What kind of character should Americans have? Is it possible to create a shared sense of national character and identity that all Americans can subscribe to?

Americans grappled with many questions about what it meant to be an American and a citizen of the new republic after the American Revolution. They grappled with these questions because the people who made up the new United States hailed from many different cultural and ethnic backgrounds. So they wondered: How do you unite the disparate peoples of the United States into one national people?

Catherine Kelly, author of Republic of Taste: Art, Politics, and Everyday Life in Early America, joins us to explore the world of art, politics, and taste in the early American republic and how that world contributed to the formation of American character and virtue.

Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/201

 

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Complementary Episodes

• Episode 024: Kimberly Alexander, 18th-Century Fashion & Material Culture
• Episode 076: Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, Citizen Sailors: Becoming American in the Age of Revolution
• Episode 084: Zara Anishanslin, How Historians Read Historical Sources
• Episode 127: Caroline Winterer, American Enlightenments
• Episode 136: Jennifer Van Horn, Material Culture and the Making of America

 

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