Answer:
This dissertation examines popular fictions that employed the history and
iconography of the American Revolution to promote radical reform movements in the
antebellum United States. The project challenges common critical assumptions that
historical fictions—and particularly those drawing upon Revolutionary history—are
inherently nostalgic and capable of conveying only a limited range of political meanings.
Rather than conservative efforts to preserve Revolutionary history, many works of this type
were extensions of their authors’ progressive reform efforts. These historical fictions sought
to recruit readers to the cause of completing the democratizing work of the Revolution in
order to ensure that the people maintained control over their own institutions.
The project considers works by authors who circulated among groups and parties that
contributed to the democratic tumult of the antebellum period, including Catharine Maria
Sedgwick, George Lippard, Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Beecher
Stowe. As members—either centrally or peripherally—of opposition political parties,
unions, and reform groups, these authors spoke on behalf of, or were received as engaging
with, campaigns for labor reform, socialism, and abolitionism. Situating these texts within
contemporary radical reform movements reveals that they explicitly endorsed policies such
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