We tend to think that the territorial expansion of the United States during the 19th century was a natural process. The idea of “Manifest Destiny,” a term broadly used in the 1840s, justified U.S. expansionist policy and has also affected how we view the history of North America. However, the North American continent was not destined from the beginning to be conquered by the United States. The myth of natural American expansion is deeply connected to our understanding of early American territorial conquest during the War of 1812 (1812–1815). This paper reinterprets the political and social turmoil of the War of 1B12 from a different perspective than that of conventional U.S. history.

For the new republic, the War of 1812 was not just a struggle for rights in the Atlantic but also a war of conquest on the continent. We are familiar with how the War Hawks’ assertion of expansionism, backed by a pro-war public, led to the U.S. invasion of Canada and Florida. This conventional narrative, however, is problematic in that it emphasizes the role and perspective of pro-war politicians too much while neglecting those who opposed, or hesitated to support, the war. The overemphasis on the pro-war movement has intensified the myth of natural expansion through blind acceptance of the view of the War Hawks. Therefore, to avoid reproducing the celebration of this war as a second war of American independence, we need to focus on those who were criticized or hated by the pro-war camp. Those called traitors―the antiwar factions, the Native American nations, and settlers at the frontier―were believed to be connected to the European empires. Indeed, all North American peoples were connected to the empires, which is understandable given the history of European rule in the Americas. But mmors of connections with Europe exacerbated this fear of European, especially British, intrusion among the American public. Americans were afraid more of suspicious individuals in the vicinity than of the European powers in the distance.

By examining the discourse of the so-called “British party,” this study shows why they were regarded as disloyal in the new republic and discusses how identities were dramatically transformed in North America in this period. To fulfill this goal, we will focus on the following points. First, we will look at the War of 1812 from the viewpoint of continental history rather than conven-tional national history. Second, we will adopt a cross-sectional approach, examining a variety of groups of people. This will lead to better capturing broad transformations during the war period than would be possible by focusing on a specific group. Third, we will situate the era of the early republic within the centuries-long history of inter-imperial relations in the Americas, which will deepen our understanding of continental turmoil in the early 19th century.

In his article “The Trope of New Negro” (1988), Henry Louis Gates, Jr. initiated the reexamination of turn-of-the-century black intellectuals and their attempts at reconstructing their self-image. Black leaders like Booker T. Washington were eager to present a “New Negro” image to fit the ideal American-self and claim his citizenship rights. Sutton E. Griggs, a Baptist preacher, published several novels in the same period, also to establish a “New Negro” as autonomous race/nation. This article examines the rhetoric employed by Griggs, when black manhood was openly obliterated and denied, to reclaim it through complex maneuvering. I argue that Griggs was not just concerned with influencing southern blacks with racial-uplift messages, but freeing them and offering a new race construction.

The Spanish American War provided an opportunity for black leaders to confirm the patriotism and citizenship of black men at a time when their image was degraded or even erased. After the Civil War, black troops were sent to the West to fight, and were thus literally removed from the sight of southern blacks and American publications. The success of black soldiers in Cuba followed by the disregard of their heroic exploits in the mainstream press prompted scores of literary works written by African Americans who wanted to both record black soldiers’ courageous acts and counter negative images imparted by Theodore Roosevelt, who had originally praised black troops.

Washington also recognized the need for blacks to show their patriotism and manhood in order to win the approval of Northern whites and claim citi-zenship. He repeatedly called for party loyalty among blacks. For Washington, the black community had to maintain a politically united front; both party loyalty and war participation were essential to show patriotism and to affirm that blacks could achieve the dominant white culture’s masculine ideal.

However, not all blacks thought it was wise to stake their wellbeing on one political alliance. Griggs’ novels, Imperium in Imperio (1399) and Unfettered (1902)―both written immediately after the Spanish American War―show more complicated black tactics and self-images. Griggs emphasized communal loyalty which permits splitting blacks politically. He advocated patriotism to the country while depicting a black nation within a larger American nation. Griggs insisted that offering counter-representations of black was not enough to legitimize their racial-self, just as mass-voting is ineffective and mass-patriotism is futile in gaining citizenship. Griggs’ idea of manhood is different; his is grounded in the southern manhood that values martial prowess, Christian piousness, and social autonomy. He triple-layered his rhetoric to match the consciousness of American-self (patriotism), southern-self (regional attachment) and racial-self (communal responsibility).

