American Exceptionalism

A New History of an Old Idea

AvIan Tyrrell

Häftad, Engelska, 2024

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Beskrivning

A powerful dissection of a core American myth. The idea that the United States is unlike every other country in world history is a surprisingly resilient one. Throughout his distinguished career, Ian Tyrrell has been one of the most influential historians of the idea of American exceptionalism, but he has never written a book focused solely on it until now. The notion that American identity might be exceptional emerged, Tyrrell shows, from the belief that the nascent early republic was not simply a postcolonial state but a genuinely new experiment in an imperialist world dominated by Britain. Prior to the Civil War, American exceptionalism fostered declarations of cultural, economic, and spatial independence. As the country grew in population and size, becoming a major player in the global order, its exceptionalist beliefs came more and more into focus—and into question. Over time, a political divide emerged: those who believed that America’s exceptionalism was the basis of its virtue and those who saw America as either a long way from perfect or actually fully unexceptional, and thus subject to universal demands for justice. Tyrrell masterfully articulates the many forces that made American exceptionalism such a divisive and definitional concept. Today, he notes, the demands that people acknowledge America’s exceptionalism have grown ever more strident, even as the material and moral evidence for that exceptionalism—to the extent that there ever was any—has withered away.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum:2024-06-19
Mått:152 x 229 x 23 mm
Vikt:399 g
Format:Häftad
Språk:Engelska
Antal sidor:288
Förlag:The University of Chicago Press
ISBN:9780226833422

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Mer om författaren

Ian Tyrrell is emeritus professor of history at the University of New South Wales and the author of Crisis of the Wasteful Nation: Empire and Conservation in Theodore Roosevelt’s America and Historians in Public: The Practice of American History, 1890–1970, both published by the University of Chicago Press.

Recensioner i media

"Tyrrell, a distinguished Australian historian, has written a rich intellectual history of the dramatic shifts in the meaning of the defining but, it turns out, highly malleable idea of 'American exceptionalism,' from its roots in the revolutionary era to the present. Tracing the term’s changing significance illuminates U.S. history more broadly."

Innehållsförteckning

Introduction: The Peculiar Tale of American ExceptionalismChapter 1: The Puritans and American ChosennessChapter 2: Looking Back, Looking Forward: Remembering the RevolutionChapter 3: Cultural Nationalism and the Origins of American ExceptionalismChapter 4: Lyman Beecher, Personal Identity, and the Christian RepublicChapter 5: Women and Exceptionalism: The Self-Made Woman and the Power of Catharine BeecherChapter 6: Race, Anglo-Saxonism, and Manifest DestinyChapter 7: In the Hands of an Angry God: The Antislavery Jeremiad and the Origins of the Christian NationChapter 8: Fin de Siècle Challenges: The Frontier, Labor, and American ImperialismChapter 9: Two Isms: Americanism and SocialismChapter 10: The Dream and the Century: The Liberal Exceptionalism of the New Deal State, 1930s–1960sChapter 11: The Newly Chosen Nation: Exceptionalism from Reagan to TrumpAfterwordAcknowledgmentsNotesIndex

Häftad

282 kr