In this Book
- This Violent Empire: The Birth of an American National Identity
- Book
- 2012
- Published by: The University of North Carolina Press
- Series: Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia
summary
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.
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.
Table of Contents
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- Acknowledgments
- pp. xiii-xviii
- List of Illustrations
- pp. xxi-xxii
- Section One: The New American–as–Republican Citizen
- Chapter One: Fusions and Confusions
- pp. 55-87
- Chapter Three: American Minervas
- pp. 136-188
- Section Two: Dangerous Doubles
- Prologue Two: Masculinity and Masquerade
- pp. 191-206
- Chapter Four: Seeing Red
- pp. 207-249
- Section Three: The New American–as–Bourgeois Gentleman
- Prologue Three: The Ball
- pp. 291-308
- Chapter Eight: Black Gothic
- pp. 413-464
- Conclusion
- pp. 465-468
Additional Information
ISBN
9781469600390
Related ISBN(s)
9780807832967, 9780807872710, 9780807895917, 9798890885180
MARC Record
OCLC
861793465
Pages
512
Launched on MUSE
2016-01-01
Language
English
Open Access
No