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Book Reviews
| "Let a Common Interest Bind Us Together": Associations, Partisanship, and Culture in Philadelphia, 1775–1840. By Albrecht Koschnik. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007. xvi, 351 pp. Illustrations, tables, notes, bibliography, index. Cloth, $75; paper, $45.)
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This meticulously researched analytical study of voluntary associations in Philadelphia argues that Federalists, notwithstanding their failure to control major elected offices after 1800, "put the principle of voluntary action to more diverse, long-lived, and influential uses" (p. 2) than we have previously recognized. The first of five thematic chapters examines partisan groups that disagreed about the 1776 state constitution and looks at the controversies over the democratic societies of the 1790s; it also details the widespread hostility to partisan groups that prevented their long-term viability. Chapter 2 considers several post-1800 partisan fraternities, especially the Republican Tammany Society and the Federalist Washington Benevolent Society, while chapter 3 provides a rich examination of volunteer militia companies. The final two chapters focus on younger "third generation" (p. 153) Federalists and present the book's central argument—that this cohort's professional and cultural groups "formed the organizational basis for the transformation of Federalist partisanship into cultural Federalism" (p. 185). Albrecht Koschnik maintains that this broad view of political action reveals a continuity within Federalism as "it moved from the almost exclusive concern with political power to the almost equally exclusive creation of culture" (p. 9). Although Federalists left partisan politics behind, they created "the institutional backbone of a new civic culture...that provided the context for their assertion of cultural authority and stewardship" (p. 227). |
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