While we agree that the frameworks of new American studies are still ex
tremely relevant, we do find that these ideas must evolve and expand to keep pace with
this change in leadership and the rejections of pluralism that impact the ways in which
we engage life narratives in the United States.
15. Brown’s analysis is prompted by Tom Junod’s study of the painstaking quest to
find the identity of people photographed falling from the Twin Towers on 9/11—and
the reactions to both the photos and the subsequent search for names and stories—in his
article “The Falling Man.”
16. It remains to be seen whether the armed insurrection at the US Capitol in early
2021 will become such a national narrative-changing event, although it seems poised to
do just that especially in light of information related to Putin’s potential involvement in
the Trump administration.
17. Eric D. Lamore amends this question to acknowledge that Obama is “an African
American life writer” (3).
18. Kim and Robinson clarify that “multiple Americanists have referred to [this
era], and not in overly positive fashion, as the ‘Age of Trump’” (2).
19. The loss of Trump’s Twitter privileges and his own failed social media app,
Truth Social, seem to have only nominally slowed him down as the Conservative Politi
cal Action Conference (CPAC) and other ultraconservative political organizations reach
out to him to articulate their missives of populism and privilege.
20. For instance, Timothy Dow Adams, Linda Haverty Rugg, Marianne Hirsch,
and Maurice O. Wallace and Shawn Michelle Smith have established photography as
an elemental aspect in and as auto/biography; Gillian Whitlock, Julia Watson, Hillary
Chute, and Michael A. Chaney have done the same for graphic lives; Sidonie Smith,
Julia Watson, Françoise Lionnet, and Sarah Brophy establish multiple genres of self-
portraiture and self-referential art-making processes as sites of auto/biographical narra
tives and acts; Susanna Egan, Jim Lane, and William H. Epstein have likewise done this
work for lives documented on film; and John David Zuern, Julie Rak, Anna Poletti, and
Paul Longley Arthur have contributed to making digital lives a focal point within our
discourse community.
21. To clarify, it is perhaps the acceptance and internalization of auto/biographical
studies as an interdisciplinary field that has been harder won than the recognition or
naming of it as such. For example, in 1981, Albert E. Stone argued that the auto/biogra
phy is “a naturally interdisciplinary subject” (2); however, conferences, books, and spe
cial issues of journals have yet to incorporate fully this missive. Western academic disci
plinary norms that emphasize specialization to the point of exclusion undermine—on
administrative and other levels—inclinations towards multi-, trans-, and interdisciplin
ary academic work.
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Dakobijigaade mii miinawaa
Aaba’igaade
Gichimookomaanakiing
Tied and Untied in America
Margaret Noodin
Omaa Gichimookomaanakiing
anishinaabewiyang gaye naabishkaageyang
wiikwaji’oyang gaye odaapinigaazoyang
mookimaazoyang endaso mooka’ang.
[Here in America
we are first people and settlers
free selves and taken slaves
voices rising new with each dawn.]
A merica is a name, a place, a constructed identity. Ideas about

being American depend on diverse personal experiences and
existential notions of geopolitical identity. In the center of the North America,
where the Great Lakes are tied together by rivers, basins, and currents, there is
a place known as both Anishinaabewakiing and Gichimookomaanakiing. The first
name means “land of the lowered beings” because Indigenous stories tell of an
origin in the sky, while the second name means “land of the long knives”
27
28 Noodin / Dakobijigaade
because colonizing soldiers carried guns made longer by knives. Speakers of

Anishinaabemowin who live in this space remember ancient mound builders,
six-foot beavers, and warnings that everything will change. Speakers of English
believed once in manifest destiny and have a range of names for the young na-
tion they still want to be united. This is the space where I teach and write po-
etry in Anishinaabemowin, which is an act of resilience and resistance intended
to complicate the identity of the United States.
Anishinaabe stories tell of dark winters, spring floods, fires of renewal,
times of change, and sudden extinctions (Noodin, Baldwin, and Perley). As a
diaspora diminished but not removed, the Anishinaabeg have survived the cre-
ation of the United States of America, and their oral and written histories are
evidence of the ways they remain citizens of both Anishinaabewakiing and Gichi-
mookomaanakiing. American stories tell of discovery, pilgrimage, and pioneering
spirits. The names chosen and given in this place reveal histories of first na-
tions, settlers, slaves, and people seeking freedom. In this natural and manufac-
tured landscape, naming has been tied to federal laws and social norms that
impact traditional relationships with water, land, and all life. To imagine a fu-
ture in America, we must examine accidental and intentional connections
through recollection and reconciliation. We need to untie, or retie, ideas of
identity, equity, and responsibility relative to place and time. Stories in multiple
languages must become unbound and be unraveled to winnow meaning from
the chaff, to find song in the heartbeat, to speak with the stones born of centu-
ries of nonhuman memory. What follows is an exploration of naming based in
place, politics, misunderstanding, and righted relations. It serves as a starting
point for acknowledging old ideas identity. Using a metaphor familiar to the
location, this inquiry into names and naming suggests there is a way to share
one dish with one spoon while recognizing all of our many names.1
Aki’endamo: Geo-logisms
Ge-mooka’am giizis
babasikaweyang mashkiigong
mooshka’agwiinjiseg mii mashkawaandeg
anishinaabe babaapagidanaamod zaaga’iganing.
[As the sun rises

we toss bones into the swamp
solid land emerges and
the first being breathes by the lake.]
Noodin / Dakobijigaade 29
The Americas are a conjoined set of continents that take up 8 percent of the
earth’s surface. They are descendants of the supercontinent Pangea located
between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. The distant time when they were
formed 135 million years ago is described by science and story in the same way:
plates crashed, volcanoes erupted, cataclysmic change led to new life in old
spaces. In the upper mideast region of North America, an ice age carved the
Great Lakes basin 10,000 to 12,000 years ago. The foundation for that basin
was set three billion years ago during the Precambrian era (Fuller, Shear, and
Wittig 11). Whether we speak of the Laurentian Plateau, Turtle Island, or the
land formed by Nanaboozhoo and the animals after one of several floods, we
are referring to the vast expanse of granite, sedimentary rock, limestone, shale,
sandstone, halite, and gypsum; interspersed with coal, oil, gas, uranium, zinc,
copper, iron, nickel, gold, and silver, which literally holds the earth together in
space. According to stories collected by Sac and Fox linguist William Jones
( Jones and Michelson 158–59), after creation of the continent, Nanaboozhoo
declared:
“Mii sa i’iw indawaa enigokwakamigaag o’o aki,” ogii-inaan.

