Political scientists largely agree that, today, the modern presidential nomination process favors the rise of ideologically extreme candidates who contribute to the ideological polarization that the country is experiencing. Political scientists, however, disagree about the direction in which reform should move. Most political scientists believe that the process has become too democratic and that the cure for the current ideological polarization is to return the nomination process to the control of party leaders. This prescription for reform, however, ignores the fact that, when party leaders did control the process in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, they too often chose ideological extremists or populist demagogues. Rather, as the Conclusion elucidates, the problem with the current process is that it is insufficiently democratic: the rules governing the process exclude too many ideologically moderate voters, thereby encouraging the selection of more ideologically extreme candidates. The Conclusion closes with several suggestions for how the nomination process could be opened more fully in the future so as to remedy this ideological polarization.

Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly (1799) narrates two scenes of panther attacks. In the first scene, Huntly’s mind is paralyzed, while in the second, Huntly’s body kills a stalking panther by hurling a tomahawk across a dark cave, an effort stemming from our bodily “constitution.” This introduction argues that this artist not only troubled the mind-centered ontology of consciousness—the Cartesian idea of the mind’s dominance over the body—but also explored the ontological alternatives that centered the expressions of our material body’s “constitution.” It both uncovers the posthumanist accents of this work, and reveals the way it prods us to refurbish posthumanism by historicizing it. Starting with Brown, this introduction thus recovers a set of texts focused on “minding the body,” on not simply eroding the philosophical distinction between the mind and body in order to trouble a mind-centered ontology and imagine a body-centered alternative to it, as posthumanism does. It also reveals the way artists used the expressive agency of these historical bodies to imagine less repressive alternatives to nineteenth-century structures of power—including chattel slavery, market capitalism, and patriarchy—whose claims to dominance involved reducing the body to little more than mindless matter.

Although the McGovern-Fraser reforms opened the nomination process to ordinary voters in both parties, the democratization of the process proved to be incomplete. State laws and party rules often excluded many voters, such as independent voters in states that used a closed primary restricted only to party members. Restrictive party reenrollment rules also disabled many voters from changing parties in the weeks or months leading up to the presidential primary election, thereby preventing them from voting for the candidate they supported. Moreover, voters in some states found that they possessed less influence in the process than voters in other states. Voters in smaller states were allotted more national convention delegates (and therefore influence in the process) than their populations warranted, and, by the end of the twentieth century, it was apparent that voters in states that held their primary or caucuses early in the calendar had more influence than voters in later states.

As the 1968 convention had commanded, the Democratic Party empaneled a rules reform commission to examine the party’s nomination process, most notably the rules governing how national convention delegates were selected. Following a series of public meetings, the McGovern-Fraser Commission adopted eighteen guidelines that would fundamentally reshape the presidential nomination process in the party. To comply with the new guidelines, many states adopted the presidential primary, and, unlike early primary elections, the new primaries had to allow voters to choose which presidential candidate they supported (either by registering their preference directly or by choosing delegates whose candidate preference was expressly listed on the ballot). The new primaries also became binding, ensuring that the winner of a state’s primary election actually received the support of the delegates from that state. The end result was a nomination process that empowered ordinary voters for the first time in American history, and, because the new primaries were codified in state law, the McGovern-Fraser reforms also had the effect of democratizing the Republicans’ nomination process as well.

White cultural elites in the US capital of Philadelphia in the 1780s and 1790s depicted Native Americans (or “Indians”) as vanishing peoples, soon to be replaced by Anglo culture. The fledgling nation’s premier naturalist Bejamin Smith Barton and the consecrated poet of the American Revolution Philip Freneau turned to Spanish American antiquarianism to invent a glorious antiquity for North America. They learned from Antonio de Ulloa’s Noticas Americanas (1772) and Francisco Javier Clavijero’s Storia Antica del Messico (1781) how to practice antiquarian materialism, then chose early Republican literary and scientific periodicals to disseminate their conquest of the Native American past. Those two americanistas in particular showed how to collect Indigenous artifacts, assemble them, and invest them with European meanings, which inspired the first generation of US Americanists to relegate Native American life to the dustbin of prehistory and at once fabricate their own Whiteness.

