School for Patriots? The Foundational Dramas of the American and Polish Revolutions Revisited

At a time when the exclusionist rhetoric of the nation continues to be dressed up as patriotic conviction, this article advocates a return to the archive to investigate the controversial issue of patriotism. It might be surprising to find, for example, that The Patriot’s Calendar, published in London in the 1790s, contained both Magna Carta and the Marseillaise. Accordingly, the connections between patriotism and liberty and patriotism and citizens’ rights invite closer scrutiny. To give my theoretical considerations a more inductive grounding, I focus on Joseph Addison’s Cato (1713) and Anna Bojarska’s Lekcja polskiego [The Polish Lesson, 1988], along with their theatrical enactments during the American War of Independence (1775–1783) and the Polish Revolution (1980–1989), respectively

Conviction · Independence (probability theory · Patriotism · Political science · Rhetoric · Scrutiny · Theology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Classics · Historical Geopolitical and Social Dynamics · History · Law · Military, Security, and Education Studies · Philosophy