Miidash,“Mii maawiin maajiiwaaboode,” gii-ikidod.
“Indawaa ji-gozigwang ninga-anjitoon wiikaa biinjibide’gaazonak.”
[“That then, no doubt, will be the extent of this earth,” he said to the
(animal-folk).
And now, “I fear that this will float away,” he said.
“Therefore, in order that it may be heavy will I make it so that it shall never be
moved.”]
Stories vary, but the central message that land and life emerged from water is
the same. The mixing of minerals in fertile swamps will lead to the first breath
on the shore.
There is no way to know the exact words used by the first people who lived
with the lakes, but one name for this freshwater system is Gichigaming (Noodin,
“Ganawendamaw,” 251). In Anishinaabemowin, this translates to “the Great
Sea.” With 163 Odawa, Ojibwe, and Potawatomi nations all using languages
they identify as Anishinaabe, it is one of the most common languages of the re-
gion (Noodin, “North American Great Lakes”). The term for the land is aki, and
when it is compounded by adding Anishinaabe to create the word Anishinaabewaki-
ing, it can reference either Indigenous land in general or the particular network
of individuals and communities located in and around the Great Lakes of North
America. When students learn this term, they are asked to connect identity with
geology and astrophysics. The morphemes—onizhishin (it is good), naabe (human
being), nisaa (to lower) and abi (to be seated)—can imply galactic origins of mat-
ter, energy, and biologic beginnings (Noodin, Bawaajimo).
In this landscape, species, classes, biomes, and air masses are tied to one
another by fractals of clan and kinship. Every life is related to the layer immedi-
ately preceding and can be traced through pathways of connections preserved
at a cellular self-conceptual level and an expansive communal level through
complex origin stories. Images carved in stone or written on rock faces record
early human and nonhuman alliances. The Hegman Lake Pictographs, Sani-
lac Petroglyphs, and Agawa Rock Pictographs are records of knowledge and
scientific observation across many centuries in Anishinaabewakiing.2 They are
semiotic messages that precede the modern industrial moment. Alter-American
identity is tied to the past through these lines, and their extralinguistic gestures
offer a means of becoming untied to the present. Knowing one’s place in the
universe was to know one’s name and claim an identity with temporal and phys
ical dimensions.
Aanjitoojig: Agents of Change
Gimookojigemin
giizhigag mookodamang
mazinikojiganag mookozhangwaa
mooka’asanjigoyang gijichaaginaanan.
[We have all been part of the carving

we cut away the days
sculpting the shape of spirits
to uncover the cache of our souls.]
Anishinaabewakiing is a name used by one group of people for the place they call
home. When others enter this space, they bring into it new names and identi-
ties. In 1507 German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller shifted the identity
of the continent by mapping the visit of Italian merchant and mariner Amerigo
Vespucci. A few earlier maps charted the same region, but Waldseemüller was
the first to illustrate the separation between continents and outline a landmass
clearly called America.3 His work was part of the claiming by naming which
took place as new words were chosen to mark men’s attempts to build ties to
their holy and unholy fathers in distant cities of origin.
Many decades and voyages later, America became the scene of epic battles
of both blood and rhetoric. In 1775 Thomas Paine, now viewed as a “founding
father,” wrote about “America” as a place where the “original Indians” were
acknowledged as first inhabitants, ancestral scientists, and inventors (Paine,
Writings, 17). However, Paine also wrote of the wigwam as a diminished form of
shelter and set forth the concept of property extending to the center of the
earth (Paine, Writings, 23). Paine’s rhetoric was powerful. His uncommon pam-
phlet Common Sense, America’s first best-selling print publication, arguably fu-
eled the American Revolution, and in it he coined the term “United States of
America” (Ferguson). Filled with contradiction, his essay speaks of a “glorious
union of all things” while calling for military uprising (Paine, Common, 48). It is
most ironic that he states, “Man will not be brought up with the savage idea of
considering his species as enemies, because the accident of birth gave the indi-
viduals existence in countries distinguished by different names” (Paine, Common,
200). Throughout the text it is clear he does not view Indigenous people and
their nations as equals or even as belonging to the same species and has no time
to learn the names by which they call themselves.
In July 1776, when Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Indepen-
dence, he referred to “free and independent states” and “merciless Indian sav-
ages.” In rhetoric and praxis, the Indigenous people of many nations were
viewed as less than enemies and were not identified as allies despite a dozen
treaties signed between 1722 and 1774 and the service of many Indigenous
troops who assisted the colonies during the revolution ( Justice). Only one iden-
tity mattered to those who were striving to form a nation. As the commander in
chief of the Continental army, George Washington, prepared for the Battle of
Long Island, he told his soldiers on January 2, 1776:
The time is now near at hand which must probably determine whether Ameri-
cans are to be freemen or slaves; whether they are to have any property they can
call their own; whether their houses and farms are to be pillaged and destroyed,
and themselves consigned to a state of wretchedness from which no human ef-
forts will deliver them. The fate of unborn millions will now depend, under
God, on the courage and conduct of this army. . . . We have, therefore, to re-
solve to conquer or die. (Washington)
Soldiers were asked to give their lives defending the United States of America,
but it would be many years before all who lived within its boundaries were
counted as citizens with equal rights. Citizenship for most American Indians
came in 1924 and was followed in 1934 by the Indian Reorganization Act, which
granted each Indigenous nation the opportunity to form its own democracy.
This history is relevant because when the children of Anishinaabewakiing ask

the name of the nation that surrounds their own nations, the answer is Gichi-
mookomaanakiing, the Land of the Long Knives, which recalls the bayonets used
to win the American Revolution. So often, the modern struggle for identity de-
pends on knowledge of this old colonial history. The term Gichimookomaanakiing
is not the name the people who carried guns with long knives gave to them-
selves, but it is the name earned by a small number of them. Returning to
Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, we find the statement that “men do not change
from enemies to friends by the alteration of a name” (95). He may have been
speaking of those who change their political identity, but his words remind us
that it is not the names but the stories tied to them that reflect levels of misun-
derstanding or opportunities for reconciliation. By tying the present to the past,
we can better understand the clash of cultures and identity that must be ad-
dressed as we name ourselves and others.
Dibaajimowinan Aaba’bii’iganan mii

Niibidoonan: Stories Unraveled and
Rewound
Ganabaj gimookawaadamin
ezhi-anjidimaajimowaad
mii miinwaa gaa-mooka’amang
da-bagidenindamang.
[Maybe we cry
as the stories change
and what we uncover
needs a proper burial.]
America, as a location and political identity, represents continual negotiation.

The people of 573 separate sovereign nations are recognized as dual citizens by
the United States of America.4 Some trace their political identity to treaties of
the 1700s, and others’ rights were defined during westward expansion as the
thirteen colonies became fifty states, one federal district, and sixteen territories.
Each place now a part of the relatively young nation has a history unlike the
others and a memory of the time before America. In many parts of the United
States, individuals and communities are working to move beyond racist
erasure.
Working for many years with children and adults learning Anishi-
naabemowin to better understand their own identity, the most common ques-
tion I am asked by beginning students is whether the term of greeting boozhoo is
connected to the French bonjour. This is never a question about etymology as
much as it is about adaptation, assimilation, and identity. I was taught that
boozhoo is a reference to the cultural hero wenaboozhoo, who has the ability to shift
shapes, to become the other. By using boozhoo as a greeting, we test a listener’s
cultural competency. We implicitly ask, “Do you know winter stories of Gich-
igaming?” Sharing stories is central to survival and connected to the ways under-
stand ourselves and one another. The words we use and the names we accept
shape our ways of being and knowing in a world that can sometimes seem to be
coming apart at the seams.
As the next generation strives to create a just and sustainable future, names
matter. Nations are reshaping their collective identity by taking back their origi-
nal names and by asking others to respect their language and history. In Anishi-
naabewakiing, many nations retain the legal term “Chippewa” as a part of state
and federal legal communications, but the use of “Anishinaabe” and the con-
cept of a confederated diaspora, which includes the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Po-
tawatomi, has increased in recent decades. In the same region the Winnebago
and Menominee, whose names reflect descriptions given by neighboring Ojibwe,
are taking back their original names. The Ho-Chunk, once referred to as “Win-
nebago” because their Ojibwe knew them as the people who lived near the
dark waters of a large lake, have taken back their original name, which means
“the people of the big or sacred voice.”5 The Menominee, named by the
Ojibwe for the wild rice abundant in the lakes where they lived, now state, “We
are Kiash Matchitiwuk, the Ancient Ones.”6 Some observers call this work
“decolonization” or “reconciliation”; others might refer to it as evolutionary
ethical adjustment.
This brings us back to Gichimookomaanakiing, the United States of America,
Land of the Long Knives. Although deeply rooted in lived experience and real
history, does use of this Anishinaabe name perpetuate memories of war or
serve as a reminder against it? Has the time come for speakers of Anishi-
naabemowin to follow the example of the Haudenosaunee, whose political tra-
ditions include the burial of a weapon beneath a tree of peace? To discern
whether other nations might have a suggestion, I asked teachers of several In-
digenous languages how to say “America” and “American” in the language of
their nation. Dr. Dylan Robinson, assistant professor and Canada Research
Chair in Indigenous Arts at Queen’s University, explained:
Stó:loˉ probably wouldn’t distinguish between American and Canadian settlers,

and use the Halq’emeylem word “xwelitem” which means “starving person.”
The reason being that the major influx of settlers into our territory took place
during the gold rush. They arrived with gold fever, but also literally starving for
food. Obviously, this settler hunger for resources hasn’t abated, so we still use
the word today.7
Beth Piatote, associate professor of Native American Studies at the University

of California, Berkeley, replied:
To answer your question about “Americans,” I think that the only word we use
is so:ya:po:, which is kind of a generic “white man.” It has the suffix (po: or pu:)
for people. The word for the English language is so:ya:po:timt (white man’s lan-
guage). So:ya:po: designates “American” more than British types who are
“kinco:c” or King George/Canadians;?allayma is “Frenchman” or “by the
river person.” . . . A few years ago there was a colorful conversation on the Nez
Perce listserv about the meaning of the word so:ya:po:, because the translation
isn’t quite known. Some say it was a loan word of the French “chapeau,” but
my favorite explanation (what I want to be true) is the idea that it came from a
Salish term meaning “upside down face,” because white men were bald on
their heads but had beards on their faces.8
Obviously calling Americans “starving people” or “upside down faces” based on

a simple description is similar to calling them “long knives” and based on a phys
ical description, not a qualitative assessment. Americans believe they stand for
freedom, equality, and shared governance, not full bellies, hairy chins, and mus-
ket tips. As languages and cultures are revitalized, Indigenous confederacies
and cross-cultural alliances must also be reconstructed or built from the ground
and water up to new aspirational heights.
Maawanjiwakiing ani Mookibiiwakiing:

