Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: James Harrington's The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656) has predominantly been interpreted as a work of republican opposition to Oliver Cromwell's Protectorate. This paper makes the case for understanding it as an act of counsel, offering the Lord Protector a prescription for the fulfillment of his own primary stated political ambitions.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Abstract

For a number of years I’ve been gathering materials for a book on party bolting by elected leaders. I’ve presented papers on facets of this topic at APSA and MWPSA meetings (most recently on Ben Nighthorse Campbell and Richard C. Shelby). My paper on Jeffords will consider factors precipitating his switch. It will contrast his pre- and post-defection voting behavior and will compare him with others who have left their party in recent years (with Wayne Morse, Harry Byrd Jr. and Robert Smith, who became independents, and with those who defected to the other political party).

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Analyses of the political thought of James Madison have typically divided his theoretical work into two phases. In the first -- Madison as Publius -- the Founder grapples with the challenges of creating a strong central state. In the second -- Madison as politician -- the Founder abandons the Federalist position and becomes the chief theorist of the Jeffersonian effort to protect individual rights. Madison’s defenders, such as Lance Banning, have sought to reconcile these phases, while the Founder’s critics typically dismiss one or the other of them as opportunist.

Less noticed -- but crucial to understanding the whole of Madison’s thought -- is the emergence of a third phase: Madison as elder statesman, a period that bridges the end of his political career and the emergence of rights-oriented philosophies, like those of John Calhoun, that portended a rupture of the republic the Founder worked so hard to create. In this phase, Madison sheds the rhetoric of individual rights and reincarnates his role as Publius, the advocate of a strong central government in which popular majorities are slowed and channeled but ultimately accepted as the only alternative to despotic rule. This paper, which charts Madison’s retreat from rights and return to his majoritarian beginnings, is part of a larger project that explores the balance the Founder sought to strike between individual rights and majority rule -- a conflict that continues to haunt liberal theory to this day.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Henry James created one of American fiction’s most vivid images of the female reporter in the character of Henrietta Stackpole, Isabel Archer’s intrepid friend in The Portrait of a Lady (1881). An American journalist whose letters for The New York Interviewer are “universally quoted,” Henrietta comes to Europe to write a series of letters from abroad. Scholars have long noted the self-referential potential of James’s namesake reporter, but they have rarely taken her seriously. In the preface to the 1908 edition of Portrait, James apologizes at length for allowing such a minor character as Henrietta to “pervade” his novel, observing that “she exemplifies, I fear, in her superabundance, not an element of my plan, but only an excess of my zeal.” A bit player who ends up taking up a surprising amount of space, the Progressive-minded Henrietta is often discussed in terms that echo James’s own dismissive commentary, as a character who somehow got away from him—particularly when he revised Portrait for the New York edition, some twenty-seven years after its original publication.

This paper considers precisely how and why Henrietta Stackpole got away from her author. In the process, it pays special attention to an under-examined figure of the Progressive Era, the globe-trotting girl reporter. It reads Henrietta against the backdrop of the real-life American newspaperwomen who traveled and lived abroad in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century—and who embodied a modern phenomenon of publicity and progressivism often identified as peculiarly American. The “superabundance” that James associates with Henrietta reflects, at least in part, the explosive possibilities of transnational publicity, which promised to spread American democracy abroad but also launched an unpredictable exchange of ideas and judgments—about women, about progress, about reform, about the United States itself. James’s difficulties with Henrietta bear reluctant witness to the female writers who made careers out of such unpredictable exchanges at the turn of the century. Distinguished by their mobility and intrepidity, these women included Nellie Bly, who wrote her first book about spending six months in Mexico and attained media stardom in 1890 when she circumnavigated the globe in 72 days; Elizabeth Banks, who became known for her “Campaigns of Curiosity” in London in the 1890s; Ida Tarbell, who went to Paris as an unknown in 1891 and ended up writing a biography of French revolutionary hero Madame Roland; and Ida B. Wells, whose first anti-lynching pamphlet, Southern Horrors, was published in London as U.S. Atrocities and whose British lecture tour in 1893 catapulted her into prominence at home and abroad. Whether they were advocating American technological superiority like Nellie Bly or exposing American hypocrisy like Ida B. Wells, the comings and goings of these newspaperwomen forged a highly visible model of the Progressive woman writer embedded in a publicity machine without national borders. James did not like this model at all. But as Henrietta’s evolution reveals, he felt obliged to reckon with its startling power.