Starting with Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), the first major Anglophone text reacting to Euro-American colonialism, this chapter traces how Early American texts – such as Walter Ralegh’s Discoverie of Guiana (1596), John Winthrop’s “A Modell of Christian Charity” (1630), and William Byrd II’s History of the Dividing Line (post-1728) – reflect the dizzying complexity of economic exchange in the Atlantic colonies before US independence. As European encounters with Indigenous cultures unsettled long-held assumptions about economic value and English colonies adopted multiple systems of exchange to survive, these texts show their colonial actors improvising to navigate ever-shifting conditions. In doing so, I argue, these actors engage in the kind of intersubjective thought experiments that Adam Smith describes in his social and political theories. While contemporary US culture often imagines Smith ushering America into economic modernity, then, these texts show the vector of influence moving in the opposite direction, with Anglophone New World literature showing, very early, the possibilities and problems of the commercial imagination.

This chapter surveys portrayals of money within US speculative fiction. While they may take us to alien planets or alternate universes, such works also serve to remind us how strange “ordinary” money already is. Speculative fiction has often sought to reimagine money in some more rational or explainable form. These thought experiments often propose money based on some purportedly stable and incontrovertible value, such as labor, time, energy, or motion. There is a second and somewhat distinct tendency, which envisions reputation-based currencies and other “storied moneys,” often capable of reflecting diverse incommensurable values. Then there are portrayals of large fortunes that, whether or not they come with overt speculative elements such as magic or futuristic technologies, can also take on an aura of the fantastic. In particular, large fortunes become storied money to the extent that they reflect and enact their owners’ personal characteristics, relationships, and histories. Speculative fiction also often blurs with speculative practices, from Josiah Warren’s Time Store in the 1820s to the Technocracy movement of the 1930s to contemporary cryptocurrency, Non-Fungible Tokens, and blockchain finance. This porous boundary invites the question: might money itself be understood as a kind of speculative fiction?

This chapter argues that antebellum sensationalism, broadly defined, offers a key archive for understanding the emotional life of capitalism. The first half of the chapter examines the period’s two best-selling novels, George Lippard’s The Quaker City (1845) and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), and argues that sensationalism adopts and makes use of the affective excesses of melodrama. The chapter shows how, repeatedly, these and other sensational texts stage characters whose postures of emotional distress reflect a desire for spiritual meaning and social connection that transcends the modern, rational world of capitalism – that which Max Weber famously describes in terms of “disenchantment.” The second half of the chapter turns to urban sensationalism. Here, the chapter contends that most of these popular texts revolve around a sentimental logic whereby the tears of the financially distressed act as the markers of middle-class sensibility. Affect thus becomes an alternate currency. The chapter concludes with the most canonical example of urban sensation fiction: Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (1853). The argument here is that “Bartleby” turns the emotional registers of sensationalism inside out. For though Bartleby is the melodramatic and sentimental victim of capitalism and disenchantment, he also rejects the emotional gestures of these genres.

The conclusion explores Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno (1855), focusing on the way its characters and, we, as readers, make sense of embodied actions on board the San Dominick. Being able to read the emplotment of bodies becomes the key to solving the mystery on the ship, and to making sense of the story itself. By doing so, Melville complicates the mind-centered ontological paradigm’s structuring of our reading practices, our “mind-centered reading practices,” that reduce all bodies to just so many textual objects recording lived experience. By privileging the expressive agency of the material body, Melville also presents a competing reading practice, a “body-centered reading practice,” that understands the body as an active agent making meaning out of lived experience. The conclusion contrasts Amasa Delano’s faulty “mind-centered reading practice” with Babo’s rebellious “body-centered reading practice.” Melville thus “minds the body” to demonstrate the way the material expressions of the lived experiences of racial embodiment can short-circuit the objectification of Black bodies in the nineteenth-century chattel slave economy. And by doing so, Melville also models for us, as twenty-first-century readers, new ways to interpret critically the resistant meaning-making possibilities of embodied experience in all of its expressive dynamism.

