Blessed Among Nations: How the World Made America - Hardcover

Rauchway, Eric

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0809055805 ISBN 13: 9780809055807

Verlag: Hill & Wang Pub, 2006

Inhaltsangabe

Globalization is not always a leveling force. It produces winners, losers, and, on occasion, global economic disasters. No nation so clearly reflects globalization’s warping influence than the United States, a fact Eric Rauchway compellingly demonstrates. A historian’s answer to the rosier predictions of economists, Blessed Among Nations is a sharply narrated reminder that we need only review the decades between the end of the Civil War and the aftermath of World War I—the first era of globalization—to spy the myriad dangers we face today.

Globalization’s early history provides the answer to why America has inspired envy but not imitation. At the end of the nineteenth century, no nation benefited so markedly from the free flow of capital and labor as did the United States. With the British Empire acting as the world’s economic referee, America received more of both than any other part of the globe, and as a result developed its unique fondness for a smaller, less intrusive state. This in turn led America to refuse the role of referee following World War I; a worldwide depression was the result. Written with passion and precision, Blessed Among Nations draws contemporary lessons from this history.

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Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Eric Rauchway teaches at the University of California, Davis, and is the author of Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt’s America (H&W, 2003). He lives in northern California.

Eric Rauchway teaches at the University of California, Davis, and is the author ofMurdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt’s America (H&W, 2003). He lives in northern California.

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Excerpted from Blessed Among Nations by Eric Rauchway. Copyright © 2006 by Eric Rauchway. Published in July 2006 by Hill and Wang, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved.
 
Introduction
 
This book offers a look at American history through the lens of globalization. Like a regular optical lens you might find in a telescope or a microscope, it is meant to help you see something you wouldn’t if you were simply looking with your unaided eyes. It directs your attention to the movements of money and people around the globe, and how they influenced American politics and culture.
 
Also like a regular optical lens, it is better at bringing some kinds of things into focus than others. Just as a telescope is terrific for marveling at the mountains on the moon but pretty poor for peering at paramecia, this book is designed to help you get an appreciation for the effects of powerful global forces, not local ones.
 
It’s not that we don’t care about the paramecia of the past. The microscopic view of history, when carefully trained on the right subject—a mad prophet, a frontier speculator, a presidential assassin—can tell us a great deal. But if we want to see large features in faraway landscapes, we need to overlook these otherwise compelling close-ups.
 
There is another way in which I hope this book will work like a lens. Like a lot of people, I need corrective lenses to see properly, and also like a lot of people I don’t like to go to the doctor very much. So people like me will wear a pair of glasses for years without seeing an optometrist. And during that time, those glasses, which were perfectly designed to help us see when they were made, get worse and worse at their job. The lenses aren’t changing, but our eyes are. We just don’t notice because it happens so slowly. Then, finally, we get tired of the headaches and the blurry vision and we go to the doctor and get a properly prescribed pair of spectacles. And we put them on, and suddenly we see the world as if it were new, and we realize we’ve been squinting through outdated lenses for far too long. I think that much of what we see nowadays when we look at American history is like this, a picture as seen through lenses that worked fine for us once, but don’t work so well now that we’ve changed. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with our old glasses; they were just meant for a different set of eyes, and too much of the world now looks out of focus.
 
When you put on your new glasses after delaying a visit to the doctor for too long, you suddenly wonder how you could ever have stood to look through the old ones. I hope this book will help us see America’s place in the world with the same freshness, so that we can see the same old story with a new clarity and begin to wonder how we could ever have stood to look at the world through those quaint old spectacles, missing so much of such importance.
 
Specifically, using globalization as a lens brings into focus the relationship between the United States and the rest of the world in the late nineteenth century, and how this relationship shaped American political development. Capital and labor from overseas pushed American political development in noticeably unusual directions during a particularly important growth spurt. This early formative influence bequeathed the United States some peculiar and lasting habits of government. The effects of globalization helped the country become a powerful nation without developing (in comparative terms) a powerful central government. In the United States, as in some other countries, we often argue over the appropriate size and authority of national government, and usually we argue from principle: a big government is better because it can provide security; a small government is better because it can allow freedom. These arguments from principle have what to a historian seems like an unfortunately timeless quality, as if government were some uniform product, of which you can have too much or too little, but which is always the same thing. If we look at how government grew in the first place, we might remember that it is a set of solutions to a set of problems—not theoretical problems, but practical problems—and that, in practice, not all peoples face the same problems. During its growth into a powerful nation, the United States faced a set of problems unlike those any other nation has encountered. Americans formed their habits of government by solving a set of problems specific to their circumstances. And we know that habits often outlast the circumstances that justified them, just as we often wear prescription eyeglasses long after our eyes have changed, and sometimes with bad consequences.
 
The long life of American habits, which outlasted the circumstances to which they were suited, has affected not only the United States but also the rest of the world fairly dramatically. To take up a literally dramatic analogy: the fifty-year period from 1865 through 1914 is, in the history of the Western world, like the play Hamlet. The great actors on the international stage, set at odds by bad faith, misunderstanding, and the fateful entanglement of their interests, come ever closer to catastrophe until finally they clash, and after a gruesome bout of killing none of the major players is left standing. It’s terribly moving, and we in the audience feel emotionally drained. Then, somewhat confusingly, a fellow named Fortinbras walks on and says, well, now I’m the king of Denmark. And…curtain. Even in Shakespeare’s full script there’s little indication of who Fortinbras is, or what he’s been up to.1 His story, whatever it is, must have gone on mostly separate from that of Hamlet and his family, because we’ve been watching them, and there’s been scarcely any mention of Fortinbras. Yet he must have been, in some important way that was taking place offstage or, if you prefer, outside the principal focus of the action, connected to the characters and events of the play, because here he is, king. There is something very wrong with the end of this play; the foreseeable future seems dramatically disconnected from the immediate past as we have learned it.
 
The world’s people must have felt much this sense of puzzlement and anxiety in 1918, when at war’s end the Americans suddenly emerged as the planet’s great power. Where had these Americans been, what had they been up to, and what did they think were the normal relations among nations? Most of the world’s people knew little more about the United States in 1918 than theatergoers know about Fortinbras at the end of Hamlet, and in significant ways we know little more now than they did then, because we have been telling this history as if we’ve been restaging Hamlet, without any attention to the important offstage back story. We need now, all of us, to know not only what the American Fortinbras was doing just before he emerged from the wings, but also how his strange tale connects to the main action, if we want to understand why he has gone on to behave as he did and what it means to the world.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Hill & Wang Pub
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2006
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0809055805
• ISBN 13: 9780809055807
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 240
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar