In this much anticipated work, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg takes up Crevecoeur's challenge 'What then is the American, this new man?' and boldly answers: A deeply divided subject of This Violent Empire, this United States. In exposing republican citizens' desires and fears, she not only opens up new realms of thought and inquiry
she makes clear that no genuine understanding of the new ... Read morenation can overlook the profoundly confounded and contested cultural construction of 'the American, this new man.'
Michael Meranze, University of California, Los Angeles|""Smith-Rosenberg maps the genesis of a historical dilemma, how the United States' vaunted diversity and emphasis on unity often function in bitter opposition. Historically rich and theoretically sophisticated, This Violent Empire studies the social, material, urban, intercultural, and international contexts through which an impossibly unified American identity was imagined in the magazines, literature, and art of the early United States.""
Dana D. Nelson, Vanderbilt University|""Scholars of the new nation and its culture have been waiting twenty years for this book
and it is well worth the wait. We will no longer hear that the most powerful actors of the 'founding' did not think or talk creatively about Indians, or slaves, or women. This Violent Empire reaches deep into the national psyche and broadly into the cultural practices that defined Americans and their 'Others' in a formative period; it is a tour de force of political and cultural analysis that informs us all.""
David Waldstreicher, Temple University Show Less