Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-7
Author(s):  
Jean H. Baker
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Ancient Greece ◽  
American Exceptionalism ◽  
The United States ◽  
National Endowment ◽  
Short Introduction ◽  
Moravian Church ◽  
New Republic ◽  
Benjamin Latrobe

This introduction presents Benjamin Latrobe as a rebel who left the Moravian Church and remade himself as an architect and engineer in the United States. It emphasizes his rapid ascension as an architect and engineer in the new republic as well as his very American penchant for speculation. The themes in this short introduction are his constant moving, his chronic debt, and his commitment to buildings that expressed American exceptionalism and connected the United States to the admired republics of ancient Greece and Rome. The introduction also previews the themes of the book: his life spent in motion, his chronic debilitating headaches along with his optimism and resilience, and his family as a sanctuary. It establishes the six cities he lived in as important background for his struggles and discusses the monumental National Endowment for the Humanities project that published his letters and drawings.

Deafness and Ethnic Identity: The Idea of a Deaf State and its Resonances with American Exceptionalism and Frontier Ideology

2019 ◽  
Vol 67 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-90
Author(s):  
Marion Rana
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Ethnic Identity ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
American Exceptionalism ◽  
Manifest Destiny ◽  
The United States ◽  
Culture Studies ◽  
Deaf Identity ◽  
American Nation

Abstract This article focuses on the nineteenth century as a pivotal time for the development of a Deaf identity in the United States and examines the way John Jacob Flournoy’s idea of a “Deaf-Mute Commonwealth” touches upon core themes of American culture studies and history. In employing pivotal democratic ideas such as egalitarianism, liberty, and self-representation as well as elements of manifest destiny such as exceptionalism and the frontier ideology in order to raise support for a Deaf State, the creation and perpetuation of a Deaf identity bears strong similarities to the processes of American nation-building. This article will show how the endeavor to found a Deaf state was indicative of the separationist and secessionist movements in the United States at that time, and remains relevant to Deaf group identity today.

City on a Hill: American Exceptionalism and the Elect Nation

2000 ◽  
Vol 36 ◽  
pp. 299-318
Author(s):  
J. R. Oldfield
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Elementary School ◽  
South Carolina ◽  
American Exceptionalism ◽  
The United States ◽  
National Anthem ◽  
Pledge Of Allegiance ◽  
American Flag

Some years ago I was invited to spend a day in an elementary school in Columbia, South Carolina. The day began, as I imagine every day began, with the national anthem and the pledge of allegiance to the American flag. The children then sang a song, a ditty really, which began as it ended with the simple refrain: ‘I am special’. Later I was shown some of the work the class had been doing. Across the back of the room were pinned up the children’s attempts to answer a question that had been exercising me, namely what was special about the United States. Some of the responses were fairly predictable. America was special, one seven-year-old wrote, because it was a democracy. Others singled out freedom or liberty as their country’s unique virtue. One brave soul boldly asserted that America was special because Americans were rich, while another thought the secret had something to do with happiness.

American Intellectual History: A Very Short Introduction

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Revolutionary War ◽  
Short Introduction ◽  
Westward Expansion ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Intellectual ◽  
American Intellectual History ◽  
American Thought

American Intellectual History: A Very Short Introduction provides an introduction to the history of American thought from the sixteenth century up until the present. Long before the United States was a nation, it was a set of ideas, projected onto the New World by European commentators and explorers. American thought grew from this foundation of expectation and experience, both enriched and challenged over the centuries by developments including the Revolutionary War, westward expansion, the rise of capitalism, the proliferation of diverse religions, immigration, industrialization, and the emergence of the United States as a superpower. This introduction provides an overview of some of the most compelling episodes and abiding preoccupations in American thought, while showing how ideas have been major forces driving the course of American history.

