American Crucible
Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century
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- 27,99 €
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- 27,99 €
Description de l’éditeur
This sweeping history of twentieth-century America follows the changing and often conflicting ideas about the fundamental nature of American society: Is the United States a social melting pot, as our civic creed warrants, or is full citizenship somehow reserved for those who are white and of the "right" ancestry? Gary Gerstle traces the forces of civic and racial nationalism, arguing that both profoundly shaped our society.
After Theodore Roosevelt led his Rough Riders to victory during the Spanish American War, he boasted of the diversity of his men's origins- from the Kentucky backwoods to the Irish, Italian, and Jewish neighborhoods of northeastern cities. Roosevelt’s vision of a hybrid and superior “American race,” strengthened by war, would inspire the social, diplomatic, and economic policies of American liberals for decades. And yet, for all of its appeal to the civic principles of inclusion, this liberal legacy was grounded in “Anglo-Saxon” culture, making it difficult in particular for Jews and Italians and especially for Asians and African Americans to gain acceptance.
Gerstle weaves a compelling story of events, institutions, and ideas that played on perceptions of ethnic/racial difference, from the world wars and the labor movement to the New Deal and Hollywood to the Cold War and the civil rights movement. We witness the remnants of racial thinking among such liberals as FDR and LBJ; we see how Italians and Jews from Frank Capra to the creators of Superman perpetuated the New Deal philosophy while suppressing their own ethnicity; we feel the frustrations of African-American servicemen denied the opportunity to fight for their country and the moral outrage of more recent black activists, including Martin Luther King, Jr., Fannie Lou Hamer, and Malcolm X.
Gerstle argues that the civil rights movement and Vietnam broke the liberal nation apart, and his analysis of this upheaval leads him to assess Reagan’s and Clinton’s attempts to resurrect nationalism. Can the United States ever live up to its civic creed? For anyone who views racism as an aberration from the liberal premises of the republic, this book is must reading.
Containing a new chapter that reconstructs and dissects the major struggles over race and nation in an era defined by the War on Terror and by the presidency of Barack Obama, American Crucible is a must-read for anyone who views racism as an aberration from the liberal premises of the republic.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Is America a wonderful melting pot in which the world's ethnicities and races can come together to form a vibrant new nation, or has the American dream become, in the words of Malcolm X, the American nightmare? The ideal of the multiracial, multicultural society has always been influenced dynamically by the competing, very potent ideal of America as a white, Protestant country. In this engrossing, powerfully argued study, Gerstle (Working-Class Americanism) shows how this struggle has shaped the past 100 years of U.S. life, society and politics. With a meticulous eye for detail, he moves deftly from quoting Theodore Roosevelt's desire for "hyphenated Americans" to become "Americans pure and simple" to a telling exegesis on how Superman comics represented a unique moment in the conceptualization of "the immigrant," specifically the Jewish immigrant, in popular culture. This ability to draw on a wide range of cultural artifacts and events from Frank Capra films and the Rosenberg executions to the effect of the Black Power movement on African-American GIs in Vietnam is matched by his portrayals of telling moments in U.S. history, such as when FDR's Jewish advisers urged him not to meet with a group of Orthodox rabbis who came to Washington in 1943 to ask for an end to "the destruction of European Jewry." Gerstle balances his critique of how often the U.S. has failed to live up to its melting pot ideal with a strong sense of fairness and an even stronger sense of the possibility for change. This informed and well-argued study is a strong addition to the literature on race, multiculturalism and citizenship in the U.S.