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Since the 1950s historians of the colonial era in North, South and Central America have extended the frontiers of basic general knowledge enormously; this rich historiographical tradition has generated robust methodological discussions about how to study the European encounter in the light of the experience of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. By bringing together major research reviews by a series of leading scholars, this volume makes it possible to compare directly approaches relating to colonial North America, Brazil, the Spanish borderlands, and the Caribbean.
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 idea of America's special place in history has been a guiding light for centuries. With thoughtful insight, John D. Wilsey traces the concept of exceptionalism, including its theological meaning and implications for civil religion. This careful history considers not only the abuses of the idea but how it can also point to constructive civil engagement and human flourishing.
Why did Donald Trump follow Barack Obama into the White House? Why is America so polarized? And how does American exceptionalism explain these social changes? In this provocative book, Mugambi Jouet describes why Americans are far more divided than other Westerners over basic issues, including wealth inequality, health care, climate change, evolution, gender roles, abortion, gay rights, sex, gun control, mass incarceration, the death penalty, torture, human rights, and war. Raised in Paris by a French mother and Kenyan father, Jouet then lived in the Bible Belt, Manhattan, and beyond. Drawing inspiration from Alexis de Tocqueville, he wields his multicultural sensibility to parse how the intense polarization of U.S. conservatives and liberals has become a key dimension of American exceptionalism—an idea widely misunderstood as American superiority. While exceptionalism once was a source of strength, it may now spell decline, as unique features of U.S. history, politics, law, culture, religion, and race relations foster grave conflicts. They also shed light on the intriguing ideological evolution of American conservatism, which long predated Trumpism. Anti-intellectualism, conspiracy-mongering, a visceral suspicion of government, and Christian fundamentalism are far more common in America than the rest of the Western world—Europe, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Exceptional America dissects the American soul, in all of its peculiar, clashing, and striking manifestations.
Since its founding, the United States has defined itself as the supreme protector of freedom throughout the world, pointing to its Constitution as the model of law to ensure democracy at home and to protect human rights internationally. Although the United States has consistently emphasized the importance of the international legal system, it has simultaneously distanced itself from many established principles of international law and the institutions that implement them. In fact, the American government has attempted to unilaterally reshape certain doctrines of international law while disregarding others, such as provisions of the Geneva Conventions and the prohibition on torture. America’s selective self-exemption, Natsu Taylor Saito argues, undermines not only specific legal institutions and norms, but leads to a decreased effectiveness of the global rule of law. Meeting the Enemy is a pointed look at why the United States’ frequent—if selective—disregard of international law and institutions is met with such high levels of approval, or at least complacency, by the American public.
In this sobering analysis of American foreign policy under Trump, the award-winning economist calls for a new approach to international engagement. The American Century began in 1941 and ended in 2017, on the day of President Trump’s inauguration. The subsequent turn toward nationalism and “America first” unilateralism did not made America great. It announced the abdication of our responsibilities in the face of environmental crises, political upheaval, mass migration, and other global challenges. As a result, America no longer dominates geopolitics or the world economy as it once did. In this incisive and passionate book, Jeffrey D. Sachs provides the blueprint for a new foreign policy that embraces global cooperation, international law, and aspirations for worldwide prosperity. He argues that America’s approach to the world must shift from military might and wars of choice to a commitment to shared objectives of sustainable development. A New Foreign Policy explores both the danger of the “America first” mindset and the possibilities for a new way forward, proposing timely and achievable plans to foster global economic growth, reconfigure the United Nations for the twenty-first century, and build a multipolar world that is prosperous, peaceful, fair, and resilient.
Is America unique? One of our major political analysts explores the deeply held but often unarticulated beliefs that shape the American creed. "(A) magisterial attempt to distill a lifetime of learning about America into a persuasive brief . . . (by) the dean of American political sociologists".--Carlin Romano, "Boston Globe".
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.
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.
Cover -- Half-title -- Title -- Copyright -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Chapter 1. The "Natural Elevation" of Equity: Quasi-Inquisitorial Procedure and the Early Nineteenth-Century Resurgence of Equity -- Chapter 2. A Troubled Inheritance: The English Procedural Tradition and Its Lawyer- Driven Reconfiguration in Early Nineteenth-Century New York -- Chapter 3. The Non-Revolutionary Field Code: Democratization, Docket Pressures, and Codification -- Chapter 4. Cultural Foundations of American Adversarialism: Civic Republicanism and the Decline of Equity's Quasi-Inquisitorial Tradition -- Chapter 5. Market Freedom and Adversarial Adjudication: The Nineteenth-Century American Debates over (European) Conciliation Courts and the Problem of Procedural Ordering -- Chapter 6. The Freedmen's Bureau Exception: The Triumph of Due (Adversarial) Process and the Dawn of Jim Crow -- Conclusion. The Question of American Exceptionalism and the Lessons of History -- Appendix. An Overview of the Archives -- Notes -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y -- Z