Informed observers of the Senate may view the 1945–80 period as the doldrums of Senate party history, a period of stasis, the unchanging “textbook Congress” (Shepsle 1989). The study of Congress in these years has long emphasized the role of weak parties and a decentralized policymaking process dominated by committees and their chairmen. However, as we discover in Chapter 8, the parties under Robert Taft (R, Ohio) and Lyndon Johnson (D, Tex.) were dynamic, establishing organizational foundations that shaped future developments and patterns of leadership behavior. We emphasize four developments, none of which have been emphasized in other accounts: evolving new venues for collective decision-making, expanding staff resources, adopting new committee assignment practices, and establishing more consequential campaign committees. These developments were responses to the parties’ electoral challenges, factional problems, and personal interests of key leaders.

The Senate parties had been competitive since the 1870s, but, in the early 1890s, the intensity of competition was exacerbated by the waning battle by Republicans to secure voting rights for Black men in the South. The Federal Elections Bill of 1890–91 represented the last attempt, for the next two-thirds of a century, to protect the right to vote. Chapter 5 examines this battle and its transformative impact on the Senate. Faced with the prospect of reenfranchised Black voters, an overwhelmingly Republican group, and thus the end of Democratic hegemony in the South, Senate Democrats regarded the battle against the bill as an existential fight. Leading them in battle was Arthur Pue Gorman (D, Md.), who, in the process of defeating the Federal Elections Bill, honed the filibuster as a weapon of minority obstruction and transformed the position of caucus chairman, at least for the minority Democratic party, into a position of elected floor leadership. Modern party leadership in the Senate, we show, traces its birth to Gorman and to this battle.

Don Bartolomé de Alva Ixtlilxóchitl, a Mexican diocesan priest of Spanish and noble Nahua ancestry, translated three plays from the Spanish baroque in the early 1640s. Due to his multiple positionalities – priest, translator, author – Alva has been understood as “in-between” distinct polarities. This understanding of Alva makes him relevant for examining sources and influences in proto-Latinx writing, including his way of dealing with language. This chapter analyzes Alva’s Nahuatl translation of Antonio Mira de Amescua’s El animal profeta y dichoso patricida, to argue that Alva is not “in-between” polarities, but rather is a cultural mediator that created and managed new contexts. Hence, Alva is a co-creator, not mere translator, who managed to reach two distinct audiences, Jesuit priest and Nahua elite, in one coherent text. He makes use of his positionalities, particularly in his portrayal of free will, strategically and intentionally to exercise his position of power as a priest and noble Nahua. Finally, his role as mediator contributes to the Latinx archive, providing an alternative to Gloria Anzaldúa’s notion of “nepantla.” Instead, the process of “malinalli” in Aztec metaphysics becomes another way of conceptualizing a mixing together. This is exemplified in his process of translation.

This chapter explores a very early manifestation of Latinx people. Just as Goths, Celtics, and Andalusíes mixed to form something called “Spanish,” in the New World, pre-Latinx people formed when Indigenous, African, and European peoples encountered each other. A philological route to recover those realities is to read the archive, taking care to filter out colonial bias. Since chronicles about the New World were composed in Spanish or Portuguese, a neocolonial reworking of the archive occurs as it is translated into English. An early instance of what could be described as Latinx culture in a place called Cofachiqui in present-day South Carolina appears in Inca Garcilaso de la Vega’s polished notes from his conversations with the conquistador Gonzalo Silvestre, La Florida by the Inca (1993). Other authorities add nuance and color to Garcilaso’s narrative, including The Account of the Gentleman of Elvas (1993), Luys Hernández de Biedma’s Relation of the Island of Florida (1993), and Rodrigo Rangel’s Account of the Northern Conquest and Discovery of Hernando de Soto (1993). When read together and reading between the lines, a fuller picture emerges of an early Latinx experience that happened in South Carolina at a place described in the chronicles as Cofachiqui.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, frustration with party boss control of the nomination process continued to grow. At the beginning of the twentieth century, at the behest of Progressives, several states adopted the presidential primary election, allowing voters to directly participate in the nomination process for the first time. Both national parties accepted the validity of the primary election process, but the early primaries did little to empower ordinary voters. In most primary states, voters did not directly vote for the presidential candidate but rather for the individual delegates to the national convention, whose candidate preference was often unknown and not disclosed on the ballot. As a result, uncommitted and favorite-son delegations, both of which were typically stand-ins for the state and local party bosses, often won the primary elections. Moreover, even when a candidate won a state’s primary, the national convention often allowed delegates from that state to vote for a different candidate; the primary result was not viewed as binding. Thus, despite the initial promise of primary elections, ordinary voters remained on the periphery of the nomination choice.

