Tyler C. Cline

Tyler Cline (Ph.D., University of Florida, 2025) is a historian of the United States and the World, with a focus on histories of racial ideologies, religion and politics, and intellectual movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries across the Atlantic World.

His current book project, To Slake the Thirst of Liberty: Anglo-Saxonism and the Transimperial Origins of Citizenship and the State, examines Anglo-Saxonism as an ideological, cultural, and political movement in the nineteenth century. In particular, To Slake the Thirst of Liberty explores how the ideas and assumptions within Anglo-Saxon thought shaped conceptions of citizenship and subjecthood and denied the egalitarian right to access political and social power. This was particularly important during the mid-nineteenth century, an era of democratization, the decline of legal restrictions on Catholics across the English-speaking Atlantic World, and the growing push for the emancipation of enslaved peoples in the British Caribbean and the American South. Ultimately, Anglo-Saxonism drew together a fiercely anti-Catholic Protestantism, hierarchical conceptions of race, and a commitment to a political sense of “rational liberty” in order to construct an idealized individual as the sole political actor capable of governing: the Anglo-Saxon.

Dr. Cline’s research has appeared in Histoire Sociale/Social History, Acadiensis, and the American Review of Canadian Studies. His forthcoming article, “‘Foggy Dreams of Infidel German Metaphysicians’: Nativist Responses to German American Radicalism in the Aftermath of the Revolutions of 1848,” will appear in the Journal for the Study of Radicalism.