Relation States and a Rising Nation
Geyabi mookiingweniyang
mangodaasiyang
asabaatigoog aawiyang
asabikeyang awang.
[Still we appear
bravely centered
we are shuttles
making nets in the fog.]
During a recent visit to Canada, two young people were asked to introduce
themselves. One identifies as Anishinaabe and American, the other is the de-
scendant of Irish American immigrants. Both thought it made no sense to
identify as people from Gichimookomaanakiing, but they needed a way to say they
were from the large nation to the south. They asked the Anishinaabeg elders
seated around them and came up with the name Maawanjiwakiing, which could
be translated as “the Unified Land,” something close to the United States.
Neologisms are based on shared linguistic rules and life experiences. New
words arise and either disappear or become a part of the vernacular. Maawanji-
wakiing is an excellent option that may well become popular. However, for now,
despite its fraught origin, Gichimookomaanakiing is the common term for Amer-
ica. In time new terms may arise based on more political inclusion and more
use of Anishinaabemowin. One option might be to deconstruct the sound and
meaning of mookomaan, the carving knife. Rather than entirely cast away the
history and original etymology, a new word might attempt to move beyond the
two verbs at the core of the image: mookodan, to carve something, and mookozh,
to carve someone. To the English speaker’s ear, the idea of carving someone is
unfamiliar, even horrific, but from an Anishinaabe view, it would be strange not
to mention both when discussing definitions. All Anishinaabe nouns fall into
two classes, and verbs are learned as balanced categories. With algebraic preci-
sion, the most fluent speakers can move along a spectrum of four verb types,
always balancing the speaker’s relationship to the listener and the world around
them. The word for carving is related to words for emergence and revelation:
mooka’ (to uncover), mooka’am (the sun rises), mookamanji’o (to sense a change in
health), mookawaakii (to cry of desire to accompany others), mookibiise (rise up
out of the water).
Unraveling the string of related meanings, perhaps there is a way to com-
bine the past identity with a future potential. America might become Mookibi-
iwakiing, the “Land of Emergence.” Rather than viewing the land as a place
carved by weapons, it might be considered instead, a land of relationships
changing . . . between groups of people and between the people and the earth.
It is not a definition that would distinguish it from other continents, but it would
signify a place of duality, of land and water, of motion and durability. Mookibi-
iwakiing miikawaadad waa-wiikwaji’oyang ingoding: America the beautiful where
one day we may all be free. Strategic plans for survival need to be written into
society. Elders must speak to children of something practical and perceptible.
An identity that continues is one that is tied tightly to tradition but is also able
to untie itself in order to expand and evolve. Tracing the history of identity in
this place sheds light on the web that has been woven on the continent and
allows us to connect to other networks of identity, which can carry us back into
the past and lead us into the future.
Notes
1. For more about the “Dish with One Spoon,” see Victor Lytwyn’s historical analy-
sis of the Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee wampum belt with the image of the dish
that many understand to be an example of legal precedent outlining communication
between sovereign nations.
2. The Hegman Lake Pictographs are located within the Kawishiwi Ranger District
of the Superior National Forest in Ely, Minnesota. The Sanilac Petroglyphs Historic
State Park is in Cass City, Michigan. Agawa Rock is found within Lake Superior Provin-
cial Park in Algoma, Ontario.
3. A copy of the map was purchased by the Library of Congress in 2003 (see Wald-
seemüller; Library of Congress).
4. At the time this essay was written in September 2019, there were 573 sovereign
nations federally recognized by the United States.
5. The Ho-Chunk Nation of Wisconsin is working to ensure that the Hooca˛k lan-
guage continues to be a living language through a variety of community efforts (Hooca˛k
Waaziija Haci Language Division).
6. The Menominee are preserving their ancestral language through a variety of ef-
forts (Menominee Indian Tribe of Wisconsin).
7. Dylan Robinson, email to the author, September 9, 2018.
8. Beth Piatote, email to the author, September 5, 2018.
Works Cited
Ferguson, Robert A. “The Commonalities of Common Sense.” William and Mary Quar-
terly 57, no. 3 (2000): 465–504.
Fuller, Kent, Harvey Shear, and Jennifer Wittig. The Great Lakes: An Environments Atlas and
Resource Book. Chicago: United States Environmental Protection Agency; Toronto:
Environment Canada, 1995.
Hooca˛k Waaziija Haci Language Division. “Our Mission.” Accessed February 2, 2022.
https://www.hoocak.org/.
Jones, William, and Truman Michelson. Ojibwa Texts: Volume VII, Part 1. Publications of
the American Ethnological Society, edited by Franz Boas. New York: G. E. Stechert,
1917.
Justice, Daniel Heath. “Rhetorics of Recognition: On Indigenous Nationhood, Litera-
ture, and the Paracolonial Perils of the Nation-State.” Kenyon Review 32, no. 1 (2010):
236.
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judge and jury was firmly established, and a beginning was made in
the development of Roman Law. On taking office the praetor
published an edict containing the maxims of law and the forms of
procedure which would govern him throughout his year of office. This
document followed the edict of his predecessor, with such
modifications and additions as his own judgment and the needs of
the times required. The law in this way became a living thing and
constantly adapted itself to the changing needs of society. The later
history of the edict and certain additions to the praetor’s duties we
shall have occasion to notice in another connection.
The increase which the tribune’s power underwent during this
period almost made his office a new one. With their characteristic
hesitation about introducing radical changes in the constitution, and
with their tendency to take concrete action, the Romans at the outset
had required the tribune to intervene in person when a citizen was
being harshly treated. But their common sense showed them in
course of time that it was far better to allow the tribune to record his
opposition to a bill when it was under consideration than to have him
prevent the execution of a law. This change placed a tremendous
power in the hands of the tribune in his struggle with the senate and
the nobility.
In the early period the senate had been composed of the
representatives of the leading clans, but as public business became
more complex, in making out the list of senators the censors gave a
preference to ex-magistrates, who were already experienced in
public affairs, and in course of time this practice was crystallized into
law. The men who thus became senators by virtue of having held the
praetorship, or consulship, for instance, were elected to a
magistracy, to be sure, by the people, but the prestige of a candidate
who could point to magistrates among his ancestors was so great
that a “new man” had little or no chance of being elected against
him. The results were twofold. A new nobility was established
composed of ex-magistrates and their lineal descendants. In the
second place the senate, being henceforth made up of men who had
had experience in administration at home and abroad, easily gained
supremacy both over the magistrates, who held office for a year only,
and over the popular assemblies, which were unwieldy and ill-
informed on important matters. For a century and a half, down to the
time of the Gracchi (i.e., the second century b.c.), this nobility
maintained itself, and Rome was ruled by a parliament. This state of
things is the more astonishing in view of the fact that at the
beginning of this period the democracy had won a complete victory,
and the action of the popular assembly was accepted as final on all
matters. The anomaly is easily explained by the fact that the senate
controlled the magistrates; they only could bring bills before the
assemblies, and they dared not submit measures of which the
senate disapproved.
The ascendency of the senate during this period was due in no
small measure to the necessity of dealing with important foreign
affairs, for which the people were not qualified. Between 287 and
133 came the war with Pyrrhus and the acquisition of Southern Italy,
the three wars with Carthage and the conquest of the Western
Mediterranean, the wars with Macedonia and the subjugation of the
Eastern Mediterranean. By 133 Rome’s territory included practically
all the lands bordering on the Mediterranean. The government of this
newly-acquired empire was a peculiarly difficult problem for a city-
state. It was somewhat simplified however by the fact that in her
ultimate arrangements Rome had to deal with city-states like herself.
In Italy, at the outset, she gave conquered cities civil rights and the
right of self-government. The Social War in 91-89 b.c. forced her to
grant them the political rights of Roman citizens also. Henceforth
Italy was a political unit, but, inasmuch as ballots could be cast at
Rome only, voters outside the city were at a disadvantage. The
Roman Republic never got far enough away from the tradition of the
city-state to recognize the fact that citizens could cast their ballots
elsewhere than at Rome or that other communities could send their
representatives to Rome.
To provide for a new province outside Italy, the senate sent a
commission of ten to co-operate with the Roman commander in
drawing up a charter. In this document the province was divided into
judicial circuits, and the status of each city was fixed either by
separate treaty with Rome or by legislative action. Provincial cities
were usually permitted to retain their senates, popular assemblies,
local magistrates and courts. A few of them were “free cities,”
exempt from taxation, but most of them were required to pay a fixed
sum in taxes, or to turn over to Rome a certain proportion of the
annual return from the land. The rate of taxation was not high, but
farming out the taxes to contractors, whose sole desire was to extort
as much from the provincials as possible, made taxation in the
provinces oppressive. Roman governors were often in league with
the moneyed interests at Rome, and were themselves anxious to
line their pockets during their year abroad. After a period of
experimentation the Romans settled down to the practice of sending
out ex-consuls and ex-praetors as provincial governors. These men
had experience in public affairs, but their term of office was so short
that they acquired little knowledge of local conditions and felt little
