Mary E. Stuckey – författare

National parks are widely revered as “America’s best idea”—they are abundantly popular and remarkably noncontroversial in the United States. American presidents use these parks to stake their claims to environmentalism, assert a singular national history, and define a unified national identity, often doing so inside the parks themselves. However, the establishment and history of almost every national park has been riddled with conflict over competing claims to land, knowledge, and economic interests. Like any major area of public policy, the fissures present in debates over the national parks also represent important fracture lines in the public understanding of the meaning of America and of individual claims to citizenship. The park system, in other words, does a lot of political work for both presidents and the mass public, even though much of that work goes largely unnoticed. This book explores that political work by addressing themes of national origins and the dispossession of Indigenous peoples; monuments to the national past, heritage, and the assertion of a national narrative; environmentalism and natural resources; and exploitation of the national landscape for economic gain.

In For the Enjoyment of the People, Mary Stuckey looks at the politics of the parks as well as what the parks can teach us about citizenship and what it means to be American. Stuckey asserts that through the national parks we can hope to explain the past, clarify the present, and project the future. Combining interdisciplinary conversations about tourism, public memory, national history, park history, the presidency, and national identity, Stuckey contributes insightful ideas to the conversation on the history of national parks while examining the natural, military, and patriotic nature of America’s best idea.

Winner: Bruce E. Gronbeck Political Communication Award

Winner: APSA Presidents and Executive Politics Legacy Award

Andrew Jackson spoke to Americans in ways that reflected the concerns of a young nation. Grover Cleveland helped citizens redefine themselves after the havoc of the Civil War era. FDR confronted widespread hardship with hope and determination, while Eisenhower spoke to our fears of the Communist menace. Throughout our history, presidents by their very utterances have shaped our sense of who we are as Americans.

As Mary Stuckey observes, presidents embrace, articulate, and reinvigorate our sense of national identity. They define who Americans are—often by declaring who they aren’t. In this book, she shows how presidential speech has served to broaden the American political community over the past two centuries while at the same time excluding others.

Ranging broadly from Andrew Jackson to Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, Stuckey demonstrates how presidents accomplish the dual enactment of inclusion and exclusion through their rhetorical and political choices. Our early leaders were preoccupied with balancing the growing nation; later presidents were concerned with the nature and definitions of citizenship. By examining the political speeches of presidents exemplifying distinctly different circumstances, she presents a series of snapshots which, when taken together, reveal both the continuity and the changes in our national self-understanding.

Ambitious and sweeping, Stuckey’s work documents the tactics that have naturalized and legitimated inclusion and exclusion, tracing the progress of groups such as women and African Americans from political invisibility to partial visibility and eventual inclusion. She also shows how the terms of inclusion have varied with changing political winds, helping us understand how depictions of the powerless by the powerful reflect and influence the status of various groups.

Stuckey’s analysis shows how presidents use language rooted in their times and circumstances to frame and influence contemporary definitions of citizenship. A provocative book that documents the changes in our understanding of who is and who isn’t one of “us,” Defining Americans reveals that all presidents draw upon the same set of national ideals, values, and events—but not all use those ideas in precisely the same ways.

An expert on presidential history and national identity explores the complicated and conflicted ways Americans remember Thomas Jefferson and what these impressions reveal about the nation he helped to found.

Thomas Jefferson is everywhere. In Washington, DC, and on Mount Rushmore. In history textbooks and children’s picture books. On Broadway and HBO. Jefferson is even on our money—both the ubiquitous nickel and the rare $2 bill. The many different ways that Americans remember the third president of the United States tell us very little about Jefferson himself, but they tell us a lot about the American people.

In Remembering Jefferson, presidential scholar Mary E. Stuckey examines various sites where Jefferson appears—his home at Monticello, references by other presidents, monuments and memorials, popular culture, and children’s literature—as a way of interrogating national identity. She is less interested in the actual Jefferson than in how he is used across a variety of contexts to make claims about what it means to be American in the contemporary moment.

Stuckey finds that Jefferson is a remarkably useful and multipurpose symbol. He reminds people of the importance of the nation’s founding. He provides an opportunity to reflect on inclusion and exclusion, on race and racism. He gives people a way to ground national identity in the past, while keeping it open to change. Jefferson was so complicated and multilayered that he has been purposed to suit a variety of agendas throughout history and across the entire political spectrum.

In our fraught political moment, where debates over America’s founding have become cultural battlegrounds, Remembering Jefferson is a timely reminder that how we think about the past reflects who we are in the present.

"Stuckey's perceptive study of presidential rhetoric shows how technological changes have emptied presidential discourse of political substance, weakening American democracy. Her fascinating, widely ranging book is essential reading for presidency watchers, media scholars, and everyone who cares about the quality of American politics."– Doris A. GraberUniversity of Illinois at Chicago

Rhetoric is among the most important and least understood elements of presidential leadership. Presidents have always wielded rhetoric as one tool of governance—and that rhetoric was always intended to facilitate political ends, such as image building, persuasion of the mass public, and inter-branch government persuasion. But as mass media has grown and then fragmented, as the federal bureaucracy has continued to both expand and calcify, and as partisanship has heightened tensions both within Congress and between Congress and the Executive, rhetoric is an increasingly important element of presidential governance.

Scholars have derived ways to explain how these developments and the presidents'' use of rhetoric have contributed to and detracted from the health of American democracy. This briefing book offers a succinct reflection on the ways in which historical developments have encouraged the use of political rhetoric. It explores strategies of "going public" to provide some leverage over the political system and the lessons one might derive from these choices.

This essential analysis, written for lay readers, scholars, students, and future presidents, is the first in Transaction''s innovative Presidential Briefings series. Mary E. Stuckey covers the scholarly literature with authority and offers examples of rhetoric that have lasting influence.

Rhetoric is among the most important and least understood elements of presidential leadership. Presidents have always wielded rhetoric as one tool of governance—and that rhetoric was always intended to facilitate political ends, such as image building, persuasion of the mass public, and inter-branch government persuasion. But as mass media has grown and then fragmented, as the federal bureaucracy has continued to both expand and calcify, and as partisanship has heightened tensions both within Congress and between Congress and the Executive, rhetoric is an increasingly important element of presidential governance.

Scholars have derived ways to explain how these developments and the presidents'' use of rhetoric have contributed to and detracted from the health of American democracy. This briefing book offers a succinct reflection on the ways in which historical developments have encouraged the use of political rhetoric. It explores strategies of "going public" to provide some leverage over the political system and the lessons one might derive from these choices.

This essential analysis, written for lay readers, scholars, students, and future presidents, is the first in Transaction''s innovative Presidential Briefings series. Mary E. Stuckey covers the scholarly literature with authority and offers examples of rhetoric that have lasting influence.