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Karen Sanchez-Eppler, an assistant professor of American studies at Amherst College, has published a book on the subject of embodiment between the early 1830s and the Civil War from which American historians have a good deal to learn. At first glance her project defies historians, for its coherence is elusive: she lumps together authors with seemingly little in common and admits in her epilogue to "as much discontinuity as connection." Yet the book does have an uncanny coherence. The United States Constitution in its original form was bodiless, Sanchez-Eppler says, with the Founding Fathers' "men" referring solely to wealthy white males. Imprisoned in bodies that announced their difference, those who were not white men were left to struggle for constitutional embodiment through campaigns for suffrage and...