Exceptionalism and Globalism

Notes1. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978).2. Thomas R. Hietala explores this tension in his chapter “American Exceptionalism, American Empire” in Manifest Design: Anxious Aggrandizement in Late Jacksonian America (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), 173–214. Paul Kennedy positions the United States within this larger story of empires in The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict From 1500 to 2000 (New York: Random House, 1987).3. Elliott West, “Thinking West,” in The Blackwell Companion to the American West, ed. William Deverell (Malden, Mass., and Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 25–50. For more on the travel narratives about Mexico during the Mexican–American War see Howard R. Lamar, “Foreword,” in Down the Santa Fe Trail and Into Mexico: The Diary of Susan Shelby Magoffin, 1846–1847, ed. Stella M. Drumm (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982; orig. pub. with the Lamar “Foreword,” New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1962, and first published by Yale in 1926), ix–xxxv.4. Hietala, 2.5. Fred Anderson and Andrew Cayton, The Dominion of War: Empire and Liberty in North America, 1500–2000 (New York: Viking, 2005), emphasize how the realities of territorial acquisition undermine the rhetoric of exceptionalism, xv.6. On Stephen A. Douglas's use of the phrase, see John Mack Faragher and Robert Hine, The American West: A New Interpretive History (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000), 199. Patricia Nelson Limerick, “Empire of Innocence,” in The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West, with a new Preface (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006; orig. pub. 1987).7. Henry Nash Smith's Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (1950) (emphasizes early Anglo exploration of the West as a search for trade routes to the Orient) and Walter Prescott Webb's The Great Frontier (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1952) are classic examples of the early global contextualization of Western American history. See also Howard Lamar's and Leonard Thompson's pioneering anthology, The Frontier in History: North America and South Africa Compared (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981); Walter Nugent's broad comparative piece, “Comparing Wests and Frontiers,” in The Oxford History of the American West, eds. Clyde A. Milner II, Carol A. O'Connor, and Martha Sandweiss (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 803–33; Gunther Peck, Reinventing Free Labor: Padrones and Immigrant Workers in the North American West, 1880–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); and Patricia Nelson Limerick's presidential address to the Western History Association, “Going West and Ending Up Global,” Western Historical Quarterly 32 (Spring 2001): 5–23. For an excellent example of the successful forays of a historian of the U.S. West into Pacific World history, see . World historians have comfortably incorporated the story of U.S. expansion into the global contexts of their works. See for example J. M. Roberts, The New Penguin History of the World (New York and London: Penguin, 2004; orig. pub. 1976). Roberts writes: “there was much that was barely distinguishable from imperialism in the nineteenth‐century territorial expansion of the United States, although Americans might not recognize it when it was packaged as a ‘Manifest Destiny,’ ” 827–28.8. The obvious imperial parallels include British colonization of India (under a policy of “Dual Control” from 1784, followed by the formal assumption of control in 1858), the French conquest of Algeria (1830–1847), and the European nations' carving up of the African continent at the West African Conferences of Berlin (1884–1885). Algeria's two most prominent leaders and resistors of French colonial authority, Abd‐el‐Kader and Ahmad Bey, surrendered to the French in 1847, the same year that American forces entered Mexico City.9. For more on American exceptionalism see Michael Kammen, “The Problem of American Exceptionalism: A Reconsideration,” American Quarterly 45 (March 1993): 1–43; ; David Noble, Death of a Nation: American Culture and the End of Exceptionalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002); and Deborah L. Madsen, American Exceptionalism (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998).10. Richard Slotkin, in Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1800 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1973); The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800–1890 (New York: Atheneum, 1985); and Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth‐Century America (New York: Atheneum, 1992), contends that there was a more conscious construction of the national identity on a foundation of frontier mythology.11. Benjamin Franklin, “The Internal State of America: Being a True Description of the Interest and Policy of that Vast Continent,” in The Writings of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Albert K. Smythe, vol. 10 (New York: Macmillan, 1907), 117–18. See also James Paul Hutson, “Benjamin Franklin and the West,” Western Historical Quarterly 4 (October 1973): 425–34.12. For the Jefferson quotation see Gilbert Chinard, Thomas Jefferson: The Apostle of Americanism (Boston: Little, Brown, 1929), 80–2; James C. Malin, The Contriving Brain and the Skillful Hand in the United States (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Edwards Brothers, 1955); and H. A. Washington, ed., The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 2 (Washington, D.C., 1854), 332.13. John L. O'Sullivan's article “Annexation,” addressing the opposition of