| Summary: | Ever since the founders drafted ""We the People, "" ""we"" have been at pains to work out the contradictions in their formulation, to fix in words precisely what it means to be American. Constituting Americans rethinks the way that certain writers of the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth century contributed to this project; in doing so, it revises the traditional narrative of U.S. literary history, restoring an essential chapter to the story of an emerging American cultural identity. In diverse ways, very different writers-including Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, Harriet Wilson, W.E.B.
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