The Myth of American Exceptionalism

The Myth of American Exceptionalism PDF Author: Godfrey Hodgson
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780300125702
Category : Exceptionalism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The idea that the United States is destined to spread its unique gifts of democracy and capitalism to other countries is dangerous for Americans and for the rest of the world, warns Godfrey Hodgson in this provocative book. Hodgson, a shrewd and highly respected British commentator, argues that America is not as exceptional as it would like to think; its blindness to its own history has bred a complacent nationalism and a disastrous foreign policy that has isolated and alienated it from the global community. Tracing the development of America’s high self regard from the early days of the republic to the present era, Hodgson demonstrates how its exceptionalism has been systematically exaggerated and—in recent decades—corrupted. While there have been distinct and original elements in America’s history and political philosophy, notes Hodgson, these have always been more heavily influenced by European thought and experience than Americans have been willing to acknowledge. A stimulating and timely assessment of how America’s belief in its exceptionalism has led it astray, this book is mandatory reading for its citizens, admirers, and detractors.

The Myth of American Exceptionalism

The Myth of American Exceptionalism PDF Author: Godfrey Hodgson
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780300125702
Category : Exceptionalism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book

Book Description
The idea that the United States is destined to spread its unique gifts of democracy and capitalism to other countries is dangerous for Americans and for the rest of the world, warns Godfrey Hodgson in this provocative book. Hodgson, a shrewd and highly respected British commentator, argues that America is not as exceptional as it would like to think; its blindness to its own history has bred a complacent nationalism and a disastrous foreign policy that has isolated and alienated it from the global community. Tracing the development of America’s high self regard from the early days of the republic to the present era, Hodgson demonstrates how its exceptionalism has been systematically exaggerated and—in recent decades—corrupted. While there have been distinct and original elements in America’s history and political philosophy, notes Hodgson, these have always been more heavily influenced by European thought and experience than Americans have been willing to acknowledge. A stimulating and timely assessment of how America’s belief in its exceptionalism has led it astray, this book is mandatory reading for its citizens, admirers, and detractors.

Cormac McCarthy and the Myth of American Exceptionalism

Cormac McCarthy and the Myth of American Exceptionalism PDF Author: John Cant
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136095063
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 371

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Book Description
This overview of McCarthy’s published work to date, including: the short stories he published as a student, his novels, stage play and TV film script, locates him as a icocolastic writer, engaged in deconstructing America’s vision of itself as a nation with an exceptionalist role in the world. Introductory chapters outline his personal background and the influences on his early years in Tennessee whilst each of his works is dealt with in a separate chapter listed in chronological order of publication.

The Myth of American Exceptionalism

The Myth of American Exceptionalism PDF Author: Godfrey Hodgson
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300142684
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
The idea that the United States is destined to spread its unique gifts of democracy and capitalism to other countries is dangerous for Americans and for the rest of the world, warns Godfrey Hodgson in this provocative book. Hodgson, a shrewd and highly respected British commentator, argues that America is not as exceptional as it would like to think; its blindness to its own history has bred a complacent nationalism and a disastrous foreign policy that has isolated and alienated it from the global community. Tracing the development of America’s high self regard from the early days of the republic to the present era, Hodgson demonstrates how its exceptionalism has been systematically exaggerated and—in recent decades—corrupted. While there have been distinct and original elements in America’s history and political philosophy, notes Hodgson, these have always been more heavily influenced by European thought and experience than Americans have been willing to acknowledge. A stimulating and timely assessment of how America’s belief in its exceptionalism has led it astray, this book is mandatory reading for its citizens, admirers, and detractors.

American Exceptionalism

American Exceptionalism PDF Author: Deborah L. Madsen
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 9781578061082
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
American Exceptionalism provides an accessible yet comprehensive historical account of one of the most important concepts underlying modern theories of American cultural identity. Deborah Madsen charts the contribution of exceptionalism to the evolution of the United States as an ideological and geographical entity from 1620 to the present day. She explains how this sense of spiritual and political destiny has shaped American culture and how it has promoted exciting counter arguments from Native American and Chicano perspectives and in the contemporary writings of authors such as Thomas Pynchon and Toni Morrison.

