American character? Simon Schama argues it has a bright future.
With Barack Obama's election, the idea of an American national character is back, and it feels more salient than ever. Time and again during the presidential campaign, Obama told us his story: the mixed-race child of a man from Kenya and a woman from Kansas. He graduated from the Ivy League and was elected a U.S. senator. And then the self-described "mutt" became president. "Only in America," he declared.
Obama's popular narrative, and the way he has told it, promises to revive interest in what scholars term American exceptionalism — the idea that the American story is somehow unique. Attempts to define that quality have led foreigners to these shores, generated countless commentaries, and after World War II helped give rise to an entire academic discipline — American studies. But the topic has been notably out of fashion in the scholarly world. Now, from the well-known historian Simon Schama, we have a new, contrarian view that looks at what's unique in the American character, putting our past in the context of the election of the new president we are just inaugurating.
The discussion of the American character is embedded in the nation's DNA. In the 18th century, J. Hector St. John Crèvecoeur famously asked, "What then is the American, this new man?" He was the product of a place where immigrants escaped their past and melted together into a new race of men, the French-American writer answered. In the 19th century, the French observer Alexis de Tocqueville toured the country and coined the word "individualism" to describe what he encountered. Talking to fellow American historians at century's end, Frederick Jackson Turner identified the frontier as the key element in national development....
Simon Schama knows transnational history as well as anyone, but he has no interest in abandoning exceptionalism. The American Future: A History (published in Britain by the Bodley Head in September and due out from Ecco in the United States in May), stands firmly in the tradition of foreign writers seeking to diagram American distinctiveness and chart the American character. (Schama has simultaneously presented a four-part BBC documentary series of the same title. It aired in Britain last fall and will be issued on DVD and aired on BBC America in the United States on Inauguration Day.)
Born in London in 1945 and educated at Christ's College, University of Cambridge, Schama not only mentions his literary forebears but also relates to them. He compares his first trans-Atlantic crossing, in 1964, for example, to that of Charles Dickens a century before. Because of a storm, Schama's voyage took longer, but both men were shocked by what they first encountered: Dickens despaired over slavery, and Schama over the continued need to struggle for civil rights.
In the book, Schama narrates his travels over the years (many of them during this year's primary season) to such locales as Iowa, Nevada, Texas, and Virginia and sees themes from history refracted in the present. Currently a university professor of art history and history at Columbia University, he identifies four topics that he argues will inform America's future because they have indelibly shaped its past: war, religion, immigration, and abundance....
Read entire article at Louis P. Masur in the Chronicle of Higher Ed
Obama's popular narrative, and the way he has told it, promises to revive interest in what scholars term American exceptionalism — the idea that the American story is somehow unique. Attempts to define that quality have led foreigners to these shores, generated countless commentaries, and after World War II helped give rise to an entire academic discipline — American studies. But the topic has been notably out of fashion in the scholarly world. Now, from the well-known historian Simon Schama, we have a new, contrarian view that looks at what's unique in the American character, putting our past in the context of the election of the new president we are just inaugurating.
The discussion of the American character is embedded in the nation's DNA. In the 18th century, J. Hector St. John Crèvecoeur famously asked, "What then is the American, this new man?" He was the product of a place where immigrants escaped their past and melted together into a new race of men, the French-American writer answered. In the 19th century, the French observer Alexis de Tocqueville toured the country and coined the word "individualism" to describe what he encountered. Talking to fellow American historians at century's end, Frederick Jackson Turner identified the frontier as the key element in national development....
Simon Schama knows transnational history as well as anyone, but he has no interest in abandoning exceptionalism. The American Future: A History (published in Britain by the Bodley Head in September and due out from Ecco in the United States in May), stands firmly in the tradition of foreign writers seeking to diagram American distinctiveness and chart the American character. (Schama has simultaneously presented a four-part BBC documentary series of the same title. It aired in Britain last fall and will be issued on DVD and aired on BBC America in the United States on Inauguration Day.)
Born in London in 1945 and educated at Christ's College, University of Cambridge, Schama not only mentions his literary forebears but also relates to them. He compares his first trans-Atlantic crossing, in 1964, for example, to that of Charles Dickens a century before. Because of a storm, Schama's voyage took longer, but both men were shocked by what they first encountered: Dickens despaired over slavery, and Schama over the continued need to struggle for civil rights.
In the book, Schama narrates his travels over the years (many of them during this year's primary season) to such locales as Iowa, Nevada, Texas, and Virginia and sees themes from history refracted in the present. Currently a university professor of art history and history at Columbia University, he identifies four topics that he argues will inform America's future because they have indelibly shaped its past: war, religion, immigration, and abundance....