Good citizens and bad history: Today's political ideals in historical perspective

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes This paper is the keynote lecture delivered at the conference on "The Transformation of Civic Life,"; Nashville, Tennessee on November 12, 1999. The conference was organized around my book, The Good Citizen: A History of American Civic Life (Free Press, 1998; Harvard University Press, 1999). The lecture crystallizes the argument of the book and extends it; all empirical materials referred to in the lecture are fully referenced in the book itself. Only materials not discussed in the book are footnoted here.