American Liberty Pole

Shira Lurie is Assistant Professor of History at Saint Mary’s University.

“In The American Liberty Pole, Shira Lurie vividly depicts the combative ceremonies of the liberty pole, as both a lived experience and an arena to contest the meaning of liberty and who counts as an American citizen. This book contributes to our understanding of early America, but more importantly, it demonstrates that protest has played a critical role in the American story from the beginning.” - Lindsay M. Chervinsky, author of The Cabinet: George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution“Lurie effectively situates liberty poles at the heart of the debate over the nature of republican government, whether politics out-of-doors--so important to British and Anglo-American political culture under a monarch--remained acceptable once the government was in the hands of representatives of the people. She highlights their centrality in a period of political transition and cultural formation and traces their striking evolution across a long period of time. The book is an admirable treatment.” - Eric A. Hinderaker, University of Utah, author of Boston's Massacre“The liberty pole is one of those features of early American political culture that every historian knows about, but until now no one has offered a compelling interpretation of what they meant to those who erected them, and what they can tell us about the broader politics of the founding era. Lurie’s book enables us to see these liberty poles as far more than quaint relics from an era gone by, but rather as a key site at which a wide range of Americans thought, fought, and put into practice what it might mean to live in an aspirationally democratic republic.” - Seth Cotlar, Willamette University, author of Tom Paine's America: The Rise and Fall of Transatlantic Radicalism in the Early Republic

• Introduction: Politics at the Poles1. The New York City Liberty Poles2. Regulation, Ratification, and the Right to Resist3. Debating Dissent in the Whiskey Rebellion4. The Federalist Popular Politics of Assent5. "Wandering Apostles of Sedition": Itinerant Republican Activists6. From Poles to Polls: The Elections of 1799 and 18007. Partisan Politics and Poles in the Nineteenth CenturyEpilogue: "Forgetting While Remembering"