This dissertation examines popular fictions that employed the history and iconography of the American Revolution to promote radical reform movements in the antebellum United States. The project challenges common critical assumptions that historical fictions—and particularly those drawing upon Revolutionary history—are inherently nostalgic and capable of conveying only a limited range of political meanings. Rather than conservative efforts to preserve Revolutionary history, many works of this type were extensions of their authors' progressive reform efforts. These historical fictions sought to recruit readers to the cause of completing the democratizing work of the Revolution in order to ensure that the people maintained control over their own institutions.

The project considers works by authors who circulated among groups and parties that contributed to the democratic tumult of the antebellum period, including Catharine Maria Sedgwick, George Lippard, Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. As members—either centrally or peripherally—of opposition political parties, unions, and reform groups, these authors spoke on behalf of, or were received as engaging with, campaigns for labor reform, socialism, and abolitionism. Situating these texts within contemporary radical reform movements reveals that they explicitly endorsed policies such as labor reform, socialism, or abolitionism. Even texts by supposedly moderate writers provoked enthusiastic responses from radicals—and chagrin or outrage from conservatives.

Reading these texts in light of the controversies and contestations that permeated antebellum culture enables us to recover their radical potential. By re-imagining the past, authors infused their version of Revolutionary history with their own political concerns. This project uncovers within this supposedly conservative genre calls for pension reform for veterans, democratized suffrage, debt relief measures, the formation of unions and socialist cooperatives, and the abolition of slavery. It concludes by examining the dissolution or breakdown of the genre as America neared Civil War and it became increasingly evident that violence, rather than print culture, would be necessary to resolve the nation's divisions.