Between the mid-1920s and mid-1940s, the two Senate parties strengthened the position of floor leadership, building on the foundations laid by Gorman in the 1890s and on the innovations of the 1910s. This era of consolidation—a period first of Republican dominance, then of extended Democratic dominance, interrupted by a short period of competitiveness—is the subject of Chapter 7. Charles Curtis (R, Kans.), who became Republican leader in 1923, elaborated leadership posts as he navigated factionalism within his party. The New Deal elections left the Republican conference depleted—down to 16 members in 1937—so they minimized their formal organization in the 1930s and waited until 1944 to reinvent it. Democrats in this era were led by Joe Robinson (D, Ark.) and Alben Barkley (D, Ky.), who centralized power in the floor leadership position and wielded it effectively, but otherwise made few organizational changes.

As the providers of care work, women experienced the painful losses of male bodies during the Civil War acutely. This chapter explores the way Elizabeth Stuart Phelps used her works—particularly her successful sentimental novel, The Gates Ajar (1868)—to imagine faith as a way to manage this pain. Yet, Phelps’s popularity stemmed from the way her notion of faith also complicated the orthodox Calvinist belief in a disembodied spirit: an ontology premised on the soul’s difference from, and superiority to, the body. By developing what Phelps calls “spiritual materialism,” she puts the lived experience of embodiment at the very center of belief, not drifting or working between mind-centered and body-centered paradigms, as we have seen, but operating beyond them both at the level of faith. Precisely the way this re-embodied faith moves beyond mind-centered and body-centered ontologies allows Phelps’s sentimental novel itself to move beyond the restrictive gender politics of sentimentalism, “minding the body” to tell a less repressive story of domesticity and reveal a more capacious understanding of female desire.

The great postwar buildout comprises the most dramatic chapter in the longer history of suburbanization in the US. No other moment compares in terms of scale, speed, or social significance: the period saw a broader white middle-class identity coalesce around suburban homeownership. The literature that attends to these physical and social transformations – narrative material that continues to shape perceptions of suburban life today, and that provides this chapter with its principal focus – is characterized by hyperbolic tensions about money. Concerns about not having quite enough of it repeatedly become matters of life and death in these stories; the very real advantages of suburban living are thus typically obscured or disavowed. This chapter argues, however, that some of the period’s literature possesses a further, instructional role: texts such as Sloan Wilson’s 1955 novel The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit offer guidance, in a manner not unlike contemporary self-help literature, about how to make money matter to just the right degree to maximize the advantages of suburban settlement. This fine balancing, which is always executed in the absence of any consideration of the precarity of others, is a precise measure of the privilege of these fictional white middle-class subjects.

Organizational innovation in Senate parties is not continuous. Innovation is time-consuming and causes rifts among senators and so has been most likely to occur when the short-term payoff, in terms of the goals of majority party control and winning legislative battles, is substantial. The payoff is likely to be greatest when party strength is close to parity. Our central theme has been that modern party leaders advance their parties’ legislative and electoral goals by managing their party organization, coordinating party activities on the floor, serving as intermediaries with the president, building coalitions, and serving as party spokespersons. We have emphasized throughout this book that legislative and electoral goals are usually pursued in tandem. The process of organizational invention is sporadic. But it is also one of the nearly monotonic increases in the organizational capability of the two parties since the creation of party caucuses in 1841.