History/Political Science paper by Lévai, Csaba
The Role of Violence in the American (1776) and the Hungarian (1849) Declarations of Independence (Accepted)
Type of Abstract (select):Abstract (max. 250 words):
Former analyzers of the American and the Hungarian Declarations of Independence rarely observed the role violence and the description of violent actions played in the rhetorical argumentation of the two declarations. In the American document great emphasis had been laid on the violent actions of the “foreign mercenaries”, the “merciless Indian savages”, and the slaves who revolted against their American masters. According to the argumentation of the American declaration all these violent groups were in the service of the tyrannical king of Britain to deprive the Americans from their well-deserved freedom. One can find very similar reasoning in the Hungarian declaration as well. According to it, the Habsburg rulers of Hungary were trying to deprive the Hungarians from their ancient liberties by the help of a foreign army, and the national minority groups of Hungary, the members of which committed violent and inhuman actions very similar to the brutal deeds of the above mentioned enemies of American liberty. The authors of the original drafts of the two declarations (Thomas Jefferson and Lajos Kossuth) used very similar language to describe the violent actions of their adversaries. I think that this topic fits into the theme of this year’s conference, since it deals with the interaction of Hungarians and others on two different levels. On the one hand it studies the interaction of Hungarians and the national minority groups during the War of Independence in 1848-1849, and on the other, it also deals with the impact of the American Declaration of Independence on its Hungarian counterpart.
Type of presentation: paper
Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Csaba Lévai teaches 18th- and 19th-century history at the University of Debrecen. His research interests are the history of the British colonies in North America, the history of the American Revolution, the history of slavery in British North America and the United States of America, and the history of early Hungarian-American contacts. He was a two-times Fulbright scholar at the University of Virginia, and he was also a research fellow at the International Center for Jefferson Studies (Charlottesville, Virginia), and at the Fred W. Smith Library for the Study of George Washington (Mount Vernon, Virginia).