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10 - American Internationalism

from Part I - Imperial and Postcolonial Settings

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 November 2023

By
Andrew Preston
Edited by
Cathie Carmichael ,
Matthew D'Auria  and
Aviel Roshwald
Cathie Carmichael
Affiliation:
University of East Anglia
Matthew D'Auria
Affiliation:
University of East Anglia
Aviel Roshwald
Affiliation:
Georgetown University, Washington DC
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Summary

Since the founding of the United States in the late eighteenth century, Americans have rooted their national identity in their relationship with the wider world. America’s geopolitical position, its civilizing mission, its identity as the home of a chosen people, and its security requirements have shaped not only Americans’ external relations but also their very sense of themselves and who they are in a world of other peoples.

American nationalism has of course had several other sources than the outside world.1 The virtue of republican self-government – what might be identified as “civic nationalism” – has been an obviously powerful font of America’s self-identity, particularly the ways in which Americans have seen themselves as different, even superior, to other countries.

Keywords

AmericanUS and the worldnational securityWoodrow Wilson and/or WilsonianismFranklin D. RooseveltJudeo-Christianinternationalism and/or liberal internationalismAbraham LincolnWilliam McKinleyWorld War IWorld War II (or First World WarSecond World War)
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of Nationhood and Nationalism , pp. 210 - 232
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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References

Further Reading

Benton-Cohen, Katherine, Inventing the Immigration Problem: The Dillingham Commission and Its Legacy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Borstelmann, Thomas, Just Like Us: The American Struggle to Understand Foreigners (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020).Google Scholar
Canaday, Margot, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hoganson, Kristin L., Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish–American and Philippine–American Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).Google Scholar
Jacobson, Matthew Frye, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876–1917 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000).Google Scholar
Kazin, Michael, and McCartin, Joseph A. (eds.), Americanism: New Perspectives on the History of an Ideal (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Leffler, Melvyn P., Safeguarding Democratic Capitalism: US Foreign Policy and National Security, 1920–2015 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017).Google Scholar
Patel, Kiran Klaus, The New Deal: A Global History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016).Google Scholar
Preston, Andrew, Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith: Religion in American War and Diplomacy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012).Google Scholar
Schultz, Kevin M., Tri-Faith America: How Catholics and Jews Held Postwar America to Its Protestant Promise (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).Google Scholar
Thompson, John A., A Sense of Power: The Roots of America’s Global Role (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015).Google Scholar
Wall, Wendy L., Inventing the “American Way”: The Politics of Consensus from the New Deal to the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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