Griggs, in his novels, repeatedly questioned impending disfranchisement and suggested a way to stop losing voting power. After the emancipation, voting rights more than anything was what defined southern black manhood. While Washington spoke to the larger audience that included many whites, self-publishing Griggs wrote for the predominantly black audience. Through his novels Griggs revealed choices for blacks to change the southern degenerate race policies. His writings helped shape the “New Negro” consciousness.

The main purpose of this essay is to examine how the narrative of American exceptionalism has evolved during the presidency of Barack Obama, who seemed, at least early in his presidency, to hesitate to invoke the idea. Although the origin of the concept of American exceptionalism goes back to John Winthrop’s “a City upon a Hill” in 1630, it is over the last several years that the usage of the term has increased significantly in American politics and publications. One of the reasons for the recent rise of American exceptionalism was President George W. Bush’s unilateral or unpopular foreign policy, exemplified by the Iraq war. In this context, American exceptionalism was considered as almost identical to American unilateralism; based on the conviction that the U.S. is the only country that matters, they can, on a global scale, do whatever they believe is right, for example, to spread freedom and democracy. Therefore, it was natural that very few expected the newly-elected Obama, who had harshly criticized Bush’s unilateral military interventions and pledged a withdrawal from Iraq in the presidential campaign, would turn out to be a President with a strong propensity to emphasize American exceptionalism.

What changed Obama’s calculation from 2011 onward was the Arab Spring, pressing him to decide whether to intervene militarily in Arab countries facing democratization or humanitarian crises. As a result, Obama intervened in Libya (under “Responsibility to Protect”) to protect civilians in danger of being killed by Gaddafi’s forces, but declined to intervene in Syria to stop civil war and human suffering (and overthrow the Assad regime) while ridding Syria of its chemical weapons arsenal by non-violent means under the auspices of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, and intervened in Iraq and Syria to destroy the Islamic State. Intriguingly or ironically, President Obama, also considered a non-interventionist at first, would rely on the discourse of American exceptionalism in appealing to the inward-looking or war-weary American public and justifying the importance of these interventions.

This essay explores the circumstances under which President Obama has invoked American exceptionalism in his major speeches relating to the abovementioned crises in the Arab world and clarifies how he came to be devoted to American exceptionalism, how he attempted to differentiate his own American exceptionalism from that of President Bush, disdained by him and many Americans, and how Obama utilized American exceptionalism in conducting his interventions. The essay concludes that Obama’s American exceptionalism can be characterized as “multilateral American exceptionalism,” which articulates American uniqueness as a nation that supports democracy and human dignity in the world, as well as emphasizing the multilateral framework required for conducting U.S. military interventions.

American exceptionalism has long been closely related to an American identity. Accordingly, this essay’s argument also demonstrates how the United States under Obama’s presidency, which saw a relative decline in American power in the international system and an increasingly introverted American public, attempted to redefine American “self-image” in an increasingly unstable world.

In the process of the end of the Cold War, President George H. W. Bush announced that the United States, as a “European power,” would maintain significant military forces in Europe as long as its allies desire U.S. presence as part of a common security effort. This image of the U.S. at the Cold War’s demise might contradict its classical self-image in the context of U.S.-European relations. Traditionally, the U.S. took measures to avoid power politics on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. This paper explores why the U.S. decided to engage in the future of Europe, revealing its image as a “European power.” To this aim, first, this paper classifies theories of U.S. foreign policy into four types: 1) primacy, 2) isolationism, 3) offshore balancing, and 4) selective engagement. Furthermore, it examines as a case study the Bush administration’s foreign policy toward Europe on the basis of declassified primary materials located at the Presidential Library in Texas, memoirs by the former officials, and secondary sources. In this section, the way the U.S. managed the “German Question” at that time in collaboration with neighboring countries including the Soviet Union will be investigated. From 1989 to 1990, many in Europe were concerned about the scenario that the unified Germany became militarily and economically powerful, followed by a European imbalance of power. In this context, many neighbors in Europe, including the Soviet Union, welcomed U.S. military presence in the future of Europe as a “stabilizer.”

