A Nation of Minutemen: How The American Militia Became a Metaphor for the People
The second 2025-2026 David Center for the American Revolution Seminar will take place November 5, 2025 at 3:00 p.m. ET on Zoom.
The speaker will be Eran Zelnik. Eran teaches history at California State University, Chico. He is author of American Laughter, American Fury: Humor and the Making of a White Man’s Democracy, 1750-1850 (Johns Hopkins University Press, Jan. 2025) and has published articles in the Journal of the Early Republic and Early American Studies, including "Yankees, Doodles, Fops, and Cuckolds: Provincialism and Compromised Manhood in the Revolutionary Period," that won the Dorothy Ross prize for the best article in intellectual history by an emerging scholar.
The paper will be pre-circulated to registered participants in advance of the seminar meeting.
To attend the seminar and to receive a copy of the paper, please register via Zoom.
The David Center for the American Revolution Seminar serves as a forum for works-in-progress that explore topics in the era of the American Revolution (1750-1820). Questions about the series may be directed to Brenna Holland, Assistant Director of Library & Museum Programs, at [email protected].
NOTE: Seminars are designed as spaces for sharing ideas and works still in-progress. For this reason, this event will not be recorded.
A Nation of Minutemen: How The American Militia Became a Metaphor for the People
Historians have long noted that the institution of the militia figures prominently in American as well as broader republican thinking. The cultural and intellectual work it performed for the United States, however, has not been sufficiently explained. This article argues that the American militia and its singular virility—crafted first and foremost around the legend of the Minutemen—was a crucial site for tethering individuals to a national and republican community. It thus became the leading metaphor through which Americans interpreted the revolutionary idea that Americans made their own and placed at the heart of their newfound nation: the sovereignty of "the people." Allowing white male citizens and militia members across the United States to imagine themselves heeding the call of a nation, the militia as both an institution and an idea, negotiated the leap required for local community members, both low and high born, to make sense of the abstraction: "the people." Of course, this would also mean that this emerging empire would be the exclusive domain of white men, the only ones who were truly part of the, so called, people.