This Violent Empire
The Birth of an American National Identity
Carroll Smith-Rosenberg
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Imprint: Omohundro Institute and University of North Carolina Press
Published: 12/2012
Pages: 512
Subject: History, Literary Criticism
| University of North Carolina
Print ISBN: 9.78E+12
eBook ISBN: 9780807895917
DESCRIPTION
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.
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