European powers to the annexation of Texas, appeared in the Democratic Review 17 (July–August 1845): 5–10. His later, more famous expression of the concept of Manfiest Destiny appeared as an editorial in the New York Morning News, 27 December 1845. For more on Manifest Destiny see Hietala, Manifest Design; David M. Pletcher, The Diplomacy of Annexation: Texas, Oregon, and the Mexican War (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1973); Robert W. Johannsen, “The Meaning of Manifest Destiny,” in Manifest Destiny and Empire: Antebellum American Expansionism, eds. Sam W. Haynes and Christopher Morris (College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 1997), 7–20; and Julius Pratt, “The Ideology of American Expansion,” in Essays in Honor of William E. Dodd: By His Former Students at the University of Chicago, ed. Avery Craven (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1935), 335–53. Pratt is also the author of two other useful articles, “The Origin of Manifest Destiny,” American Historical Review 32 (July 1927): 795–98 and “John L. O'Sullivan and Manifest Destiny,” New York History 14 (July 1933): 213–34. Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” (1893), in The Frontier in American History (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1920), 1–38.14. Dorothy Ross, “Historical Consciousness in Nineteenth‐Century America,” American Historical Review 89 (October 1984): 909–28.15. For a good coverage of the American debate over the war with Mexico including Lincoln's “Spot Resolutions,” see Chapter Ten “Conquest and Controversy, 1846–1850,” in Westward Expansion: A History of the American Frontier, 6th ed., ed. Ray Allen Billington and Martin Ridge (an abridgement) (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2001), 215–36, especially 220–21.16. Hietala, 173.17. Francis Parkman, The Oregon Trail: Sketches of Prairie and Rocky‐Mountain Life (Boston: Little, 1872; orig. pub. 1849); Theodore Roosevelt, The Winning of the West, 4 vols. (New York and London: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1889–1896). Turner's essays were collected in The Frontier in American History.18. Among the more notable New Western History critics of Turner's frontier thesis are Limerick's “Introduction: Opening the Frontier and Closing Western History,” in The Legacy of Conquest, and various essays by Limerick, Richard White, Donald Worster, and others in Trails: Toward a New Western History, ed. Patricia, Nelson Limerick, Clyde Milner, II, and Charles Rankin (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1991).19. The leading New Western historians, Limerick, White, and Worster, all viewed the West within a broader context of imperialism. The titles of Limerick's The Legacy of Conquest and Worster's Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of American West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985) speak to a comparative global contextualization. Richard White's seminal textbook, It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own: A New History of the American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), also parallels American empire building in the West with the efforts of other empires around the globe.20. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer (New York: Fox, Duffield, 1904; orig. pub. 1782), 41, 43–44.21. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Henry Reeve text as revised by Francis Bower, ed. Phillips Bradley, 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1945); James Bryce, The American Commonwealth, 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1893–1895).22. See Jennifer Pitts' “Introduction” in Alexis de Tocqueville, Writings on Empire and Slavery, trans. and ed. Jennifer Pitts (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), ix–xxxxviii, especially xxi. The pertinent Tocqueville writings in the volume are: “Essay on Algeria” (October 1841), 59–116, “First Report on Algeria” (1847), 129–73, and “Second Report on Algeria” (1847), 174–98.23. I refer here to the broad concept of westward expansion and to Ray Allen Billington's textbook, Westward Expansion: A History of the American Frontier (New York: Macmillan and Co.), which first appeared in 1949 and has played an influential role in sustaining the notion that the story of the West is the story of white westward movement into the West.24. An example of this placement of the West within the wider world in the genre of travel writing can be found in The Western Journal, and Civilian, published in St. Louis. In vol. 11 of this publication, subscribers could read about “Aubrey's Journey from California to New Mexico” (no. 1, October 1853, 84–96), a fast‐paced, blood‐filled, and highly questionable account of white endurance against Indian attacks and, just a few months later, could read Man Butler's “Exploration of the River Amazon: A Sketch from Lieutenant Herndon's Travels,” a U.S. government‐sponsored expedition to the Amazon that began in May 1851 (no. 5, February 1854, 342–49).25. Sarah Bird Wright, “Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896),” Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 189: American Travel Writers, 1850–1915, eds. Donald Ross and James J. Schramer (Detroit, Mich.: Gale Research, 1998), 305–20, 307; hereafter referred to as DLB. Mary Suzanne Shriber notes that 1,765 books of travel were published in the United States between 1830 and 1900; see her Writing Home: American Women Abroad, 1830–1920 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1997), 2. Lynne Withey, in Grand Tours and Cook's Tours: A History of Leisure Travel, 1750–1915 (New York: William Morrow and Co., 1997), 234, notes that at least 1,044 travel books about the Middle East were published in the nineteenth century. Max Berger in The British Traveller in America, 1836–1860 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943), 14, notes that 230 accounts by British travelers to America were published between 1836 and 1860.26. Later in the century, in 1888, National Geographic Magazine first appeared to satiate the public's hunger for knowledge about far‐flung places.27. Mary K. Edmonds, “Paul Belloni Du Chaillu (1831?