I am revisiting Daniel Walker Howe’s charming study The Political Culture of the American Whigs because I’m writing about antebellum Americans’ notions of what “Western Civilization” was or what the phrase meant or what the idea signified. What does this have to do with late 20thcentury debates on the canon?  Probably not as much as countless other aspects of this project that I should be working on.  In fact, I could easily deal with antebellum American conceptions of Western Civilization in a paragraph or two (if I addressed them at all), give another paragraph or two to the civilizational discourse Read more