Dissertation Poject

Symbolic Communication of Colonial and State Legislatures, c. 1760-1820 (working title)

The project examines the transformation of selected colonial legislative assemblies (colonial legislatures) into republican, “American” institutions (state legislatures) from the outbreak of the American Revolution to the 1820s.

Created in the 17th and 18th centuries as political counterweights to the royally appointed governors and to

represent settler interests, the legislative assemblies of the thirteen north American colonies came into conflict with the Crown during the struggle for independence. This tension culminated in the mid-1770s, when confrontations – either with the royal governors or with the increasingly radicalized and disillusioned populace – led to the dissolution of assemblies in almost all the colonies. Under the constitutions adopted between 1776 and 1780 by the newly declared “states,” legislatures were reestablished – larger and more ethnically, religiously, and socially diverse than before. Contrary to what many historians long believed, these new bodies did not simply inherit the widespread “political attachment” once given to their colonial predecessors.

Methodologically, the project, which is located at the intersection of constitutional history, political history and cultural history, draws on theoretical and empirical work on “constitutional culture(s)”, which understand constitutions as lived orders that are staged in regular practice and created through performative acts of communication. The project examines the significance of “symbolic communication” in the staging of authority, both within parliament and in interaction with the governed.  Among the events examined are, for example, elaborate and costly inauguration ceremonies at the annual openings of parliament, but also the numerous controversies fueled by zealous newspaper editors over parliamentary privileges of individual members and allegedly unconstitutional observances of Thanksgiving Day by parliaments. It has already become apparent that the replacement and substitution of familiar and proven instruments of rule was not complete with the declaration of independence in 1776, nor with its military enforcement and recognition in 1783. Until well into the 19th century, Great Britain, from which the American states had broken away in a war lasting several years, remained just as much a point of reference as other European powers or British colonies in North America and the Caribbean, which remained part of the Empire after 1776.

The legislatures are understood as arenas for the negotiation of ideological conflicts in the post-revolutionary, post-war United States and serve as a prism for the broader social changes shaping the nascent nation.