American Tyrannies in the Long Age of Napoleon [Audiobook]

Because Napoleon defined tyranny around the nineteenth-century Atlantic world-its features and emergence, its relationship to democratic institutions, its effects on persons and peoples-he provides a way for nineteenth-century Americans to explore the parameters of tyranny and their complicity in its cruelties. Napoleon helps us see the decidedly plural forms of tyranny in the US, bringing their fictions into focus. At the same time, however, there are distinctly American modes of tyranny. From the tyrannical style of the American imagination to the usurping potential of American individualism, Elizabeth Duquette shows that tyranny is as American as democracy.