The Genesis of America: US Foreign Policy and the Formation of National Identity, 1793–1815 (Cambridge Studies in US Foreign Relations)
Cambridge University Press
Edition: Reprint, 5/28/2020
EAN 9781108453547, ISBN10: 1108453546
Paperback, 330 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 2.1 cm
Language: English
Originally published in English
The Genesis of America investigates the ways in which US foreign policy contributed to the formation of an American national consciousness. Interpreting American nationalism as a process of external demarcation, Jasper M. Trautsch argues that, for a sense of national self to emerge, the US needed to be disentangled from its most important European reference points: Great Britain and France. As he shows, foreign-policy makers could therefore promote American nationalism by provoking foreign crises and wars with these countries, hereby creating external threats that would bind the fragile union together. By reconstructing how foreign policy was thus used as a nation-building instrument, Trautsch provides an answer to the puzzling question of how Americans - lacking a shared history and culture of their own and justifying their claim for independent nationhood by appeals to universal rights - could develop a sense of particularity after the conclusion of the Revolutionary War.
Introduction
1. Political ideologies and American identity in the era of the French Revolution
2. Foreign policies of unneutrality and the Jay Treaty
3. Federalists and the origins of the Quasi-War
4. Disentangling America from France
5. Republicans and the origins of the War of 1812
6. Disentangling America from Great Britain
Conclusion.