New Publication: "The Genesis of America: US Foreign Policy and the Formation of National Identity, 1793-1815"

"The Genesis of America: US Foreign Policy and the Formation of National Identity, 1793–1815" is the title of the new publication by Dr. Jasper M. Trautsch, Affiliated Researcher and former Postdoc of the Graduate School in Regensburg. In this book he examines how the US foreign policy has contributed to the emergence of an American national consciousness.

About the book

The Genesis of America investigates the ways in which US foreign policy contributed to the formation of an American national consciousness. Interpreting American nationalism as a process of external demarcation, Jasper M. Trautsch argues that, for a sense of national self to emerge, the US needed to be disentangled from its most important European reference points: Great Britain and France. As he shows, foreign-policy makers could therefore promote American nationalism by provoking foreign crises and wars with these countries, hereby creating external threats that would bind the fragile union together. By reconstructing how foreign policy was thus used as a nation-building instrument, Trautsch provides an answer to the puzzling question of how Americans - lacking a shared history and culture of their own and justifying their claim for independent nationhood by appeals to universal rights - could develop a sense of particularity after the conclusion of the Revolutionary War.

Jasper M. Trautsch: The Genesis of America: US Foreign Policy and the Formation of National Identity, 1793–1815, Göttingen: Cambridge University Press, 2018.

1. Edition 2018
328 Pages
Online ISBN: 9781108635301
Cambridge University Press