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Nationalist Ironies: The Legacy of the Federalist Party and the Construction of a Unified Republic

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Cultures of Memory in the Nineteenth Century

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Abstract

The Federalist Party, one of the nation’s two major political parties in the Republic’s first decades, disintegrated in 1823. Yet, decades after their demise Federalists remained active in American memory and treated as a living danger. The chapter looks at the Federalist Party’s legacy, beginning in its lifetime and culminating in the aftermath of the American Civil War. The chapter shows that the usage of the Federalist Party as an “other” reveals a special irony of nineteenth-century American nationalism: the party itself was regarded as outside the American Revolution’s republican legacy even as some of its core ideas came out victorious—though by a different name.

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Almog, A. (2020). Nationalist Ironies: The Legacy of the Federalist Party and the Construction of a Unified Republic. In: Grenier, K., Mushal, A. (eds) Cultures of Memory in the Nineteenth Century. Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37647-5_11

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