American Exceptionalism

A New History of an Old Idea

Ian Tyrrell

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Hardback

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English

University of Chicago Press
19 January 2022

History; History of the Americas; Political ideologies

A powerful dissection of a core American myth.

The idea that the United States is unlike every other country in world history is a surprisingly resilient one. Throughout his distinguished career, Ian Tyrrell has been one of the most influential historians of the idea of American exceptionalism, but he has never written a book focused solely on it until now. The notion that American identity might be exceptional emerged, Tyrrell shows, from the belief that the nascent early republic was not simply a postcolonial state but a genuinely new experiment in an imperialist world dominated by Britain. Prior to the Civil War, American exceptionalism fostered declarations of cultural, economic, and spatial independence. As the country grew in population and size, becoming a major player in the global order, its exceptionalist beliefs came more and more into focus—and into question. Over time, a political divide emerged: those who believed that America’s exceptionalism was the basis of its virtue and those who saw America as either a long way from perfect or actually fully unexceptional, and thus subject to universal demands for justice. Tyrrell masterfully articulates the many forces that made American exceptionalism such a divisive and definitional concept. Today, he notes, the demands that people acknowledge America’s exceptionalism have grown ever more strident, even as the material and moral evidence for that exceptionalism—to the extent that there ever was any—has withered away.

By: Ian Tyrrell
Imprint: University of Chicago Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm,
ISBN: 9780226812090
ISBN 10: 022681209X
Pages: 288
Publication Date: 19 January 2022
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Ian Tyrrell is emeritus professor of history at the University of New South Wales and the author of Crisis of the Wasteful Nation: Empire and Conservation in Theodore Roosevelt's America and Historians in Public: The Practice of American History, 1890-1970, both published by the University of Chicago Press.

Reviews for American Exceptionalism: A New History of an Old Idea

American Exceptionalism is a much-needed, erudite, wide-ranging, and persuasive study. There are many books addressing American exceptionalism but none like this. It is the most critically astute, synthetic, interdisciplinary, and balanced of all the studies made of the topic. -- John Corrigan, author of Religious Intolerance, America, and the World: A History of Forgetting and Remembering