This volume celebrates and evaluates Anthony D. Smith’s path-breaking contribution to the study of nations and nationalism. A fresh and critical look at Anthony D. Smith’s path-breaking contribution to the study of nations and nationalism. Debates various issues concerning Smith’s controversial ethnosymbolic approach. Includes contributions from academics based in the Czech Republic, Norway, the UK and US. Opens up new avenues of research.

Before this book first appeared in 1963, most historians wrote as if the continental expansion of the United States were inevitable. "What is most impressive," Henry Steele Commager and Richard Morris declared in 1956, "is the ease, the simplicity, and seeming inevitability of the whole process." The notion of inevitability, however, is perhaps only a secular variation on the theme of the expansionist editor John L. O'Sullivan, who in 1845 coined one of the most famous phrases in American history when he wrote of "our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions." Frederick Merk rejected inevitability in favor of a more contingent interpretation of American expansionism in the 1840s. As his student Henry May later recalled, Merk "loved to get the facts straight." --From the Foreword by John Mack Faragher

"Fritsche's book, which is closely researched, carefully argued, and philologically rigorous, will become an indispensable point of reference for further debates on Heidegger's ambiguous political and ethical legacy."—Richard Wolin, author of The Politics of Being "Unquestionably, Fritsche has a highly unusual command of the Heideggerian idiom, which he uses to very good effect."—Tom Rockmore, author of On Heidegger's Nazism and Philosophy

Contains thirty-one essays in which the authors, all historians, discuss specific, under-recognized events they believe helped shape America and the world.

The path out of this present age of darkness is clear and simple, but no one wants to take it. It is a path that starts with recognizing the failure of oneself to lead a disciplined life, runs through the acceptance that democracy is a failed experiment and includes the firm understanding that materialism is the enemy. This enemy is a two-headed dragon. One head is the dialectical materialism of Marxism and Marxian socialism. The other head is the combined forces of consumerism and laissez-fare capitalism. The ideology of National Destiny combines Fascism and Integralism to bring about a revival of the human spirit that has been excluded from modernity in the West. This is not an ideology of racism. All races can play a role in National Destiny. It is simply a question of renouncing the narcotic of victimhood, standing up straight and tall, and answering the call of the Fatherland.

High quality reprint of Manifest Destiny; A Study Of Nationalist Expansionism In American History by Albert Katz Weinberg.

American myths about national character tend to overshadow the historical realities. Mr. Horsman's book is the first study to examine the origins of racialism in America and to show that the belief in white American superiority was firmly ensconced in the nation's ideology by 1850. The author deftly chronicles the beginnings and growth of an ideology stressing race, basic stock, and attributes in the blood. He traces how this ideology shifted from the more benign views of the Founding Fathers, which embraced ideas of progress and the spread of republican institutions for all. He finds linkages between the new, racialist ideology in America and the rising European ideas of Anglo-Saxon, Teutonic, and scientific ideologies of the early nineteenth century. Most importantly, however, Horsman demonstrates that it was the merging of the Anglo-Saxon rhetoric with the experience of Americans conquering a continent that created a racialist philosophy. Two generations before the new immigrants began arriving in the late nineteenth century, Americans, in contact with blacks, Indians, and Mexicans, became vociferous racialists. In sum, even before the Civil War, Americans had decided that peoples of large parts of this continent were incapable of creating or sharing in efficient, prosperous, democratic governments, and that American Anglo-Saxons could achieve unprecedented prosperity and power by the outward thrust of their racialism and commercial penetration of other lands. The comparatively benevolent view of the Founders of the Republic had turned into the quite malevolent ideology that other peoples could not be regenerated through the spread of free institutions.

Defining Documents offers a broad range of historical documents on important authors and subjects in American history, with primary source documents, in-depth analysis, and comprehensive lesson plans. Each two-volume title, designed in consultation with an expert in the field, contains approximately 80 primary source documents with an in-depth critical analysis.

In the twentieth century, Americans thought of the United States as a land of opportunity and equality. To what extent and for whom this was true was, of course, a matter of debate, however especially during the Cold War, many Americans clung to the patriotic conviction that America was the land of the free. At the same time, another national ideal emerged that was far less contentious, that arguably came to subsume the ideals of freedom, opportunity, and equality, and that eventually embodied an unspoken consensus about what constitutes the good society in a postmodern setting. This was the ideal of choice, broadly understood as the proposition that the good society provides individuals with the power to shape the contours of their lives in ways that suit their personal interests, idiosyncrasies, and tastes. By the closing decades of the century, Americans were widely agreed that theirs was--or at least should be--the land of choice. In A Destiny of Choice?, David Blanke and David Steigerwald bring together important scholarship on the tension between two leading interpretations of modern American consumer culture. That modern consumerism reflects the social, cultural, economic, and political changes that accompanied the country's transition from a local, producer economy dominated by limited choices and restricted credit to a national consumer marketplace based on the individual selection of mass-produced, mass-advertised, and mass-distributed goods. This debate is central to the economic difficulties seen in the United States today.

A story of the wise and the shortsighted, the bold and the timid, the generous and the grasping men and women who have been the stuff of American reform.