sympathy with the provincials. Public sentiment at Rome could effect
no change, because, like most democracies, the Roman democracy
felt little interest in the welfare of the provincials.[4]
The tribunates of the two Gracchi[5] at the end of the period which
we have been considering begin the century-long revolution which
ultimately overthrew the oligarchy and brought in the empire. The
attention of Tiberius Gracchus was called to the gradual
disappearance of the peasant proprietor from Italy, to the abnormal
growth of the city at the expense of the country, and to the crushing
out of the middle class. He and his brother set themselves to work to
remedy this situation by limiting the size of landed estates, by
assigning state lands to homesteaders, and by drafting off the city’s
proletariat to colonies in Italy and abroad. In these plans Tiberius met
the violent opposition of the senate, but carried his measures
through in a popular assembly in spite of the senate’s efforts. By this
action, and by securing “the recall” of a hostile tribune, he struck a
fatal blow at the prestige of the senate, which had controlled
legislation for a century and a half. Ten years later by securing the
passage in the popular assembly of one bill to supply grain to the
poor of Rome at a price lower than the market rate, of another
imposing a penalty on a magistrate who carried out the final decree
of the senate suspending certain constitutional guarantees, and of a
third which dealt with the taxes in Asia, Gaius, the brother of
Tiberius, vindicated the claim of the popular assembly to be the
controlling factor in legislation on domestic and foreign affairs. The
political history of Rome for the next century is a continuation of this
life-and-death struggle between the nobility and the democracy, with
one and the other contestant alternately in the ascendant. The
development of the empire and the need of a standing army to carry
on wars abroad and maintain order, in the end, gave a decisive turn
to the struggle.
To maintain its integrity an oligarchy must keep its numbers small
and must prevent individuals from gaining too great eminence or
popularity. The traditional acceptance by the masses of certain
families as the only families qualified to furnish rulers for the state
had kept the nobility a close corporation. To accomplish the second
object, that is, to prevent an ambitious individual from rising too
rapidly to power, from holding his authority too long a time, and from
securing too strong and compact a following, the senate had hedged
the magistracies about with a number of legal safeguards. The strict
laws enacted before the time of the Gracchi against bribery and
prescribing a secret ballot were passed to protect the nobility, and
not in the interests of morality. Custom at first, and later, legislation,
fixed minimum age requirements for most of the offices, established
a certain order in which they must be held, and required an interval
between the incumbency of two successive magistracies. The
reactionary recasting of the constitution under Sulla illustrates well
the aristocratic policy in these matters. In it the important
magistracies stand in the order of quaestorship, aedileship,
praetorship, and consulship, and a two-year interval was necessary
between each two. The minimum age requirement for the consulship
was forty-three years, and no one might be reëlected to a magistracy
until a period of ten years had expired. This is essentially the system
which had been gradually worked out during the flourishing period of
the oligarchy. It had also always been a fundamental principle of the
Republic that no magistrate should hold office for more than a year,
except the censor, whose term was eighteen months. This provision
of the constitution took from the magistrate his power and desire to
initiate political action. He had been a senator for many years before
becoming consul. In twelve months he would be a senator again. He
did not lose class-consciousness during his short term of office. If he
had wished to assert himself, it would have been impossible. The
senate was a body of trained administrators, many of whom had a
wider technical knowledge of the questions at issue than he had
himself. It was a body of men bound together by mutual self-interest,
which had a tradition of centuries behind it. The danger point in the
system for the oligarchy lay in the fact that an army and unlimited
authority had to be given to the governor of a province. The senate
tried to minimize this danger by keeping a tight grip on the purse-
strings when appropriating money and in voting troops for the
provinces, and by requiring governors to submit their arrangements
in the provinces to the senate for ratification, when their terms had
expired.
The decline of parliamentarism in the century which lies between
the Gracchi and Caesar may be traced in the loss of these
safeguards, one after another. Disorders at home, the pressure of
wars abroad and the dominance of the army led to their disregard. A
case in point occurred toward the close of the second century before
our era. The senatorial leaders had shown great incompetence and
venality in their campaigns against the Numidian king Jugurtha, and
the popular party forced the election to the consulship of Marius, a
man of humble birth, and gave him command of the forces in Africa.
His brilliant success in this war made the people turn to him in 104,
when the Cimbri and Teutons swept down into Italy and
overwhelmed the aristocratic leaders. Once more he succeeded, and
was elected to the consulship year after year, until, in the year 100,
he held this office for the sixth time. The popularity of Marius brought
his son to the consulship before he had reached his twentieth year.
Twenty-five years later the senate itself was forced to give up an
important feature of its policy. Sertorius, a brilliant democratic leader,
had established himself in Spain; he had formed an alliance with
Mithridates, Rome’s deadly enemy in the East, and threatened to
return to Italy and restore the democracy to power. To avert this
danger the senate made Pompey proconsul, although he had not yet
held even the quaestorship, and sent him to Spain with 40,000
troops. A little later the Gabinian and Manilian laws, carried through
by the democracy against the vigorous opposition of the oligarchy,
entrusted him with extraordinary powers for a long term to carry on
the wars against the Cilician pirates and against Mithridates. The
dictatorship of Sulla in 82 b.c. and the sole consulship of Pompey in
52, both of which resulted from disorder in Rome, violated the
principle of collegiality which was one of the most important
safeguards of the oligarchy. Within one hundred years, then, of the
time of the Gracchi all the bulwarks which the aristocracy had built
up to protect its position were broken down. “New men” were put in
the consulship. Popular favorites attained that office before reaching
the minimum age required of candidates, and men were freely
reëlected to it. The fixed “order of the offices” and the principle of
collegiality were violated.
In its struggle for power, the democracy met a reverse in the
suppression of the Catilinarian conspiracy in 63 b.c., so that when
Pompey returned from his campaign against Mithridates in the
following year, the senate ventured to postpone the ratification of his
arrangements in Asia and the reward of his veterans. This forced
him to make common cause with the democratic leader Caesar, and
with Crassus, whose wealth and financial associates made him a
man of great influence. In 60 b.c. these three political leaders formed
the compact, known as the First Triumvirate, which directed the
politics of Rome through its control of the popular assembly for a
number of years.[6] Caesar was given the consulship, and later an
important command in Gaul. The death of Crassus in a campaign in
Parthia left Caesar and Pompey face-to-face. Pompey who had staid
in Rome ultimately threw in his lot with the senatorial party, and,
when in 49 b.c. the senate tried to make Caesar give up his Gallic
province and the Civil War broke out, Pompey was put in charge of
the army operating against Caesar. Caesar’s success in the war
made him undisputed master of Rome, and before his death he
became dictator for life. The liberators, as they called themselves,
made a last stand for the old régime, but were defeated at Philippi,
and the victors, Octavius, Antony and Lepidus, formed the Second
Triumvirate, the members of which did not content themselves with
the unofficial position of political bosses, as Caesar, Crassus, and
Pompey had done, but secured a legal basis for their autocratic
power through legislation in the popular assembly. Again the
elimination of one member of the triumvirate, Lepidus, and the battle
of Actium in 31 b.c. left Octavius, or Augustus as we know him in
later life, in undisputed control of the state. The revolution was
complete. The old machinery of government had broken down under
the strain put upon it by the policy of imperialism. Parliamentarism
and the narrow policy of a city-state were ill adapted to the
government of an empire. The large armies and the long terms of
office abroad which Marius and Sulla, Pompey and Caesar had held,
had put at their disposal greater resources than the state could
command, and the Roman citizens and provincials who had been
taught to obey them implicitly in the field maintained their allegiance
to their old commanders upon the return of the latter to Italy.
2. Post-Augustan
The problem which confronted Augustus in revising the
constitution after the battle of Actium was not simple. He had to
provide a just and efficient government for an empire, which included
southern and central Europe, the Near East, and northern Africa,
without breaking away too violently from the traditions of the city-
state. Rome must continue to be the capital. Italy must hold her
privileged position above the provinces, and the old organs of
government and the old forms and titles must be kept. The political
life of the Republic had been embodied in two institutions, the senate
and the tribunate. One represented the aristocracy; the other, the
aspirations of the democracy. These two organs of government
formed the core of the system which Augustus finally adopted. In this
arrangement therefore he adhered closely to the tradition of the old
city-state.[7] Other considerations reinforced in his mind the
argument from tradition. The tribunician power, which he took for life,
could be exercised in almost every field of administrative activity.
Furthermore, the office was popular, because the tribune had from
time immemorial been the champion of the masses and had
protected the individual against the encroachments of the state.
