The Body Politic: Foundings, Citizenship, and Difference in the American Political Imagination

In The Body Politic, Catherine Holland advances an original thesis that challenges the dominant schools of thought concerning the liberal tradition in the United States. Organized around two founding moments--the American Revolution and ratification of the Constitution and the period of Reconstruction following the American Civil War--The Body Politics identifies a recurring, symbolic figure at the heart of American dilemmas of citizenship and nation, namely the human body.

Holland reinterprets the meaning of the struggle for citizenship, and doesn't simply include issues of gender and race, but demonstrates how anxieties and concerns about the shifting meaning of the body is crucial to understanding pivotal moments in the founding and refounding of American citizenship.

Holland reexamines both literature and events, from the writings of Thomas Jefferson to the adultery trial of Henry Ward Beecher, to demonstrate how embodiment and disembodiment shaped the imagination of the nation and of citizenship throughout American political history.