This Violent Empire

The Birth of an American National Identity

Häftad, Engelska, 2012

Del i serien Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press

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Beskrivning

This Violent Empire traces the origins of American violence, racism, and paranoia to the founding moments of the new nation and the initial instability of Americans' national sense of self.Fusing cultural and political analyses to create a new form of political history, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg explores the ways the founding generation, lacking a common history, governmental infrastructures, and shared culture, solidified their national sense of self by imagining a series of ""Others"" (African Americans, Native Americans, women, the propertyless) whose differences from European American male founders overshadowed the differences that divided those founders. These ""Others,"" dangerous and polluting, had to be excluded from the European American body politic. Feared, but also desired, they refused to be marginalized, incurring increasingly enraged enactments of their political and social exclusion that shaped our long history of racism, xenophobia, and sexism. Close readings of political rhetoric during the Constitutional debates reveal the genesis of this long history.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum:2012-08-30
Mått:154 x 233 x 33 mm
Vikt:739 g
Format:Häftad
Språk:Engelska
Serie:Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press
Antal sidor:512
Förlag:The University of North Carolina Press
ISBN:9780807872710

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Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Mary Frances Berry Collegiate Professor, Emeritus, University of Michigan, is author of numerous books, including Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America.

Recensioner i media

In this much anticipated work, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg takes up Crevecoeur's challenge 'What then is the American, this new man?' and boldly answers: A deeply divided subject of This Violent Empire, this United States. In exposing republican citizens' desires and fears, she not only opens up new realms of thought and inquiry--she makes clear that no genuine understanding of the new nation can overlook the profoundly confounded and contested cultural construction of 'the American, this new man.'--Michael Meranze, University of California, Los Angeles|""Smith-Rosenberg maps the genesis of a historical dilemma, how the United States' vaunted diversity and emphasis on unity often function in bitter opposition. Historically rich and theoretically sophisticated, This Violent Empire studies the social, material, urban, intercultural, and international contexts through which an impossibly unified American identity was imagined in the magazines, literature, and art of the early United States.""--Dana D. Nelson, Vanderbilt University|""Scholars of the new nation and its culture have been waiting twenty years for this book--and it is well worth the wait. We will no longer hear that the most powerful actors of the 'founding' did not think or talk creatively about Indians, or slaves, or women. This Violent Empire reaches deep into the national psyche and broadly into the cultural practices that defined Americans and their 'Others' in a formative period; it is a tour de force of political and cultural analysis that informs us all.""--David Waldstreicher, Temple University