American Exceptionalism

American Exceptionalism PDF Author: Ian Tyrrell
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022681212X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
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.

The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism

The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism PDF Author: Matthew D. Lassiter
Publisher: Oxford University Press on Demand
ISBN: 0195384741
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 361

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Book Description
"More than one-third of the population of the United States now lives in the South, a region where politics, race relations, and the economy have changed dramatically since World War II. Yet scholars and journalists continue to disagree over whether the modern South is dominating, deviating from, or converging with the rest of the nation. This collection asks how the stories of American history chance if the South is no longer seen as a region apart--as the conservative exception to a liberal nation."--Back cover.

The New American Exceptionalism

The New American Exceptionalism PDF Author: Donald E. Pease
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 0816627827
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 261

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Book Description
For a half century following the end of World War II, the seemingly permanent cold war provided the United States with an organizing logic that governed nearly every aspect of American society and culture, giving rise to an unwavering belief in the nation's exceptionalism in global affairs and world history. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, this cold war paradigm was replaced by a series of new ideological narratives that ultimately resulted in the establishment of another potentially endless war: the global war on terror. In The New American Exceptionalism, pioneering scholar Donald E. Pease traces the evolution of these state fantasies and shows how they have shaped U.S. national identity since the end of the cold war, uncovering the ideological and cultural work required to convince Americans to surrender their civil liberties in exchange for the illusion of security. His argument follows the chronology of the transitions between paradigms from the inauguration of the New World Order under George H. W. Bush to the homeland security state that George W. Bush's administration installed in the wake of 9/11. Providing clear and convincing arguments about how the concept of American exceptionalism was reformulated and redeployed in this era, Pease examines a wide range of cultural works and political spectacles, including the exorcism of the Vietnam syndrome through victory in the Persian Gulf War and the creation of Islamic extremism as an official state enemy. At the same time, Pease notes that state fantasies cannot altogether conceal the inconsistencies they mask, showing how such events as the revelations of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib and the exposure of government incompetence after Hurricane Katrina opened fissures in the myth of exceptionalism, allowing Barack Obama to challenge the homeland security paradigm with an alternative state fantasy that privileges fairness, inclusion, and justice.

How Myth Became History

How Myth Became History PDF Author: John Emory Dean
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816532427
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
"The book explores how border subjects have been created and disputed in cultural narratives of the Texas-Mexico border, comparing and analyzing Mexican, Mexican American, and Anglo literary representations of the border"--Provided by publisher.

The Right to Rule

The Right to Rule PDF Author: Hugh De Santis
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1793624097
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 415

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Book Description
In The Right to Rule: American Exceptionalism and the Coming Multipolar World Order, Hugh De Santis explores the evolution of American exceptionalism and its effect on the nation’s relations with the external world. De Santis argues that the self-image of an exceptional, providentially blessed society unlike any other is a myth that pays too little heed to the history that shaped America’s emergence, including its core beliefs and values, which are inheritances from seventeenth-century England. From the republic’s founding to its rise as the world’s preeminent power, American exceptionalism has underpinned the nation’s foreign policy, but it has become an anachronism in the twenty-first century. De Santis argues that, in the emerging multipolar world order, the United States will be one of several powers that determine the structure and rules of international politics, rather than the sole arbiter.

City on a Hill

City on a Hill PDF Author: Abram C. Van Engen
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300252315
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 390

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Book Description
A fresh, original history of America’s national narratives, told through the loss, recovery, and rise of one influential Puritan sermon from 1630 to the present day In this illuminating book, Abram Van Engen shows how the phrase “City on a Hill,” from a 1630 sermon by Massachusetts Bay governor John Winthrop, shaped the story of American exceptionalism in the twentieth century. By tracing the history of Winthrop’s speech, its changing status throughout time, and its use in modern politics, Van Engen asks us to reevaluate our national narratives. He tells the story of curators, librarians, collectors, archivists, antiquarians, and often anonymous figures who emphasized the role of the Pilgrims and Puritans in American history, paving the way for the saving and sanctifying of a single sermon. This sermon’s rags-to-riches rise reveals the way national stories take shape and shows us how those tales continue to influence competing visions of the country—the many different meanings of America that emerge from its literary past.