Less exceptional than it thinks
http://www.economist.com/books/displaystory.cfm?story_id=6878204
May 4th 2006
From The Economist print edition
FROM its birth, three powerful images have coloured ideas of what the
United States was and what it stood for. One was "a city on a
hill", a model commonwealth for the rest of humankind. Another, in
Walt Whitman's phrase, was a "teeming nation of nations": a
near-empty continent of immigration and fresh starts. A third, given
currency by Alexis de Tocqueville in 1831, was of a new and exceptional
kind of society not bound by prevailing rules of history.
Each picture stresses what makes America different from other
countries. Thomas Bender, a professor of history and humanities at New
York University, wants us to focus instead on what makes the United
States the same. More exactly, he is urging us to re-think key episodes
in America's past by relating them to what was happening elsewhere in
the world. The United States, he suggests, is less of a nation apart
than super-patriots or America-haters might want to believe. His aim is
not to belittle the American achievement but to break the habit of
treating it as a virtually isolated feat of self-creation. National
histories, he argues, are always local responses to broader trends, and
to that rule the United States is no exception.
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