Civic Longing is a meticulously researched, elegantly written, and timely study of the early American conception of citizenship. Carrie Hyde shows persuasively how literature and literary analysis help to fashion the categories through which we imagine our affiliations. At a time when the humanities are under attack from a variety of sources, these carefully articulated and demonstrated claims are especially salient.
-- Priscilla Wald, Duke University
How did Americans imagine citizenship before the Fourteenth Amendment? By attending to philosophy, religion, law, literature, and education, Carrie Hyde’s smart, sharp, and unique book provides a new history (perhaps even a prehistory) for a central but often undefined term in American political life.
-- Eric Slauter, University of Chicago
In this provocative interdisciplinary study, Carrie Hyde explores the various ways that U.S. citizenship was imagined and reimagined prior to the Fourteenth Amendment. One of her great contributions is to show how writings by Hawthorne, Douglass, Stowe, and many others played a fundamental role in shaping pre-1868 notions of U.S. citizenship. Beautifully written and brilliantly argued, Civic Longing offers fresh insights into the nineteenth century while speaking to vexing issues in our own time.
-- Robert S. Levine, University of Maryland
Impressive…Traces the retroactive and fluctuating ways in which citizenship has been defined in the United States since the days of the Founding Fathers.
-- Paul Giles Australian Book Review
Hyde’s excellent book makes a strong case for the role of culture and literature in shaping American understandings of what it meant to be a member of the nation in the era before the 14th amendment asserted law’s authority.
-- Johann N. Neem Civil War Book Review
Hyde takes the reader on an intellectual grand tour of citizenship as it has applied to the American context. That tour includes references to Western ‘contract’ theorists, the founders, the Declaration of Independence, U.S. Supreme Court decisions, and anti-slavery writers.
-- Choice
Hyde makes a persuasive case for the importance of literature to the development of American understandings of citizenship…Hyde’s book is one that historians will need to ponder.
-- Andrew Diemer American Historical Review
Civic Longing provides an exciting new framework for evaluating the political influence of literature in the antebellum nation…Conceptualizing citizenship through literary renderings of displacement marks this bookʼs most significant contribution to the field. By shifting our understanding of citizenship from an experience of collective belonging to an imaginative experience of longing, Hydeʼs work provides a new way to think about the political influence of literature and the sentimental dynamics of national affiliation.
-- Keri Holt William and Mary Quarterly
Civic Longing is extremely valuable for its exploration of genres that legal scholars would not traditionally turn to when tracing the ancestry of our modern conception of citizenship. These alternative sources offer some important insights into how imagined citizenship affects the development of legal constructs…Hyde’s analysis is sophisticated and detailed. Her mastery of her selected sources is impressive, and the conclusions she draws from these sources are persuasive.
-- D. Carolina Núñez Tulsa Law Review
Astute…Hyde is particularly adept at using interdisciplinary, sociohistorical materials to uncover the ways in which the concept of citizenship evolved from the late eighteenth century to the nineteenth…Offer[s] new ways to suggest how evolving concepts of belonging were formed across different forms of media, including court cases, novels, short stories, and newspapers.
-- Kacy Dowd Tillman Early American Literature