Publications of the Bavarian American Academy

During the four years of Donald Trump’s presidency, questions of race, discrimination, and ethnonationalism have been gaining importance in American culture and politics once again. Racism and antisemitism have been tolerated, and at times even encouraged, by the current administration’s policies and actions, ranging from the so called “Muslim ban” and the constant demands for building a “wall” on the Mexican-American border to openly calling the neo-Nazi marchers in Charlottesville “very fine people” and to the events following the killing of George Floyd.

All this, alongside the Covid-19 pandemic, has impacted the social and political climate in the USA, even though the roots for current problems and polarizations reach deep into the American past. This volume examines recent developments in comparative perspective, analyzes their histories, and discusses their possible impact on the future.

Undoubtedly, the American Revolution is the founding moment of the United States of America. However, it also had major repercussions outside the U.S., as an inspiration for independence and social movements, for state- and nation-building. The contributions in this anthology draw from research in history, history of law, political science, art history, literary and cultural studies to assess the representations and uses of the American Revolution across the last 250 years.

The first of four thematic trajectories explores the historiographical narratives produced within and outside the borders of the U.S. The second deals with political and constitutional narratives on the American Revolution and how they were used during the Italian Risorgimento, the ‘Vormärz’ or the Revolution of 1848. The third trajectory is about the rejection of the American Revolution, about loyalists and conservatives in Europe and the Atlantic World. The fourth axis focuses on the relationship between visual/stage representations and cultural/historical memory.

All contributions show how actors remember and as such construct the American Revolution by means of visual, textual, performative, and musical representations and how they connect their representations of this past event to their present-day collective experiences, claims and actions.