This violent empire : the birth of an American national identity / Carroll Smith-Rosenberg.

Includes bibliographies and index.

Introduction: "What, then, is the American, this new man?" -- Section 1. The new American-as-republican citizen -- Prologue 1: The drums of war/the thrust of empire -- Fusions and confusions -- Rebellious dandies and political fictions -- American Minervas -- Section 2. Dangerous doubles -- Prologue 2: Masculinity and masquerade -- Seeing red -- Subject female : authorizing an American identity -- Section 3. The new American-as-bourgeois gentleman -- Prologue 3: The ball -- Choreographing class/performing gentility -- Polished gentlemen, troublesome women, and dancing slaves -- Black gothic.

"This Violent Empire traces the origins of American violence, racism, and paranoia to the founding moments of the new nation and the initial instability of Americans' national sense of self." "Fusing cultural and political analyses to create a new form of political history, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg explores the ways the founding generation, lacking a common history, governmental infrastructures, and shared culture, solidified their national sense of self by imagining a series of "Others" (African Americans, Native Americans, women, the propertyless) whose differences from European American male founders overshadowed the differences that divided those founders. These "Others," dangerous and polluting, had to be excluded from the European American body politic. Feared, but also desired, they refused to be marginalized, incurring increasingly enraged enactments of their political and social exclusion that shaped our long history of racism, xenophobia, and sexism. Close readings of political rhetoric during the Constitutional debates reveal the genesis of this long history."--Jacket.

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