American Immigration: A Very Short Introduction

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
David A. Gerber
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Illegal Immigration ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Identity ◽  
National Character ◽  
Short Introduction ◽  
Anglo American

American Immigration: A Very Short Introduction traces three massive waves of immigration from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, and analyzes the nature of immigration as a purposeful, structured activity, attitudes supporting or hostile to immigration, policies and laws regulating immigration, and the nature of and prospects for assimilation. There have been some dramatic developments since 2011, including the crisis along the southwestern border and the intense conflict over illegal immigration. The population of the United States has diverse sources: territorial acquisition through conquest and colonialism, the slave trade, and voluntary immigration. Many Americans value the memory of immigrant ancestors, and are sentimentally inclined to immigrant strivings. Alongside this sits the perception that immigration destabilizes social order, cultural coherence, job markets, and political alignments. The nearly 250 years of American nationhood has been characterized by both support for openness to immigration and embrace of a cosmopolitan formulation of American identity and for restrictions and assertions of belief in a core Anglo-American national character.

Claremont Conferences

1986 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 379-380
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
National Endowment ◽  
Annual Conference ◽  
150Th Anniversary ◽  
Democracy In America ◽  
American Society

A major conference on Tocqueville’s Democracy in America was held from January 23 to 26, 1985, at Claremont, California. The meeting, sponsored by the Claremont Institute and funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities, was the second annual conference in a larger project, Novus Ordo Seclorum, directed by Ken Masugi and designed by the Institute to celebrate the American Bicentennial. The Tocqueville Conference, which gathered as participants some three dozen scholars from the United States, France, Germany, and Thailand, also honored the 150th anniversary of the publication of the Democracy and served to demonstrate the continuing fascination and liveliness of Tocqueville’s book as a commentary on American society and culture.

National Endowment for the Arts

1978 ◽  
Vol 8 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 110-110
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Educational Institutions ◽  
National Endowment ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Dance Companies

The National Endowment for the Arts awards grants for projects related to the arts, and makes grants to museums, theatres, dance companies, and educational institutions in the United States to help support and improve their programs. Because of the Endowment's organization it was not possible to compile a list of Africa-related grants.

Filming Hegemony: Hollywood and the Manichean Script of Geopolitics

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Georg Löfflmann
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
National Security ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
American Exceptionalism ◽  
The United States ◽  
External Threats ◽  
Hollywood Movies ◽  
American Hegemony ◽  
Film Productions

The chapter focuses on popular culture as key site for the production of constructs of geopolitical identity and practices of national security as common sense knowledge and conventional wisdom, examining popular Hollywood movies of the ‘national security cinema’ and the involvement of the Pentagon in the filmmaking process. Representations of geopolitical identity and national security are analyzed in some of the commercially most successful films in the United States released between 2009 and 2015. The chapter’s analysis testifies to the enduring popularity of key ideational themes and mythologies, such as American exceptionalism, military heroism, and external threats endangering the existence of the United States, its interests and values under the Obama presidency. The serial reproduction of these national security narratives, realized in multi-million dollar film productions, illustrates the cross-discursive leverage of American hegemony over alternative formulations of grand strategy under the Obama presidency and the popularity of a particular national security imagery of American geopolitical identity.

British Radical Attitudes towards the United States of America in the 1790s: The Case of William Winterbotham

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emma Macleod
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
United States Of America ◽  
The United States ◽  
Thomas Paine ◽  
High Court ◽  
Philosophical View ◽  
Political Analysis ◽  
Chattel Slavery ◽  
Joseph Priestley ◽  
New Republic

This chapter examines British radical attitudes towards America during the 1790s by taking up the case of William Winterbotham, a Plymouth Baptist preacher who was jailed in Newgate prison for four years (1793–1797) for allegedly seditious content in two sermons he preached in November 1792. Winterbotham's most ambitious work was An Historical, Geographical, Commercial, and Philosophical View of the American United States, published in four volumes in 1795. It demonstrates the fascination that America held for British radicals beyond Thomas Paine, Joseph Priestley and Richard Price. Among his many concerns, Winterbotham was highly critical of the institution of chattel slavery. The chapter explores Winterbotham's political analysis of the new republic and shows that his imprisonment for seditious libel was bracketed by contemporaries with the more conspicuous 'martyrdom' of five men sentenced to transportation by the Scottish High Court of Justiciary.

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