Willing Obedience: Citizens, Soldiers, and the Progress of Consent in America, 1776-1898

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Stanford University Press, 2004 - History - 273 pages
This book highlights obedience as an American cultural motif by examining the ways in which citizens understand and dramatize the struggle between autonomy and allegiance. Willing Obedience tells the story of Americans who worked out the simultaneous demands of liberty and obedience in fiction, military memoir, and political writing from the Revolution through the nineteenth century. In contrast to the European model of a subject's blind obedience to a monarch, Americans imagined an allegiance that preserved autonomy even as they consented to the constraints of a new republic. In particular, the book considers the case of the soldier, whose surprisingly complex relationship to authority is in fact representative of the situation of all citizens in a republic.

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Contents

Sherman Lincoln and the Lawyer
1
Lincolns Electric Cord
50
Civil Warriors and Vandal Chiefs
93
Habits of Command Habits of Obedience
140
A Singular Absence of Heroic Poses
178
The Education of Theodore Roosevelt
222
Notes
235
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About the author (2004)

Elizabeth D. Samet is Associate Professor of English at the United States Military Academy at West Point.

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