Product Description: Grounded in the stories of their actual visits, What They Saw in America takes the reader through the journeys of four distinguished, yet very different foreign visitors - Alexis de Tocqueville, Max Weber, G. K. Chesterton and Sayyid Qutb - who traveled to the United States between 1830 and 1950...read more

Product Description: This study introduces a new perspective on Lincoln and the Civil War through an examination of his declaration of our national values and the subsequent interpretation of those values by families during the war.• Takes a new approach to the study of the Civil War as it connects Lincoln to families' assessment of their own and national virtues• Provides a unique viewpoint on Lincoln's virtues derived from his important Independence Hall speech• Shows how virtue helped to coalesce families into one unified nation• Is enlivened by short biographical pieces in every chapte...read more

Product Description: American Exceptionalism Revisited provides a broad overview of the various features that signify American politics. These include the upholding of an exceptional political stability, involving a particular balance between legislative, executive and judicial powers, and the permanence of a unique party system...read more

What can homespun cloth, stuffed birds, quince jelly, and ginseng reveal about the formation of early American national identity? In this wide-ranging and bold new interpretation of American history and its Founding Fathers, Kariann Akemi Yokota shows that political independence from Britain fueled anxieties among the Americans about their cultural inferiority and continuing dependence on the mother country. Caught between their desire to emulate the mother country and an awareness that they lived an ocean away on the periphery of the known world, they went to great lengths to convince themselves and others of their refinement. Taking a transnational approach to American history, Yokota examines a wealth of evidence from geography, the decorative arts, intellectual history, science, and technology to underscore that the process of "unbecoming British" was not an easy one. Indeed, the new nation struggled to define itself economically, politically, and culturally in what could be called America's postcolonial period. Out of this confusion of hope and exploitation, insecurity and vision, a uniquely American identity emerged.

Product Description: With American independence came the freedom to sail anywhere in the world under a new flag. During the years between the Treaty of Paris and the Treaty of Wangxi, Americans first voyaged past the Cape of Good Hope, reaching the ports of Algiers and the bazaars of Arabia, the markets of India and the beaches of Sumatra, the villages of Cochin, China, and the factories of Canton...read more

Product Description: The uniqueness of America has been alternately celebrated and panned, emphasized and denied, for most of the country's history―both by its own people and by visitors and observers from around the world. The idea of "American exceptionalism" tends to provoke strong feelings, but few are aware of the term's origins or understand its true meaning...read more

Product Description: From rags to riches, log house to White House, enslaved to liberator, ghetto to CEO, ambition fuels the American Dream. Americans are driven by ambition. Yet at the time of the nation's founding, ambition was viewed as a dangerous vice, everything from "a canker on the soul" to the impetus for original sin...read more

Product Description: As Bill Clinton said in his second inaugural address, “The divide of race has been America’s constant curse.” In Honor Bound, David Leverenz explores the past to the present of that divide. He argues that in the United States, the rise and decline of white people’s racial shaming reflect the rise and decline of white honor...read more

Product Description: A Companion to American Studies is an essential volume that brings together voices and scholarship from across the spectrum of American experience. A collection of 22 original essays which provides an unprecedented introduction to the "new" American Studies: a comparative, transnational, postcolonial and polylingual discipline Addresses a variety of subjects, from foundations and backgrounds to the field, to different theories of the “new” American Studies, and issues from globalization and technology to transnationalism and post-colonialism Explores the relationship between American Studies and allied fields such as Ethnic Studies, Feminist, Queer and Latin American Studies Designed to provoke discussion and help students and scholars at all levels develop their own approaches to contemporary American Studies...read more

Product Description: Brand New.

Product Description: Brand New.

A New Anthology.

Product Description: Along the 175-mile stretch from Monticello to Gettysburg—designated by Congress as the official "birthplace of America"—intriguing details of our nation’s past emerge from every town and byway. This beautiful book spotlights key places and personalities on the route, revealing insiders’ stories of early America...read more

Product Description: Cultus Americanus applies a philosophical model of political culture as ideology, religion, and myth to a re-consideration of America's liberal consensus to explain cultural diversity in America. Applying this model to the formative years of American political culture from 1600-1865 demonstrates that American diversity exists within a single, coherent cultural universe, dominated by a liberal ideology that is informed and supported by both a unique American religiosity and a vibrant American mythology...read more

A study of the ways in which language was used in the early American republic to define national character and shape national boundaries focuses on the contributions of seven men who worked with alphabets, codes, and signs--including Noah Webster, William Thornton, Sequoyah, Thomas Gallaudet, Abdul Rahaman, Samuel F. B. Morse, and Alexander Graham Bell. Reprint. 15,000 first printing. (view table of contents)

(view table of contents)

Product Description: This book accounts for the divergence, not conventionally by emphasising the political differences, but by highlighting a longer, more gradual process of interaction between physical human environments.