This story provides us with an answer to the question why the U.S. redefined its self-image as a “European power” at the ending of the Cold War. The Bush administration followed the cooperative principle in both areas of the bilateral U.S.-Soviet relationships and the Western alliance. The I-I.S. tried to treat the exhausted Soviets as still “superpower” to avoid political crisis that would lead to subversion of the Gorbachev-Ied Soviets regime. In terms of Atlantic relations, the U.S. always sought its strong leadership within the alliance to strengthen the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) solidarity at the time of turbulence. President Bush and his national security advisor Brent Scowcroft recognized that the drastic development in Europe would lead to European imbalance of power as shared by many countries in the continent. To avoid this scenario, the U.S. adamantly denied the return to isolationism, and as a “stabilizer” in new European order, it decided to continue to maintain significant military forces. U.S. military presence never retreated offshore.

In sum, when Germany unified and Europe transformed, the U.S. employed the strategy of selective engagement in new European order. The reason the U.S. redefined itself as a “European power” is to show the denial of isolationism and the continuation of stationing significant military forces to manage the European balance of power in the post-Cold war era.

Since the early 1990s, a remarkable intellectual trend has been seen among historians to de-provincialize, or globalize, American History. It now seems that the values that encapsulate the writing history beyond national borders as well as thinking about global issues in the context of human history form the consensus within American academia. Obviously, it is an alternative to “obsolete” national history while at the same time this new approach to the “American past” seems to fit with the present trend toward globalization in the fields of politics and economics. Critics of the trend to globalize historiography have therefore implied complicity with the rise of global capitalism and American hegemony. These "globalization causes" in American historical studies are revisited in this essay in order to shed light on their outstanding achievements and unavoidable limitations.

First, I search for the origin of this trend by critically reviewing preceding anti-“national history” discourses, especially those that criticize so-called American exceptionalism. This essay diligently considers the impacts of Daniel Bell’s post-exceptionalist analyses as well as the de-nationalized perspectives of social historians in the mid-1970s. It also surveys the post-Cold war intellectual fluidity that led directly to the emergence of “globalization causes.” One intriguing aspect of the situation in 1990s was the strange coexistence of persistent warnings from historians about the concept of national history alongside the newly erupted triumphalism of American ideology.

Second, I examine contemporary arguments from liberal nationalists that fundamentally conflict with “globalization.” Historians who believed in civic ideals as mechanisms to suppress post-Cold War ethno-nationalism and to restore community life divided by multiculturalism still expected the national sovereign state to form the basis of a healthy civil society. Thus, they tended to be cynical about transnational history, even dubious of its alleged innocence in relation to global power structures. In addition, some historians were conscious of America’s commitment to the globalization of the political economy. As such, some were uncomfortable with the de-centered approach pursued by “globalization causes”.

In conclusion, I contextualize the emergence of this academic trend and reconsider its meaning in the study of history. This work will show how it visualized a number of stories that had been ignored in the framework of national history. This essay also elucidates how “globalization” in history writings has naturalized actual globalization into an inherent assumption. This recognition process tends to obscure other significant aspects of the past. One such aspect that has been neglected has to do with the historical collaboration of national and global forces in shaping American history. In spite of their struggles against exceptionalism, “globalization causes” have never been free of national issues. Rather, as I historicize them by reviewing the way Americans have interpreted their past, it is clear that the next frontier of historiography lies in forging mutually complementary relationships between national and global histories. By not ignoring, but examining ever transformative American nationalism, we can illuminate how national history can be compatible with global approaches. This will also enable us to move beyond the “limitations” imposed by a conventional national or global dichotomy.