–1903),” in DLB vol. 189, 109–31.28. Jeffrey Alan Melton, “Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Mark Twain), 1835–1910,” DLB vol. 189, 65–78.29. A good introduction to these archives can be found in the various essays Travelers on the Western Frontier, ed. John Francis McDermott (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1970). See also Ray Allen Billington, Land of Savagery, Land of Promise: The European Image of the American Frontier in the Nineteenth Century (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981); and, most recently, Roger L. Nichols, “Western Attractions: Europeans and America,” Pacific Historical Review 74 (2005): 1–17.30. James Schramer and Donald Ross in their “Introduction” to DLB, vol. 183: American Travel Writers, 1776–1864 (Detroit, Mich.: Gale Research, 1997), xxv, explain that “the basic mimetic impulse in travel writing is sociological or anthropological rather than psychological—a major difference between travel literature and the novel.” Generally classified today as nonfiction, the best travel writings are far more literary than the average book of essays in the nonfiction genre but are nonetheless very different from the novel and short story traditions.31. Barbara Brothers and Julia M. Gergits, “Introduction,” DLB, vol. 204: British Travel Writers, 1940–1997 (Detroit, Mich.: Gale Research, 1999), xv–xxi, xviii.32. Ibid.33. I do not mean to suggest that this particular vein of historical scholarship first began to be mined in the World War II years. We can go back all the way to the Civil War and find Henry T. Tuckerman's America and Her Commentators: With a Critical Sketch of Travel in the United States (New York: Charles Scribner, 1864); this seems to be the earliest secondary work available on the topic of travel writers' perceptions of America. John Graham Brooks, As Others See Us: A Study of Progress in the United States (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1908) appeared during the Progressive era; and Allan Nevins's American Social History as Recorded by British Travelers (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1923) was published another decade and a half later.34. Berger, 5.35. Allen Nevins, America Through British Eyes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1948), originally published under the title American Social History as Recorded by British Travelers. Oscar Handlin, This was America: True Accounts of People and Places, Manners and Customs, as Recorded by European Travelers to the Western Shore in the Eighteenth, Nineteenth, and Twentieth Centuries (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1949).36. Robert G. Athearn, Westward the Briton (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1953; reprint, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1962, 1969); Thomas D. Clark, “The Great Visitation to American Democracy,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 44 (June 1957): 3–28. That same year also saw the publication of Earl S. Pomeroy's In Search of the Golden West: The Tourist in Western America (New York: Knopf, 1957), which included a commentary on the observations of travel writers as well as of tourists.37. This post‐World War II search for an American character helps explain the appearance of various works that we tend to lump together as examples of the “myth and symbol school.” Henry Nash Smith's classic Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1950) and John William Ward, Andrew Jackson: Symbol for an Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 1955), are particularly notable examples. In the field of American intellectual history, Henry Steele Commager's The American Mind: An Interpretation of American Thought and Culture Since the 1880s (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1950) stands as the most significant example of the postwar explorations of a distinctive Americanism. Likewise, another body of works that are generally defined as “consensus history” can be understood within the context of the post‐World War II effort to define the national character and include: Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (New York: Knopf, 1948); Daniel Boorstin, The Genius of American Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953); David M. Potter: People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the American Character (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954); and Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought Since the Revolution (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1955).38. These works were not simply paeans to a benign national distinctiveness, to be sure (Smith's Virgin Land, for example, offered a highly cautionary tale), but they are all marked by their efforts to chart the sources of the nation's distinctiveness and generally emphasize the benign nature of the national character and democratic institutions. Nevins' collection America Through British Eyes and Handlin's This was America both contained a number of very critical assessments of the American character and American institutions. Clark, to offer another example, concluded his Mississippi Valley Historical Association presidential address, “The Great Visitation,” 27, with criticism of American