For nineteenth-century scholars, the Trump years and their aftermath have proven both disorienting and invigorating by providing, if not a neat analogue to the tumultuous decades both before and after the American Civil War, at least enough resonances to call for a closer look at the politics, rhetoric, and literatures of a century that can often feel over-studied. The hubris and destructiveness of the Jacksonian era, the White vigilante violence of Reconstruction, the judicial setbacks of the Dred Scott Decision, and the anxieties over industrialization's incursions onto the natural world, have all made for a presentist turn to nineteenth-century studies. This presentist turn has also allowed us to rethink the nature of nineteenth-century selfhood as being akin to our own sense of disorientation with our own timeframe. The feeling of whiplash brought on by the regressive policies of the Trump administration, the setback of the Dobbs decision, and-most dramatically-the January 6th Insurrection has left many feeling at cross purposes with our own identities as scholars of nineteenth-century American literature and culture.
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