The national disrespect for intellectuals is one of the most conspicuous features in American life. We often describe it as anti-intellectualism, owing to the 1964 Pulitzer prize winning book, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. It was written by Richard Hofstadter. He was a leading liberal whose career paralleled the heyday of twentieth century liberalism. My essay examines Hofstadter’s historical interpretation within the changing context of American liberalism. I bring his liberal understanding of American history into relief by showing Hofstadter’s attitude toward the nineteenth century historian Henry Adams.

The contrast between Hofstadter and Adams seems very sharp. Hofstadter was christened in his mother’s Lutheran faith. But he was half-Jewish, and inevitably sensitive to an increasing ethnic diversity of American society. Adams was a prominent member of Boston’s Brahmin class. He was the great-grandson of John Adams, and the grandson of John Quincy Adams. Adams was a famous pessimist who illuminated the degeneration of American civilization. Some scholars think that the pluralist course of the modern social development forced him to criticize emerging multiethnic America.

It is natural that Hofstadter disliked Adams. Hofstadter was born in Buffalo in 1916, and raised to embody a secular and cosmopolitan atmosphere in New York. When he was a student of the graduate school of Columbia University, he attended meetings of the Young Communist League. He was a typical academic pink in the late 1930s and disappointed at strict dogmatic discipline of the Communist Party. He found out that the new beginning of America started with the Franklin D. Roosevelt government.

It seemed to him that Henry Adams was a defender for traditionalism, which prized Aryan Protestants over other ethnic groups. But Hofstadter’s feeling toward Adams softened since the late 1940s. Adams was a sincere intellectual who fought for a liberal cause of a different age. As a journalist, he wrote many articles exposing political corruption, and straggled for civil service reform in the 1860s and 1870s. He grew disappointed at horrible interest group politics, and published books which examined the dilemma of democratic society in which an egalitarian ideal inevitably tended to deny the leadership of virtuous patricians. His autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams revealed his unique pessimistic worldview.

Hofstadter was deeply interested in the democratic dilemma and pessimism presented by Adams. In his another Pulitzer prize winning book, The Age of Reform, Hofstadter severely criticized irrational elements of Populism and Progressivism, and described nineteenth century intellectuals’ agony by using The Education of Henry Adams. And again in Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, he expressed his sympathy for Adams.

Hofstadter still felt the hatred of the racial discrimination of the WASP elites, but drew attention to a psychological peculiarity of American people, which might lead to an irrational oppressive regime. However pessimistic, Henry Adams believed in the popular sovereignty, for he trusted people’s political potential for self-improvement. Hofstadter could not share such a belief with Adams. This essay illuminates Hofstadter’s vacillated historical consciousness and deep doubts about American democracy.

This paper reads Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s The Linwoods (1835) in order to illuminate a conflicting relationship between regionalism and nationalism in the early national period of America. A story about the Revolution, The Linwoods has been evaluated as a national discourse that, along with such historical novel as The New-England Tale (1822) and Hope Leslie (1827), aims at providing America with a founding myth. But the novel’s nationalism appears to be rather problematic once we take its New York setting into consideration. Occupied by the British throughout the War, New York existed as an antagonistic presence to the rest of the American colonies. Through the analysis of the workings of this un-American setting, this paper finds in the text a discursive dualism that betrays Sedgwick’s local feelings divided between New York and New England.

The Linwoods, indeed, induces us to think about the cultural atmosphere surrounding those authors who engaged themselves in bringing national literature to the American audience. In the 1820s and 1830s, national definitions of culture were still highly controversial. With its political leadership rapidly receding, New England, on the one hand, tried to revitalize itself by inventing and then distributing its own idealized image as a model for a nation with which to contend for cultural supremacy. In New York, on the other, the Young America movement set out to protest against New England’s claim for Americanness by exploring a possibility of democracy for a new paradigm of American culture.

