The Ideas That Made America: A Brief History
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
Long before the United States was a nation, it was a set of ideas, projected onto the New World by European explorers with centuries of belief and thought in tow. From this foundation of expectation and experience, America and American thought grew in turn, enriched by the bounties of the Enlightenment, the philosophies of liberty and individuality, the tenets of religion, and the doctrines of republicanism and democracy. Crucial to this development were the thinkers who nurtured it, from Thomas Jefferson to Ralph Waldo Emerson, W.E.B. DuBois to Jane Addams, and Betty Friedan to Richard Rorty. The Ideas That Made America: A Brief History traces how Americans have addressed the issues and events of their time and place, whether the Civil War, the Great Depression, or the culture wars of today.
Spanning a variety of disciplines, from religion, philosophy, and political thought, to cultural criticism, social theory, and the arts, Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen shows how ideas have been major forces in American history, driving movements such as transcendentalism, Social Darwinism, conservatism, and postmodernism. In engaging and accessible prose, this introduction to American thought considers how notions about freedom and belonging, the market and morality -- and even truth -- have commanded generations of Americans and been the cause of fierce debate.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this excellent work, Ratner-Rosenhagen, a University of Wisconsin historian, offers "a brief survey of some of the most compelling episodes and abiding preoccupations in American intellectual history," with the aim of discerning what that history is, in terms of its context as well as its central ideas. In so doing, she takes a chronological approach, but also emphasizes the movement of ideas across boundaries of time and space, as well as between elite and popular cultures. An illustrative example is the theology of Martin Luther King Jr., who was a great admirer of Mahatma Gandhi, who in turn had been inspired by Henry David Thoreau, an adherent of medieval Buddhist philosophy. Beginning with the early modern European idea of translatio imperii ("translation of empire," an imagined line of succession connecting Alexander the Great to the U.S.), Ratner-Rosenhagen surveys America's intellectual history and influences upon it. She identifies as important such episodes as the attempts of post-Revolutionary Americans to develop a distinctive national culture; the often rancorous debates over the applicability of Charles Darwin's evolutionary theories to policies toward African-Americans, Native Americans, immigrants, and the poor; the emergence of the philosophy of pragmatism; the interwar struggle between modernism and tradition; and the culture shifts of the 1960s and '70s and the "culture wars" that followed. This is a thoughtful and succinct introduction to American intellectual history.
