Upscaling Downtown: Interpersonal Dynamics of Nightlife Revelers in Geneva, New York

Bars have long been recognized as the intersection of a city’s culture and commerce. They provide opportunities for social interaction, contain a multitude of local memories, and serve as sources of identity. The American Revolution, the Whiskey Rebellion, and the Stonewall riots all developed out of local bars. So, what does it mean when the character of bars in a neighborhood begins to change? How do these changes to commercial spaces affect the social fabric of a city? Using a combination of ethnographic fieldwork and interviews, I explore the upscaling of the downtown bar scene in Geneva, New York to unpack what these commercial changes mean for the disparate groups that frequent the downtown space. I argue that instead of simply diversifying the types of businesses available to consumers in Geneva, this development has altered the very character and social fabric of downtown. Rather than creating an integrated and cohesive nightlife scene in which disparate groups come together in shared space and time, this development manifests in the fragmentation of the downtown scene in new ways that increase the segregation of people in social space.

Peace, the Constitution, and Rebellion, 1781–1800

The years following Cornwallis’s surrender in 1781 saw a few more treason cases, and a large number of cases of persons accused of aiding British prisoners to escape. Summary data on treason prosecutions are presented. Returning Loyalists were largely well treated. The state’s last treason indictment, dealing with the Connecticut land dispute, was issued in the late 1780s. The Constitutional Convention adopted a Treason Clause, the meaning of which was tested in trials resulting from the Whiskey Rebellion and Fries’s Rebellion. The prosecution and defense disagreed over whether these rebellions amounted to levying war against the United States. This debate contained many echoes of the earlier debate over resistance to British measures, and would not be conclusively resolved until the nineteenth century, if then.

The Trials of Allegiance

The Trials of Allegiance examines the law of treason during the American Revolution—a convulsive, violent civil war in which nearly everyone could be considered a traitor, either to Great Britain or to America. Drawing from extensive archival research in Pennsylvania—one of the main centers of the revolution—Carlton Larson provides the most comprehensive analysis yet of the treason prosecutions brought by Americans against British adherents—through committees of safety, military tribunals, and ordinary criminal trials. Although popular rhetoric against traitors was pervasive in Pennsylvania, jurors consistently viewed treason defendants not as incorrigibly evil, but as fellow Americans who had made a political mistake. This book explains the repeated—and violently controversial—pattern of acquittals. Juries were carefully selected in ways that benefited the defendants, and jurors refused to accept the death penalty as an appropriate punishment for treason. The American Revolution, unlike many others, would not be enforced with the gallows. More broadly, Larson explores how the Revolution’s treason trials shaped American national identity and perceptions of national allegiance. He concludes with the adoption of the Treason Clause of the United States Constitution, which was immediately put to use in the early 1790s in response to the Whiskey Rebellion and Fries’s Rebellion. In taking a fresh look at these formative events, The Trials of Allegiance will reframe how we think about treason in American history—up to and including the present.

The Critique of the Articles of Confederation Reconsidered

Generations of scholars have declared the Articles of Confederation to be inadequate to the needs of the nation of necessity replaced by the Constitution of 1787. This interpretation rests on three methodological flaws. First, it is anachronistic by which I mean that scholars use as a standard of judgement answers to questions of constitutional policy embedded in the Constitution. They then judge the alternative answers of the Articles to be wrong. Secondly, they compare the Articles in practice to the words of the Constitution incorrectly assuming the “promises” of the latter became effective public policy during the Early National period. Thirdly, they interpret comparable events in accordance with their preconceived judgement. Events like Shays’ Rebellion during the Confederation era are interpreted as signs of weakness. Comparable events in the Constitution era, like the Whiskey Rebellion and its aftermath, are judged signs of strength.

Political Practices and Political Community in the Early Republic, 1790–1794

The ratification of the US Constitution forced Pennsylvanians to adapt their democratic, extra-governmental political practices to the new federal government. This chapter looks at how these practices evolved in the early 1790s, investigating gubernatorial and legislative elections, as well as the creation of Democratic-Republican Societies and the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794. These activities focused on opposing the actions of George Washington’s administration, defending popular political activity against the Federalist policies including Alexander Hamilton’s excise tax on whiskey. The chapter particularly focuses on the events of the Whiskey Rebellion, looking at how Pennsylvanians from all corners of the state developed political institutions as they sought to resolve the long-running tensions which led to violence. Ultimately, the resolution of the Whiskey Rebellion vindicated a vision of popular sovereignty in which non-violent, representative political action, rather than an appeal to federal authority, proved most successful.

George Washington vs. The Phantom

This chapter examines two competing forms of sovereign representation against the backdrop of the Whiskey Rebellion. In the new federal republic, George Washington served as a unifying symbol of the people in the centuries-long tradition of the monarch, but the very rituals of Washington’s office and also those of the rebels, such as tar-and-feathering, call attention to the first president’s limitations as symbol of the body politic. Rather than a static substance, the people are a protean force, a circumstance that prompts new forms of representation in Mason Locke Weems’s Life of Washington (1800), Hugh Henry Brackenridge’s Modern Chivalry (1797), and other works.

American Enchantment

This book investigates the post-revolutionary rituals and discourses of enchantment, a category of mystical experience uniquely capable of producing new forms of popular power and social affiliation. American Enchantment views this phenomenon as a response to a signature problem in post-revolutionary culture: how to represent the people in the absence of the king’s body and other traditional monarchical forms. In the early United States, this absence inaugurates new attempts to conjure the people and to reconstruct the symbolic order. For many in this era, these efforts converge on enchantment. This pattern appears in works by Charles Brockden Brown, Washington Irving, Catharine Sedgwick, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, as well as in the rites of George Washington’s presidency, the religious prophecy of the Second Great Awakening, the tar and featherings of the Whiskey Rebellion, and other ritual practices such as romance reading. Recognizing the role of enchantment in constituting the people overturns some of our most commonsense assumptions: above all, the people are not simply a flesh-and-blood substance but also a supernatural force. This project makes a significant contribution to interdisciplinary scholarship on the symbolic foundations of sovereignty by arguing that the new popular sovereignty is no longer an embodied presence fixed in space—in a king, nor even in a president, an individual, a group of persons, or the state—but a numinous force dispersed through time. That is, the people, counter to all traditional thought, are a supernatural and temporal process.