It is, in fact, during this period of regional conflicts that Sedgwick experienced an important shift in authorship. Moving away from Stockbridge to New York City, that is to Say, Sedgwick started a new career as a New York writer. Not only giving up the New England theme, Sedgwick also cultivated a rather intimate kind of relationship with the central figure of the Young America movement, John L. O’Sullivan. As a result, her contribution to O’Sullivan’s Democratic Review reached a peak in the 1840s.

The dualism that informs Sedgwick’s discourse of America in The Linwoods, however, suggests a psychological difficulty Sedgwick must have felt in pursuing a career as a New York writer by jeopardizing her reputation as a New England local colorist. In the 1830s, no writer could have achieved a status as a national writer by simply expressing his/her patriotic feeling toward America. Instead of it, the situation rather obliged them to find their own place in the New York’s movement toward institutionalization of American literature as a democratic discourse.

The Pequot War broke out in 1637 and the Puritan’s Hartford Treaty (1638) deprived the Pequot of the very proper name of the tribe. According to Alden T. Vaughan, writers in eighteenth-century New England regarded the war as “a defensive maneuver,” but later such attitude gradually changed. Indeed, in L827 Catharine Maria Sedgwick narrated the conflict in Hope Leslie. In 1851, Herman Melville commented in Moby-Dick: “the Pequod . . . was the name of a celebrated tribe of Massachusetts Indians.” Melville also gave to the symbolic whaler the name “Pequod.” Therefore, a rereading of Timothy Dwight’s “The Destruction of the Pequods,” published in 1794, will give us a clue for reconsidering early American literary history.

This paper investigates how Dwight depicts the war from three perspectives. First, it confirms that he tends to side with the Pequot like Sedgwick and Melville. Although historians in Connecticut considered the Pequot as their enemies in the Biblical sense, Dwight admonishes readers to “feel for Indian woes severe.”

Second, in order to think about this admonishment precisely, the history of the Puritan mission in New England is reconstructed. Hence, it is clarified that Dwight inherited his views from Puritan missionaries (particularly John Eliot, Thomas Mayhew Jr., and his own grandfather Jonathan Edwards). This inheritance is combined, for Dwight and without contradiction, with three basic goals of the Federal Indian policy during the Washington administration: that is, according to John Demos , “to turn Indians from hunters into settled agriculturalists; to draw them fully into the orbit of Christianity; and to attach them to the principle of private, 2S opposed to communal, ownership of property.”

Finally, “The Destruction of the Pequods” is re-interpreted with special emphasis on its poetic form, the Spenserian Stanza: a dual structure (i.e., two narrators with two viewpoints) of eight lines in iambic pentameter followed by one line in iambic hexameter with the rhyme scheme “ababbcbcc.” Using the dual structure (the L637 perspective of the Pequot War and the 1794 one), Dwight implies his indebtedness to Puritan sources for narrating the battle and his awareness that he cannot transcend the conquerors’ eyes. And, he em-ploys this rhyme scheme to show his respect for and humbleness before the great epic poets: Homer and Virgil (whom he mentions in the last stanza). With the form of Spenserian Stanza as a strategy for indicating a connection with the past and creating national poetry in eighteenth-century England, as David Fairer pointed out, Dwight’s style helped establish American epic after the Revolution. It is through the equivocal poetics that Timothy Dwight came to dedicate his epic to both the Puritan and the Pequot in the year of 1794.

American families have become more diverse and choice-based since the 1970s as feminism and post-Fordism gained momentum: feminism criticized the traditional division of gender roles in a family, and post-Fordism introduced a flexible lifestyle. The nurturing father, who flexibly juggles work and family, plays a major role in families as a choice. Drawing on Lisa Duggan and Nancy Fraser’s discussion that identity politics have been instrumental in underpinning neoliberalism, this paper critically examines the cultural representation of white middle-class nurturing fathers in late twentieth-century American novels (Robert B. Parker’s Early Autumn and John Irving’s The Cider House Rules) and films (Kramer ns. Kramer and Mrs. Doubtfire). Being an “entrepreneur of himself,” the nurturing father is a poster child of neoliberalism; to borrow from Wendy Brown, the nurturing father illustrates how “the rationally calculating individual bears full responsibility for the consequences of his or her action no matter how severe the constraints on this action.”

