Recounts the pardon practice of the presidents from Woodrow Wilson to Lyndon Johnson. Notes the continuing expansion of federal criminal justice establishment, the effect of Prohibition, the expansion of the federal criminal code, and anti-narcotics campaigns on the federal prison population, and the continued low rate of clemency grants through this period. Focuses especially on clemency sought and granted for crimes of desertion or political protest during the two world wars and the Korean Conflict. Notes in particular questionable uses of the pardon power by President Harry Truman to grant relief to political allies.

During the 1870s, widespread economic and social unrest made the Reconstruction project untenable for many Republicans. The desire to minimize the federal presence in the South not only created a tension with the republican ideals and equality norms that Congress sought to impart on the states, but the lack of enforcement of these new political norms at a critical juncture undermined their ability to constrain political actors (even those who were once allies) moving forward. Chapter 7 shows that Congress’s hypocrisy and complicity in the treatment of Chinese people, women, and the initial beneficiaries of federal intervention – African Americans – diminished Congress’s standing as a counterpoint to the exclusionary tactics used by states.

The political community of “We the People” represented all of those individuals in the American polity who could claim the protection of the federal government – including women, children, and propertyless White men – but who were not necessarily voters. The Founders believed that government could limit the electorate and still be republican in form because “We the People” retained their natural right to alter or abolish government even if they could not vote. In contrast, the community of “We the Voters” had suffrage rights, but their access to the ballot was closely policed by the state. At the Founding, the electorate consisted of a small subset of Americans who could meet varying requirements concerning property ownership, age, gender, race, and citizenship. As Chapter 3 shows, after the ratification of the Twelfth Amendment, an individual deemed part of the political community entitled to vote in both state and federal elections could not be unlawfully disenfranchised without violating the Guarantee Clause’s requirement of republican government.

The Educating for American Democracy report (2021) proposes a national- consensus approach to civics and history education for K-12 public schools, emphasizing civic knowledge and civic virtues as the priority, and the necessary foundations for constructive and responsible civic participation. It then has three sections: (a) Tocqueville, Common Schools, and the Invention of American Civics – including discussion of Horace Mann, and Henry Randall Waite and the American Institute of Civics; (b) Educating for American Democracy: Civic Knowledge and Civic Virtues – summarizing the seven Themes of the report and its Roadmap of curricular guidance (ranging from Civic Participation and We the People to A New Constitution and A People in the World); and (c) American Exemplars of Reflective Patriotism and Civic Honesty – with subsections on Abolitionism and the Constitutional Confidence of Douglass and Lincoln; Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and American Justice for Women; and Martin Luther King, Jr. and Persistent Hope in American Justice.

After sketching two indicative moments from Emerson’s 1867 westward lecturing trip – his visit to the Santee Sioux in Minnesota and his visit to a group of Hegelian philosophers in St. Louis – this Introduction to the New Cambridge Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson gives an overview of the volume contributors’ main thematic emphases. These are Emerson in relation to his contemporary moment; his religious and spiritual development; transatlantic Romanticism; nature, the environment, and climate; ethics and self-reliance; political resistance and slavery; race, US imperialism, and Asia; aesthetics, poetry, philosophy, and experimentalism; and his late style and legacy. While many readers of Emerson are most familiar with the iconic picture of him as the Sage of Concord, this introduction paints a picture of a transitional and transnational Emerson who tirelessly lectured across the United States throughout his lifetime, who can be placed in his contemporaneous transatlantic currents of Romantic literature, religion, philosophy, or science, and who nonetheless looks forward to modernist poetic, aesthetic, or musical innovations.

The chapter introduces the origins of the plebiscite as a tool of international politics, and examines Sarah Wambaugh’s early career in the American women’s peace and suffrage movements. Wambaugh began researching the plebiscite following American entry into the First World War in 1917, and her early contributions reflected her youthful idealism and embrace of the principle of the self-determination of nations pronounced by Woodrow Wilson. Her early works may have influenced the peacemakers during the Paris Peace Conference of 1919; however, the plebiscites that resulted were more frequently the result of instrumental bargaining among the victorious powers. If the plebiscite was not used as consistently as advocates such as Wambaugh would have liked, a major achievement was the inclusion of women’s suffrage in nearly all plebiscites written into the post-war settlement. In this the first plebiscite decided upon for the Danish–German border region of Schleswig set an important precedent.

