Doctoral Dissertations
Date of Award
5-2011
Degree Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy
Major
English
Major Professor
Mary E. Papke
Committee Members
Dawn Coleman, Katy Chiles, Carolyn R. Hodges
Abstract
The Usable Past: American Saxonhood and the Making of America investigates the historical consciousness that serves as a conduit in the link from Britain to the colonization of New World America. This project traces the mythos of Anglo-Saxonism as it moves from Renaissance England to early America as both a cultural construct and ideological nation-building tool and puts these notions through extensive investigations of both early American and English culture and texts. The ways in which Anglo-Saxon authors envisioned history as unfolding becomes an important ideological model for the later American concept of historical identity. I have chosen to call my theoretical construct “American Saxonhood,” a term that fuses the socio-historical tendencies and aspirations with national concerns and ideologies. Out of a melting pot of English racial groups and perverted ideological notions of power, American Saxonhood sprung into being in the British New World as a shaping force for a new land, an ideology of domination, superiority, and, eventually, national pride, with the intent to forge an imagined community upon its own geographically physical grounds. The introduction introduces Anglo-Saxonism as a myth and the relevant background studies from which this project moves, announces the ultimate claims it advances, and defines the construct of American Saxonhood. Chapter One examines the socio-historical and cultural context of Anglo-Saxon history and its primary textual models, specifically British and Saxon historians—where they came from, the ideas within them, and the formation of a uniquely New World Saxon identity from the Anglo-Saxon impulse. Chapter Two explores Captain John Smith’s and the Virginia Company’s use of primary Anglo-Saxon material for the New World settlement of Jamestown, developing the idea that out of the ideological content in Anglo-Saxon texts, prominent members of the Virginia Company formulate a new, romantic nation-building ideology specifically designed for the Virginia venture. Chapter Three examines the New England region’s appropriation of the myth, starting with William Bradford and moving through John Winthrop to Cotton Mather. Finally, Chapter Four looks at the way in which Thomas Jefferson extends the mythos of American Saxonhood and weaves it into the national consciousness for succeeding generations.
Recommended Citation
Modarelli, Michael A, "The Usable Past: American Saxonhood and the Making of America. " PhD diss., University of Tennessee, 2011.
https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/11599