Probably Augustus also felt that the power of the office, from its
nature and history, was capable of indefinite extension in all
directions.
Outside of Rome and Italy the problem before him was the
improvement of conditions in the provinces.[8] To the provinces also
he applied the dual system of control. The supervision of Italy and
the management of the older provinces were entrusted to the
senate. The border provinces, where troops were stationed, he took
into his own hands. He directed the government of them by virtue of
the proconsular imperium which he held permanently. In this case,
as in that of the tribunician power, he held firmly to an old practice,
because proconsuls had ruled the provinces for centuries, but he
extended the scope of his own imperium to cover all the unsettled
provinces. This arrangement made him commander-in-chief of all the
legions. He also held the power permanently, and he was not
required to lay down the imperium, as republican proconsuls had
done, on entering the city. The whole empire was thus put under the
dual control of Augustus and the senate. This is the first instance in
history of the establishment of a constitutional monarchy.
The provinces profited greatly by the changes which Augustus
made in the method of governing them. The evils of the republican
system come out in Cicero’s orations against Verres, the governor of
Sicily, and in the letters which he wrote while he was himself
governor of Cilicia. Governors had been sent out to the provinces
without paying much heed to their competence. They received no
salary, and their terms were short. The governors whom Augustus
sent out were chosen on the score of honesty and fitness. Their
terms were long enough to enable them to become familiar with
conditions in their provinces. They received a generous fixed salary,
and those who were capable and honest might look forward to
steady advancement. The older provinces were still under the control
of the senate, but the excellence of government in the imperial
provinces exercised a beneficial influence upon them also. Italians
and provincials welcomed the firm and stable government which the
principate of Augustus promised them in the same spirit in which the
French accepted Louis Napoleon.
The development of the city-state into a world-empire is well
illustrated by the decadence of the popular assembly which
represented the narrow, selfish interests of the city of Rome, and we
are not surprised to find the election of magistrates transferred from
this body to the senate under the successor of Augustus. As for the
magistracies they lost their independence in large measure.
Augustus introduced the practice of commending certain candidates
for office, and his approval assured them election. Consequently
they became subordinates in the new executive system, of which he
was the head. The functions of government were divided between
the prince and the senate, but the lion’s share fell to the prince. The
senate could not successfully assert, in dealing with him, the claims
which it had made good against an annually elected magistrate of
much less prestige and power. Another circumstance contributed
greatly to lessen the influence of the senate. During his declining
years Augustus could not attend all its meetings. Consequently he
adopted the practice of sending it his proposals in writing. They were
always adopted without change, and propositions of this sort, known
as orationes principis, became in the course of time part of the law of
the land.
The powers which Augustus held were granted to him for life or for
a term of years. It was not easy to arrange for their transmission to a
successor, but he cleverly surmounted the difficulty by naming
Tiberius as heir to his private fortune and by having him invested
with the imperium and with the tribunician power. The theory of the
republican magistracy was kept intact, inasmuch as the two powers
just mentioned were conferred on Tiberius by the senate in
coöperation with the people, but the action of the popular assembly
was a pure matter of form, and the senate could be counted on to
approve the choice of the prince. The precedent which Augustus set
was followed by his immediate successors.
He materially strengthened his position by clearly marking off
certain social classes from the rest of the population and by making
their privileges dependent on his favor. No one could become a
senator unless he had been elected to a magistracy, and success in
an election required the support of the prince. He gave dignity to the
knighthood and definiteness to its membership by making important
appointments from its ranks, and by revising the list of knights at
regular intervals. He even created an aristocracy among the
freedmen in the municipalities.
No survey of Roman politics would be complete without some
account of political life in these municipalities, for, as we have
already noticed, the city was the organic political unit in antiquity.
Several municipal charters,[9] most of which have been found within
the last fifty or seventy-five years, give us a clear idea of the
municipal system in the West and of the efforts which were made in
the early empire to improve it and make it uniform. In cities of the
typical form there were two local chief magistrates corresponding to
the early republican consuls, two minor magistrates who bore the
title of aediles, a senate or common council of one hundred
members, and a popular assembly. The system adopted was
conservative, inasmuch as the control of local affairs rested largely
with the local senate, and the magistrates were its ministers. Most
cities were allowed to keep a large measure of self-government
under the early empire, and this fact kept alive the sentiment of local
pride and the local patriotism of the citizens. So long as the cities
were free to manage their own affairs, the empire was prosperous.
As the cities lost their sense of responsibility, or as the central
government encroached on their rights, as it began to do in the
second century of our era, the decline of the empire set in. It was to
this halcyon period of municipal prosperity from the latter part of the
first to the close of the second century that Gibbon pays his famous
tribute in the third chapter of his history: “If a man were called to fix
the period in the history of the world, during which the condition of
the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without
hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to
the accession of Commodus.” We need not stop to consider in this
connection whether the decline of this prosperity caused the decay
of self-government or was due to it. At all events the two processes
were contemporaneous.
To return from this brief account of city-life to the story of imperial
politics,—as we have noticed, under the system which Augustus set
up, there were two recognized sources of authority in the state, the
prince and the senate. We say “recognized sources of power,”
because in the background loomed up the sinister figure of the army,
which was still capable of determining the fortunes of the state, as it
had done in the times of Sulla and Marius, of Pompey and Caesar.
Perhaps we may see the first step toward the intrusion of the army
into politics again when Sejanus, the unscrupulous praetorian prefect
of Tiberius, brought all the cohorts of the praetorian guard together in
Rome. The control of these soldiers stationed in the capital put a
powerful weapon in the hands of Sejanus, but, before he could
strike, his designs were laid bare. The hereditary principle which
Augustus had introduced, by adopting Tiberius and by conferring
imperial honors upon him, a principle which was followed by his
immediate successors, was for a time a safeguard for the
succession. But when the Julian line became extinct on the murder
of Nero, the field lay open to the imperial aspirant who was backed
by the strongest army. After a year of struggle between four military
leaders, Vespasian made good his claim to the prize, and in the year
69 founded a new dynasty, the Flavian. The precedent which
Vespasian had set was not followed for a century, but from the close
of the second century to the accession of Diocletian in 284 the
praetorian guard and the army constituted the power which made
and unmade the rulers of Rome. Within the period of seventy-three
years which preceded the reign of Diocletian there were in fact
twenty-three different emperors, almost all of whom owed their
elevation to the throne to the force of arms, and kept their places on
the throne so long as they could keep the favor of their armed
supporters.
Vespasian, whose seizure of the imperial purple we noticed a
moment ago, was not a native of the city of Rome, as all the
members of the Julian line had been, nor did he belong to a noble
family. These two facts might almost be taken as an omen of the
great change which he and his successors were to bring about in the
position of Rome and Italy in the Roman world and in the political
standing of the senate. The exceptional position which Rome and
Italy had held under the republic was taken from them in part by
robbing them of their privileges and in part by raising the provinces
to a higher political plane. Augustus had started the new movement
by stationing troops in Italy and by taking the municipal departments
in Rome under his control. Within a century the same fate befell
other Italian municipalities which had befallen Rome, and they had to
surrender to the emperor the control of their finances and their
jurisdiction in all important civil and criminal cases. The privilege
which at first Rome and later the Italian municipalities guarded most
jealously was their exclusive right to Roman and Latin citizenship.
Claudius turned from this tradition when he granted these privileges
to certain Gallic cities, and the Flavian emperors violated it in a still
more striking way by their generous treatment of many cities in
Spain. The levelling down of Italy to the position of the provinces, so
far as citizenship was concerned, was completed when Caracalla in
212 granted Roman citizenship to practically all freemen in the
empire.[10] In this connection may be mentioned a significant change
which was made in the organization of the army. The legions from
the time of Hadrian on were recruited in all parts of the empire, and
officers were no longer drawn solely from the Western and Latin-
speaking portion of the Roman world, but from the East also. The
army therefore ceased to be the great Romanizing influence which it
had been in the past, and what was still worse, a feeling of local
solidarity grew up which was destined in the end to be fatal to the
unity of the empire. It was this feeling which gave rise to the
nationalist movement in the third century, and the Gallic kingdom of
Postumus in the West in that century and the kingdom of Zenobia in
