A Hercules in the Cradle

Edling, Max M.

doi:10.7208/chicago/9780226181608.001.0001

Cited by 72 publications

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“…21 If the territorialization of the North American continent represented the "most spectacular success story of the modern era," then it was one that was underpinned, as Max Edling has identified, by the federal government's "liberal use of state-sanctioned and state-directed violence." 22 The achievements of this administratively ambitious and territorially acquisitive national state were rooted in the nation's institutional framework. Though the Constitution signed in 1787 has conventionally been associated with governmental constraint, with its numerous checks upon the emergence of an overweening central government, scholars have increasingly come to suggest that it actually provided the blueprint for a state that could promote the welfare of its citizens through the creation of a dynamic and consumerdriven economy.…”

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Government by Improvisation? Towards a New History of the Nineteenth-Century American State

Bates

2021

J. Policy Hist.

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Over the last thirty years, historians and historically minded political scientists have effectively overturned the long-held perception of the nineteenth-century United States as a polity defined by its lack of an effective state. By highlighting the myriad interventions of its energetic and enterprising federal government and by incorporating subnational governments and private actors and organizations as evidence of its impressive “infrastructural” power, a generation of scholars have, collectively, described a nineteenth-century state that was both more assertive and more robust than was previously thought. Yet other scholars have begun to ask whether this interpretation has concocted a state stronger and more coherent in prospect than it was in practice. By highlighting the piecemeal and often partial nature of the nation’s institutional development and the contradictions and incoherence that accompanied its infrastructural power, these scholars have laid the foundations for a new “improvisational synthesis” that stresses the equivocal nature of American state-building and considers its enduring vulnerabilities.

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confidence: 99%