materialism and of the nation's failure to live up to its vaunted purpose as outlined in the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. Yet, characteristic of the time when it appeared, Clark carefully added that even the most “malicious comments” of some foreign travelers “have never provoked a desire [among Americans] to deny free visitation to America and its institutions” (28).39. The Henry Reeve text of Tocqueville's Democracy in America was published in New York by Alfred A. Knopf in 1945, 1953, 1954, and 1956. Oxford University Press also republished the Reeve text in 1947 and 1959.40. Tocqueville, xxi.41. David Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), 1. Spurr's book begins with a chapter titled “Surveillance: Under Western the nature of the that as an but never as an on and and a chapter titled as to the author stands the and of the For more on this topic see Clark, ed., Travel Writing and Empire: in Books, Edward W. Said, Culture and (New York: Books, orig. pub. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), xxi. David a different on the British empire and the in which it was that Edward and his the British Empire was not even with the of on the that the imperial was different and the imperial it was as least as much with has the of on the that on the was the same or even on in the the British Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), K. The of Culture (New York: 1994), Mary Pratt, Travel Writing and and New York: 1992), 5, See also and and the of Travel (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, For more on the of the see and in Fred and the and David M. “Introduction: and the in and Being in the American West, eds. David M. and T. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001), and to be a new of scholarship a of that the the An excellent example is of Empire: and Conquest in the (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, of Indian of Manners and Customs, . . . Travel (New York: and and North American Indian and of the and of and of the Made Travel of the and of in North America New York: James See for example the of from the East India in of the and in and Being of in With the North American Indian vol. 1, ed. The book was originally published under the title of and in With His North American Indian With and of the and of of American to the of and The coverage here on Paul excellent and and the in his West and University of Illinois Press, 1999), on A number of these are included in the Frederick W. and Yale was an not particularly new of the travel in which white travelers on their of and other French a the Indian travel as a for the of of the and Louis the in and in in The French conquest of Algeria during his and that of his Charles in and his the West these and the Indian in excellent is available as an book and volume 2 is available as a Mass.: coverage of the of in West be best to historians of the California as the author of a very California The book as a good example of how the West has of the world in the of the California of a Journey the of a Journey the World . . . also appeared the year in an British de Through the Journey the California and the trans. T. Nelson and Sons, Jeffrey in DLB, vol. Nineteenth‐Century Writers, ed. and James (Detroit, Mich.: Gale Research, 1993), notes that this was in by a from and to be the to have from that Howard R. Lamar in his to J. S. The World The California (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, orig. pub. and to this global is well of the world context the California but to on the American For more on to the see Charles R. the (Columbia: University of South Press, marked by its of writing and is of Theodore which is marked by its of and For excellent of see DLB, vol. his coverage in Charles and of America The University of North Press, 1998), and American Through in his and History: on Nineteenth‐Century (New York: G. that was the Western in World Traveller and of the West (July These were on with the well the work of the average The story of the Indian is also at in the American of the of a Journey the a the to With a to the of California and the South (New York: and Brothers, The American as the title coverage of the of See for example, Richard The Discourse on the of (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, Faragher and Hine, and Faragher in refer to the against the California as the of in the of the American See also and Indian The of the in (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997), and Benjamin “The of California and the of in America,” of a Journey the and In to the that the in both California and both saw by white in both the United States California leading the and in the nineteenth The policy of the and, in the United States, the of in and in was not the of in a of the on and that the of the of the to a of to the broader of these in within the broad on there a very of the of of to the of that to these highly positions together into a to from For a of the topic as it to American see The and U.S. Indian Policy (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, and Billington, Land of Savagery, Land of of a Journey the The of the book South America, the and See in DLB vol. 189, See The of that his of and his of their was in their do rather the role of Indian in these of his nation's Indian policy was more by over was to rather than by for was on M. M. is the of the History Honor and a of at the University of An of this article was as the to the in on

American exceptionalism · Art · Exceptionalism · Globalism · Political science · Politics · American and British Literature Analysis · Law · Travel Writing and Literature

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