A Post-Exceptionalist Perspective on Early American History

A Post-Exceptionalist Perspective on Early American History PDF Author: Carroll P. Kakel III
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3030213056
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 138

Book Description
This book argues that early American history is best understood as the story of a settler-colonial supplanting society—a society intent on a vast land grab of American Indian space and driven by a logic of elimination and a genocidal imperative to rid the new white settler living space of its existing Indigenous inhabitants. Challenging the still strongly held notion of American history as somehow exceptional or unique, it locates the history of the United States and its colonial antecedents as a central part of—rather than an exception to—the emerging global histories of imperialism, colonialism, and genocide. It also explores early American history in an imperial, transnational, and global frame, showing how the precedent of the North American West and its colonial trope of Indian wars were used by like-minded American and European expansionists to inspire and legitimate other imperial-colonial adventures from the late-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries.

An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (10th Anniversary Edition)

An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (10th Anniversary Edition) PDF Author: Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Publisher: Beacon Press
ISBN: 0807013145
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 330

Book Description
New York Times Bestseller Now part of the HBO docuseries "Exterminate All the Brutes," written and directed by Raoul Peck Recipient of the American Book Award The first history of the United States told from the perspective of indigenous peoples Today in the United States, there are more than five hundred federally recognized Indigenous nations comprising nearly three million people, descendants of the fifteen million Native people who once inhabited this land. The centuries-long genocidal program of the US settler-colonial regimen has largely been omitted from history. Now, for the first time, acclaimed historian and activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz offers a history of the United States told from the perspective of Indigenous peoples and reveals how Native Americans, for centuries, actively resisted expansion of the US empire. With growing support for movements such as the campaign to abolish Columbus Day and replace it with Indigenous Peoples’ Day and the Dakota Access Pipeline protest led by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States is an essential resource providing historical threads that are crucial for understanding the present. In An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, Dunbar-Ortiz adroitly challenges the founding myth of the United States and shows how policy against the Indigenous peoples was colonialist and designed to seize the territories of the original inhabitants, displacing or eliminating them. And as Dunbar-Ortiz reveals, this policy was praised in popular culture, through writers like James Fenimore Cooper and Walt Whitman, and in the highest offices of government and the military. Shockingly, as the genocidal policy reached its zenith under President Andrew Jackson, its ruthlessness was best articulated by US Army general Thomas S. Jesup, who, in 1836, wrote of the Seminoles: “The country can be rid of them only by exterminating them.” Spanning more than four hundred years, this classic bottom-up peoples’ history radically reframes US history and explodes the silences that have haunted our national narrative. An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States is a 2015 PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature.

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

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.

Writing Early American History

Writing Early American History PDF Author: Alan Taylor
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 290

Book Description
How is American history written? Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alan Taylor answers this question in this collection of his essays from The New Republic, where he explores the writing of early American history.

War and Colonization in the Early American Northeast

War and Colonization in the Early American Northeast PDF Author: Christoph Strobel
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000865932
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 140

Book Description
This book takes a new approach by synthesizing the work of scholars of military and Indigenous history to provide the first chronologically ordered, region-wide, and long-term narrative history of conflict in the Early American Northeast. War and Colonization in the Early American Northeast focuses on war and society, European colonization, and Indigenous peoples in New England from the pre-Columbian era to the mid-eighteenth century. It examines how the New English used warfare against Native Americans as a way to implement a colonial order. These conflicts shaped New English attitudes toward Native Americans, which further aided in the marginalization and the violent targeting of these communities. At the same time, this volume pays attention to the experiences of Indigenous peoples. It explores pre-Columbian Native American conflict and studies how colonization altered the ways of warfare of Indigenous people. Native Americans contested New English efforts at colonization and used violent warfare strategies and raids to target their enemies—often quite successfully. However, in the long run, depending on time and geographic location, conflict and colonization led to dramatic and violent changes for Native Americans. This volume is an essential resource for academics, students, academic libraries, and general readers interested in the history of New England, military, Native American, or U.S. history.

Colonial Paradigms of Violence

Colonial Paradigms of Violence PDF Author: Michelle Gordon
Publisher: Wallstein Verlag
ISBN: 3835348779
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Book Description
European Holocaust Studies (EHS) publishes key international research results on the murder of the European Jews and its wider contexts. In recent years, scholars have rediscovered Hannah Arendt`s "boomerang thesis" – the "coming home" of European colonialism as genocide on European soil – as well as Raphael Lemkin`s work around his definition of genocide and the importance of its colonial dimensions. Germany and other European states are increasingly engaging in debates on comparing the Holocaust to other genocides and cases of mass killing, memorialization, "decolonization" and attempts to come to terms with the past ("Vergangenheitsbewältigung").

Exceptional America

Exceptional America PDF Author: Mugambi Jouet
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520966465
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 358

Book Description
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.

What Jane Knew

What Jane Knew PDF Author: Maureen Konkle
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469675390
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 289

Book Description
The children of an influential Ojibwe-Anglo family, Jane Johnston and her brother George were already accomplished writers when the Indian agent Henry Rowe Schoolcraft arrived in Sault Ste. Marie in 1822. Charged by Michigan's territorial governor with collecting information on Anishinaabe people, he soon married Jane, "discovered" the family's writings, and began soliciting them for traditional Anishinaabe stories. But what began as literary play became the setting for political struggle. Jane and her family wrote with attention to the beauty of Anishinaabe narratives and to their expression of an Anishinaabe world that continued to coexist with the American republic. But Schoolcraft appropriated the stories and published them as his own writing, seeking to control their meaning and to destroy their impact in service to the "civilizing" interests of the United States. In this dramatic story, Maureen Konkle helps recover the literary achievements of Jane Johnston Schoolcraft and her kin, revealing as never before how their lives and work shed light on nineteenth-century struggles over the future of Indigenous people in the United States.

Into New Territory

Into New Territory PDF Author: James G. Morgan
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Pres
ISBN: 0299300447
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 282

Book Description
Into New Territory charts how the concept of US imperialism became prevalent in the writing of American diplomatic history, and how empire evolved into an effective analytical framework for the study of US foreign policy.

The Holocaust as Colonial Genocide

The Holocaust as Colonial Genocide PDF Author: C. Kakel
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137391693
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 99

Book Description
Based on an exploration of both pre-Nazi and Nazi theory and practice, Pete Kakel challenges the dominant narrative of the murder of European Jewry, illuminating the Holocaust's decidedly imperial-colonial origins, context, and content in a book of interest to students, teachers, and lay readers, as well as specialist and non-specialist scholars.