TY  - BOOK
AU  - Schmeller,Mark G.
TI  - Invisible sovereign: imagining public opinion from the revolution to reconstruction 
T2  - New studies in American intellectual and cultural history
SN  - 9781421418711
AV  - E302.1 .S36 2016eb
U1  - 303.3/80973 23
PY  - 2016///]
CY  - Baltimore, MD
PB  - Johns Hopkins University Press
KW  - Public opinion
KW  - United States
KW  - History
KW  - 18th century
KW  - 19th century
KW  - SOCIAL SCIENCE
KW  - General
KW  - bisacsh
KW  - Politics and government
KW  - fast
KW  - 1775-1783
KW  - 1783-1865
KW  - 1865-1877
KW  - Electronic book
KW  - Electronic books
N1  - Includes bibliographical references and index; Introduction : public opinion and the American political imagination -- The moral economy of opinion -- The political economy of opinion -- Partisan manufactories of public sentiment -- The importance of having opinion -- The fatal force of public opinion -- Irrepressible conflicts, impending crises -- Conclusion : corn-pone opinion -- Essay on sources
N2  - "Even today, with sophisticated surveys and computer-produced margins of error, we have trouble gauging the elusive voice we call 'public opinion, ' but no one questions its importance in a democracy. In this insightful new study, Mark G. Schmeller sets out to recreate or approximate the nature of public opinion between independence and the aftermath of Civil War and also examine what leading Americans thought about it. Where could one detect it? How might attitudes toward it, in the abstract and concrete, have changed in this eventful period? 'As Americans contested the meaning of this essentially contestable concept, ' Schmeller explains, 'they expanded and contracted the horizons of political possibility and renegotiated the terms of political legitimacy.' He argues that what began life as something close to exceptionally American republican thought (and in a sense unchanging) became something far more malleable and subject to manipulation by means of stump-speech rhetoric, partisan newspapers, trumpeting of the importance of the self in the nineteenth century, etc. Crossing into so many discrete fields of historical research, this project has much potential as a synthesizing meta-narrative"--
UR  - https://libproxy.firstcity.edu.my:8443/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&scope=site&db=nlebk&AN=1083505
ER  -