Читать книгу A Republic of Men - Mark E. Kann - Страница 9

Judith Sargent Murray once instructed her readers, “Let every American play the man for his country.”¹ The phrase was a common one. Writers and speakers employed it to motivate young males to quit their disorderly ways, measure up to standards of manhood, and fulfill their duties as citizens. What did “play the man” mean? How did manhood relate to politics? In the last half of the eighteenth century, the American culture of manhood was a complex discursive arena composed of contested ideals and consensual norms that the American founders molded into a relatively coherent “grammar of manhood” that defined citizenship and legitimized leadership in the new republic.