This chapter examines how various civil rights movements have interwoven the Declaration into their advocacy for causes to combat social and legal discrimination, including chauvinism, labor exploitation, and election plutocracy. A variety of groups, including first-wave feminists and labor advocates, effectively relied on it to promote various constitutional causes. Among suffragettes, its statement of human equality stood out, while workers’ movements favored the document’s condemnation of autocracy and oppression. As with other groups who likewise relied on the Declaration’s mandates, it represented a national commitment toward achieving a liberal equality for the common good. The Declaration of Independence remains relevant today to matters as broad in constitutional scope as federalism, campaign financing, AI advertisement, and separation of powers. Its sweeping statement of unalienable human rights and equality continues to embody core American commitments to representative democracy. That manifesto of equality and freedom has for two centuries influenced politicians, civil rights organizations, and ordinary people in the United States and abroad.

Noting the proliferation of human rights leagues at the turn of the twentieth century, and their significance up to the interwar period, this chapter argues that such leagues built on an organizational and discursive repertoire built over the course of the prior century by three transnational movements above all: the abolitionist, women’s suffrage, and peace movements. These movements shared a recognition of a systemic link between the rule of law, humanitarianism, and political participation by the people, and they sought to realize these connected values through new forms of association and mobilization. These movements shared some personnel, organizing strategies, and rhetoric. Although the language of rights and more particularly “human rights” or “droits de l’homme” was relatively marginal to these movements, especially outside France, their members did invoke human rights both to make their case on behalf of each of these humanitarian aims and also to draw connections between them, particularly between the abolition of slavery and women’s emancipation. Peace societies offered another model for bringing together diverse social groups around common political and humanitarian goals. Members of the French Ligue pour la défense des droits de l’homme et du citoyen, founded in 1898 in the context of the Dreyfus affair, as well as its provincial affiliates and human rights leagues it inspired in other countries, drew not only or even primarily on the legacy of the few prior organizations dedicated specifically to rights, but more generally on the example of these three humanitarian social movements.

Between the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century the context for petitioning changed. The number of public petitions addressed to the House of Commons declined, and commentators and politicians increasingly regarded petitioning as redundant in an era of mass electoral politics ushered in by the Third Reform Act (1884–85). Yet, as this chapter shows, petitioning did not decline but was rather reinvented in this period. Campaigners increasingly addressed singular mass petitions to a range of different authorities, including the monarch and Downing Street, in ways that emphasised the performative presentation of petitions to maximise coverage in the mass media. High-profile examples, such as petitions organised by the militant suffragettes or the Ulster Covenant and Declaration (1912) associated with Unionist opposition to Irish Home Rule, were part of a broader reimagining of petitioning with the UK’s nascent democracy. Finally, contemporaries also considered petitions to be a mechanism for calling referendums, as shown in a number of bills of the time, and also in the numerous mass petitions from Unionists and others to the king calling for Home Rule to be referred to the people via referendum or general election. As this chapter shows, while the practice of petitioning changed during an era of rapid democratisation it retained an important place within UK popular politics and political culture.

Why did people petition and why did they continue to do so when petitions were rarely successful in securing immediate change? The point of petitioning was extensively discussed within nineteenth-century political and social movements. Critics questioned the wisdom of petitioning and argued in favour of electioneering or more direct forms of protest. Tellingly, however, many of these alternatives were either petitions by another name or were facilitated by subscriptional activity. Even if they were ignored or rejected by authorities, petitions were indispensable to political campaigns and social movements, including Chartism, anti-slavery, women’s suffrage, anti-Catholics, and the Anti-Corn Law League, for a variety of reasons. This explains why so many Victorian activists were indefatigable petitioners. Petitioning was the key method for mobilising popular support and pressuring Parliament; an important way of recruiting activists and developing formal political organisation, at both national and local level; raising public awareness and political consciousness; and finally, for forging valuable networks with elite politicians. Petitioning thus underpinned and made possible a broader repertoire of modern campaigning.