The nurturing father looks liberating in terms of gender, but its intersection with race and class is equally crucial in illuminating the significance of the freedom and self-reliance he embodies. The nurturing father is almost always represented as white middle-class with its counterpoint of African American and/or working-class fathers as deadbeat dads. The white middle-class nurturing father’s new lifestyle enjoys broad support in the late twentieth century because it evokes the anxiety about the family gone awry when fathers are liberated from the yoke of traditional gender roles.

Similarly, the discourse of the nurturing father accuses mothers of irresponsibility. Mothers in these novels and films often choose their career at the sacrifice of their families; nevertheless, they insist on their custody rights when they divorce. These novels and films also blame the law which unreasonably intervenes in a family’s private problem and favors mothers by naturalizing the bonds between mothers and children. In other words, white middle-class fathers in these novels and films are represented as victims whose love for children is misunderstood by the society. As such, the dis-course of the nurturing father demands the deregulation of the familial law to reinforce the authority of the father.

The diversification of American families also means the expansion of economic inequality between families. In the age of neoliberalism, the nurturing father is a privileged status given to only those who can juggle work and family flexibly. However, the discourse of the nurturing father obscures this privilege by turning child care into a matter of fatherly “love” rather than domestic labor; and those who do not have resources to juggle work and family are deemed to be heartless. The nurturing father is a neoliberal subject who heroically takes the risk of privatization in the demise of the welfare state; the white middle-class father still knows best in the late twentieth century.

In the years between the American Revolution and the Civil War, more than 150 women produced historical writing in over 350 different works. Although women engaged enthusiastically with “history” throughout the nineteenth century, the types of history they wrote were constrained by gender prescriptions stressing women’s “essential” domesticity; biography, focused on the interior life of an individual subject, was more suitable for women whose realm of knowledge and activity was believed to be the private world of the “woman’s sphere.” As their preferred historical form, women writers (mostly white middle-class women) used biography to educate readers about the past as historical knowledge, and presented the lives of exemplary women to serve as role models. Also, women writers not only believed that the privilege of historical writing was an avenue for them to move into public sphere, but also that the past itself had the power to shape the present. Among the politically contentious issues they raised in their historical texts, most prominent was the subject of women’s citizenship. Antebellum women were not “constituents” due to the limitations of coverture. History was utilized by women’s rights activists as well as those who opposed the rights in order to approach a question: what would citizenship mean for women?

Sarah J. Hale’s Woman’s Record, first published in 1853 and again in two revised editions in 1855 and 1876, is an ambitious biographical encyclopedia of “distinguished women” from all historical eras and nations, containing some 1650 entries with 230 engraved portraits. Hale was best known as an authoritative editor of. Godey’s Lady’s Book, the most widely read women’s magazine of its day. She was one of major figures who exerted a profound influence on domestic ideology and white middle-class women’s culture of Victorian America. As her conservatism seems to reflect her writing, Woman’s Record has been generally considered as a “domestic history”: a highly conservative text in that it advocates women’s withdrawal from male-dominated political arena, particularly through the refusal of women’s suffrage, while emphasizing women’s moral superiority and domesticity based on distinctly gendered separate spheres.

This paper, however, argues that Woman’s Record is a rather radical and progressive revision of women’s history. Paying close attention to the struggle for women’s rights in the 1850s, it suggests that there was an alternative to full citizenship for American women. Hale advocated the idea of. citizenship in which women could play an important part as citizens without political and legal rights; she did insist that there would be more “citizeness” responsible for and contributed to the civil society’s progress, as those who featured on the pages of her biographical text. Although Hale seems to affirm that a woman, as a paragon of her civil virtue, should uphold the morality of her husband and children, yet many women actually celebrated in the text differ immensely from the ideal image of a “Republican Mother / Wife.” If women as individuals independent of their families were what the text really expected of women, Woman’s Record could be read as a radical manifestation in defense of a woman’s personal fulfillment rather than her motherhood and wifehood.