Palmyra in the East were concrete manifestations of this feeling and
at the same time premonitions of the future dissolution of the empire.
We noticed not only that Vespasian was born outside of Rome, but
also that he was of lowly birth. Perhaps the latter fact accounts in
part for the hostility which the senate showed toward him, and for the
effort which it made in the early part of his reign to assert its
authority. The movement was short-lived. The prince and the senate
were partners of unequal strength in the dyarchy which Augustus
had established, and Vespasian soon made this fact clear to the
senate. It came out still more clearly in the reign of his younger son
Domitian, who had himself made censor for life, and by virtue of this
authority drew up the lists of senators to suit his own pleasure. The
tradition of the city-state had been violated and the prestige of the
senate had been lowered when Julius Caesar admitted provincials to
the senate. This revolutionary precedent was freely followed by
emperors during the second half of the first century. This
transformation of the Roman senate into a body made up of
representatives drawn from all parts of the empire was part of the
larger change of the Roman imperium into an international world-
state. The senate was still allowed to elect the emperor, but the
election meant nothing more than the formal ratification of a choice
made by the candidate’s predecessor or by the army, and “Caesar’s
candidates” for the magistracies were always elected by the senate.
The senate’s legislative powers had almost disappeared, because
the senate had given up to the emperor almost entirely its right of
initiative. We have already observed the importance which the
“discourses of the prince” had acquired in the field of legislation.
Through the opportunity which they gave him of declaring his will,
and by the issuance of edicts, decrees and other “constitutions,” as
they were called, the emperor took the lawgiving power almost
completely into his own hands. The one real power which the senate
exercised under the empire, long after its legislative and electoral
functions had lost most of their meaning, was its right to sit as a
court, especially in important political cases. In this capacity it had
authority to impose the penalties even of banishment, deportation,
and death, but by the beginning of the third century this jurisdiction,
except where senators were charged with crimes, had passed to the
emperor. By the close of this century the Roman senate had
completed the cycle and come back to the status which it had held in
the primitive city-state, that of a municipal council.
This gradual loss of power by the senate meant a corresponding
increase of course in the influence of the emperor, but his
supremacy was assured also by positive additions to his authority in
other directions. Hadrian in the early part of the second century built
up a bureaucracy[11] so large and so systematically organized that it
enabled him and his successors to reach into the remotest parts of
the empire and control the government of municipalities and the lives
of all the citizens. Probably the world has never known so complete
and crushing a paternalistic system as is revealed to us by the
Codes of Theodosius and Justinian in the fifth and sixth centuries.
The drift toward autocracy was greatly accelerated by the
influence which Egypt and the Orient exercised on the development
of the principate. Perhaps the Oriental practice of identifying the
secular and divine rulers of the world never found complete
acceptance in Rome, but the erection of altars in the provinces to
Rome and Augustus, the attribution of the titles “Master and God” to
Domitian by his procurators, and in the third century the introduction
into the court of Elagabalus of the Persian practice of paying divine
honors to the sovereign, the presence of eunuchs in the palace of
Aurelian, and the wearing of the Eastern diadem by Diocletian, show
clearly enough that the principate was taking on the form of an
Oriental despotism. The conception of the emperor’s authority which
these practices suggest finds expression in the Code of Justinian in
the sixth century.[12] The first words of the rescript in which Justinian
authorizes Tribonian to codify the laws of the empire are: “We, under
divine guidance governing our realm, which has been entrusted to us
by the powers above, etc.” We shall see in the next chapter that
under the prevailing theory of Roman lawyers from the second to the
sixth century the emperor derived his authority from the people, but
this utterance of Justinian and other passages in the Code show us
the beginnings of the doctrine of the divine right of kings which Rome
transmitted from the Orient to the states of modern times. When this
point in the development of the empire had been reached, the
preëminence of the city of Rome had gone, the distinction between
Italy and the provinces had been obliterated, Roman citizenship had
lost its significance, the splendor of the senate and the magistracies
had faded, and the municipalities, which had been the pride and
glory of the early empire, were plunged in poverty and
wretchedness. In their place is an autocrat, kept in power by an army
made up largely of barbarians, who carried out his wishes through a
bureaucracy; and this, in turn, was supported by a body of citizens
divided into groups by a system of castes, and held in most cases to
the soil and to their hereditary occupations by the will of the state.
II. ROMAN POLITICS AND MODERN
POLITICS
1. Rome and the Church of Rome
In the brilliant argument which Belloc makes in Europe and the
Faith to prove that “the Roman Empire with its institutions and its
spirit was the sole origin of European civilization,” he goes so far as
to maintain that “the divisions and subdivisions of Europe, the parish,
the county, the province, the fixed national traditions with their
boundaries, the routes of communication between them ... all these
derive entirely from the old Roman Empire, our well-spring.” He finds
in the Church of Rome the medium through which this inheritance
has been transmitted. With this Catholic essayist the Protestant
historian, Harnack, is in substantial agreement when he writes: “The
Empire has not perished, but has only undergone a transformation....
The Roman Church is the old Roman Empire consecrated by the
Gospel.”
Before we take up for consideration certain points of resemblance
and of difference between our political institutions and those of
ancient Rome, it is interesting to stop for a moment to ask ourselves
in what respects the tradition and the ideals of the Roman state have
been perpetuated by the Church of Rome. In the first place the
Church is the lineal successor of the Empire in the sense that she
saved Europe from chaos when the political ties which bound its
several component parts to Rome were severed, and she conserved
with all her power through the Middle Ages the Roman elements
which escaped being engulfed by the wave of barbarism. More than
that, she kept alive the old tradition of world-empire, no longer of the
flesh, but of the spirit. Like the old Empire her domain embraced
diverse lands and peoples. She resembled and she resembles the
Empire now in the fact that she follows law and tradition strictly. She
requires implicit obedience from the individual, and the interests of
the individual are subordinated to those of the organization. In all
these characteristics she is the true spiritual daughter of the Roman
Empire. We noticed a moment ago that the realm of the Church, like
that of the Emperor, included many different lands. The territorial
parallelism between the two systems goes beyond this general point
of resemblance.
As Sohm has put it in his Outlines of Church History, “the city or
civitas was the lowest political unit of the Empire. It became the
lowest political unit of the Church. In the constitution of the Church
the territory of the city appeared as the episcopal diocese. In the
constitution of the Empire the province, with the provincial governor,
stood above the civitas. The episcopal dioceses were united in like
manner under the direction of the metropolitan, the bishop of a
provincial capital, forming an ecclesiastical province. In the
constitution of the Empire, from the fourth century, several provinces
composed an imperial diocese under an imperial governor (vicarius).
The imperial diocese also (at least in certain parts of the Eastern
Greek Church) formed, after the fourth century, part of the
ecclesiastical constitution, as the district of a patriarch, to whom the
metropolitans of the imperial dioceses were subordinate. Finally the
general union of the churches corresponded to the general union of
the Empire, with the imperial Council (the so-called Oecumenical
Council) as its legitimate organ.... Thus in its old age the Roman
Empire bequeathed its constitution to the young Church.... It was its
last great legacy to the future.”
And later Sohm goes on to say: “To this day the diocese of the
Catholic bishop is the copy of the Roman civitas; the province of the
Catholic archbishop, the copy of the Roman imperial province; and
the Catholic Church under a Pope declared omnipotent by law, the
copy of the ancient Roman Empire, with its Caesars who claimed the
world as their possession.” The Church extended its limits in ancient
times and still extends them by new conquests, just as the Empire
did. The missionary expeditions of Gregory in the sixth century, like
the Jesuit enterprises in North and South America in recent times,
were carried out in the spirit of Caesar or Trajan, and, after the
Christian conquest of England, Gregory spoke as a Roman Emperor
might have spoken, when he said “In one faith He linked the
boundaries of the East and the West.” The absolute power of the
Emperor in the later period is continued in tradition by the infallibility
of the Pope, and the remarks of the city prefect, Themistius, to
Theodosius the Great, “thou art the living law,” might be made with
propriety to the Pope of today. The title “Pontifex Maximus” is
common to both rulers, and there is a striking similarity between
other ecclesiastical titles and those in the official Roman list of the
Notitia Dignitatum. Latin is the official language of the Church, as it
was of the Empire; the Pope consults the College of Cardinals, as
the Emperor consulted the Senate; Canon Law, which has been
derived in part from Roman Civil law, is codified as Roman Law was;
the Councils seem to follow the parliamentary procedure of the
Roman Senate, and the dress of Church officials is reminiscent of
Roman times. In other words, what is characteristic of the spirit of
the organization and of the externals of the Church of Rome is a
direct inheritance from the Empire.
2. The Individual and the State