The Black press was produced almost exclusively by male writers and editors. Those writers, joined by a small number of women authors, frequently addressed themselves to women readers or took up women’s issues. While the papers often invoked the ideal of Black women leading fulfilled lives in the home, caring for their husbands and children, they also acknowledged that for most Afrodescendants, that ideal was simply unattainable. Writers supported the efforts of Black (and White) domestic workers to organize and achieve the workplace protections enjoyed by industrial and commercial workers.Motherhood was a fraught and frequent topic in the Black press. The papers worried about high rates of illegitimacy and single motherhood in their communities, and enjoined mothers to prepare their children to lead honorable and productive lives.Women’s contributions to the papers offer evidence of Black women's political participation, before and after the advent of female suffrage, and the limits of that participation. Finally, female beauty was a regular topic in the Black press, which offered advice on how to achieve it, public contests to determine who best embodied it, and debate over fashion from the perspective of both morality and women’s equality.

The Mexican–US War ends with the top half of Mexico – and its people – subsumed into the voracious US empire. A new musical genre – the Corrido – emerges from the new borderlands. The California Gold Rush produces a wealth of song from as far east as Scandinavia and as far west as China. US nativists sing against the arriving Germans and Irish Catholics, but they reserve their greatest musical venom for the Chinese in the form of the “John Chinaman” minstrel stereotype. Against such vicious representations, we have the Songs of Gold Mountain to reflect the true humanity of Chinese immigrants. In the wake of the Seneca Falls Convention, songs of women’s suffrage resound across the landscape, including those of Sojourner Truth. The Hutchinson Family Singers become the first US “supergroup” with their abolition songs, and Black challenges to the minstrelsy of E. P. Christy, Stephen Foster, and others continue, not only through the oratory of Frederick Douglass and songs of the Underground Railroad, but also through the operatic accomplishments of Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield.As the country careens toward the irrepressible schism of civil war, song becomes a highly supercharged, sectional arena.

The new century’s radical songwork takes in the victims of the Triangle Factory fire, Mother Jones, and the bards of the Industrial Workers of the World (with Joe Hill at their pinnacle). The IWW’s Italian songwriters – Arturo Giovannitti and Efrem Bartoletti – emerge as important voices, as do the Finnish songwriters of the Italian Hall Disaster in Calumet, Michigan, and the multinational corridistas of the Ludlow Massacre in Colorado. Other revolutionary arenas include the vaudeville stage and the drag club, where the cross-dressing of Julian Eltinge and Bothwell Browne challenges the tyranny of heterosexual norms. Charlotte Perkins Gilman emerges as a leading songwriter for women’s suffrage and joins the ranks of those opposing US entry into the coming European war. As the government clamps down on the proliferation of antiwar activism, Tin Pan Alley leads the shift from antiwar to prowar songwriting. With the US now at war, Black soldiers produce a powerful body of song reflecting the outrages of segregation in the ranks. Black composers James Reese Europe and Noble Sissle turn their wartime service into pioneering art-song, and Lakota warriors –formerly forbidden to sing – lend their voices to the war effort. The Armistice produces a wealth of song celebration, but a new musical menace arises in the form of the Ku Klux Klan and its vicious songs.

This chapters analyzes Canada’s struggles during two world wars, a global depression, and the onset of mass consumer society. The Great War claimed the lives of 65,000 soldiers and exacerbated cultural and regional cleavages. In the 1920s mass consumer society, secularism, and youth culture began to challenge the Victorian values that had hitherto served as a basis for social cohesion. As a nation dependent on the export of primary resources, Canada suffered deeply from the Great Depression of the 1930s. Although the economic crisis lifted with the outbreak of the Second World War, social divisions persisted. The turmoil resulting from wars and depression encouraged new political parties and movements (Progressive, Farmer, Labour, Communist, Maritime Rights, Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, Social Credit, Union Nationale, and Reconstruction) that undermined the two-party system. Women struggled to translate the franchise, which they won federally in 1918, into political power. In 1929 the British Judicial Committee of the Privy Council (Canada’s highest court of appeal until 1947) declared women “persons” under the law but discrimination against women remained rampant. Dominions in the British Empire were accorded full autonomy by the Statute of Westminster in 1931, but internal differences blunted its practical applications in Canada until after the Second World War.