Let us pass now to consider the relation which our political
theories and institutions bear to those of Rome. A wise government
aims to strike a judicious balance between the rights of the individual
and the safety and welfare of the community. This happy mean can
best be determined by watching the play of the two principles in
concrete cases. Such an opportunity is offered to us by the history of
the ancient city-state which sets before us examples in which the two
ideals of government mentioned above are combined in varying
degrees. These instances range from Athens which favored the
freedom of the citizen to Delphi or Sparta which exalted the
importance of the commonwealth.
We owe also to the Greeks and Romans the discussion of another
fundamental political problem and various attempts to solve it. Is the
ideal state a state ruled by one person, by a few persons, or by all
the citizens? This question was discussed with great acumen and
learning by Greek writers on political theory, and their views with
certain modifications have been transmitted to us by Cicero in his
treatise On the Commonwealth. Indeed the merits and defects of all
systems of government have been exemplified in the history of
Rome itself, which ran through the entire gamut of governmental
forms.
The two most important Roman writers of the classical period on
political theory were Cicero and Seneca. Unfortunately only a part of
Cicero’s treatise On the Laws has come down to us, and only
fragments of his book On the Commonwealth are extant, but these
two works were known in their entirety to the early Roman jurists and
to the Christian Fathers, and have exerted a great influence on them,
and through them, upon us. Even in their present fragmentary form
they show us what an important contribution Cicero has made to
political philosophy. Quite outside the fact that he served as an
intermediary between Greek political thinking and that of our own
times, his two works are of great value to us, both because of
Cicero’s method of approaching the subject of the state and because
of his conception of the organization of society. Most of Cicero’s
predecessors, with the exception of Panaetius and Polybius, direct
their attention to the ideal state, to an imaginary commonwealth.
Cicero in his Commonwealth, De Re Publica, II. 1. 3, tells us that it is
his purpose to study the Roman state “in its birth, its growth, its
maturity, and in its present strength and vigor.” In other words he
introduces the modern method of studying the organization of actual
states, and we have set forth, perhaps for the first time, the fruitful
conception of the state as an organism.
In discussing the organization of society, Cicero finds the source of
law and justice, not in utility, but in nature. Right and wrong are
determined naturae norma, (De Legibus, I. 16. 44). This law of
nature is not one thing in Rome, another in Athens; it is not one thing
today, another tomorrow, but it is eternal and immutable, (De Re
Publica, III. 22. 33). This conception of the ius naturale was taken up
by Ulpian in the third century and by other early jurists, developed in
the Code of Justinian, and handed down through the Middle Ages to
our own time. It covers “that body of principles of justice and reason
which men can rationally apprehend, and which forms the ideal norm
or standard of right conduct and of the justice of social institutions.”
From the Civil law it passed into Canon law through the encyclopedic
work of St. Isidore in the seventh century, and gave rise to the
tripartite division which Gratian sets forth in the Decretals, when he
writes: “Ius naturale appears with the beginnings of the rational
creation, and remains unchangeable: the ius consuetudinis (i.e., the
ius gentium) had its inception later, when men began to live
together.... But the ius constitutionis (i.e., the ius civile) begins with
the principles which the Lord delivered to Moses,” i.e., with written
law. These distinctions have furnished the starting point in most
modern discussions of the subject. Cicero defined the
Commonwealth as “the affair of the people, but the people is not any
assemblage of men, gathered together in any fashion, but a
gathering united under a common law and in the enjoyment of a
common well being,” (De Re Publica, I. 25. 39). From this definition
he seems to imply that the state has a twofold purpose, to protect
the individual, and to promote his welfare. In one passage in his
Commonwealth, (De Re Publica, III. 13. 23), he makes a speaker in
the dialogue enunciate a theory of the state, out of which Rousseau
may well have developed his doctrine of the Social Contract: “But
when one person fears another, when man fears man, and class,
class, then, since no one trusts his own strength, a compact is made
between the people and the rulers, out of which springs that which
Scipio approved—a state whose form is determined by agreement.”
This theory of the Social Compact, probably derived from Cicero,
was put forth again in the eleventh century. So far as the form of the
state goes, it may be monarchical, aristocratic, or democratic, or
these three elements may be combined in it, as Cicero thought they
were in the Roman state; Cicero followed Aristotle and particularly
Polybius, in the latter’s discussion of the constitutions of Rome and
Sparta. The views which Cicero held on this point were taken up for
consideration and emphatically denied by Jean Bodin in his great
work on the state in the sixteenth century.
Cicero regards any government as legitimate which secures
justice and promotes the well being of all its citizens, but he is
dissatisfied with monarchy or aristocracy. As the Carlyles have
remarked, in their History of Mediaeval Political Theory in the West,
which has been of great service to me at many points in this chapter
in tracing the development of Roman political doctrines through the
Middle Ages, Cicero believed that “every citizen had in him some
capacity for political authority, some capacity which ought to find a
means of expression.” Another fundamental social conception which
comes to the surface in Cicero, and is still more clearly stated in
Seneca and Marcus Aurelius and the Christian writers, is that of the
homogeneity of the human race, the brotherhood of man. To the
Greeks, before the time of Stoicism, there was a great gulf between
themselves and the barbarians. The Romans showed sometimes a
similar contempt for other people, but they recognized the intellectual
and artistic superiority of the Greeks. A century and a half before
Cicero’s time Plautus seriously or humorously refers to his
countrymen as barbarians, when compared with the Greeks. In other
words the Romans believed in their own superiority in some fields of
human activity, but recognized their inferiority to other peoples in
other respects. This made them tolerant of the institutions and
practices of races which were brought within the Empire, and formed
the basis of that conception of the brotherhood of man which did so
much to ameliorate the condition of the lowly, and which is the ideal
towards which we somewhat ineffectually strive today. Allied to this
cosmopolitan doctrine of the brotherhood of man, was the Roman
doctrine concerning the composition of individual societies or states.
Aristotle’s theory of the organization of society presupposes the
inequality of the men who compose it. Cicero believed in natural
equality. We are alike, he says, in esteeming the same virtues, in
hating the same vices, in our possession of reason and in our
capacity for acquiring knowledge. Seneca is almost at the point of
extending this conception of natural equality to include even slaves,
for, as he says in his treatise on The Giving and Receiving of Favors:
“fortune has granted the slave’s body to his master, he buys it and
sells it, but the soul of a slave can not be bought and sold.” We shall
have occasion to return to this point later, but, while we are speaking
of Seneca, it may be well to mention his explanation of the origin of
the law of nature which was discussed a few moments ago. The
existence of the ius naturale presupposes a state of nature

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The Divided States: Unraveling National

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Printed in the United States of America

This book may be available in a digital edition.

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