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SoSe 22: The US: Nation-building in the Age of Civil Wars, 1830-1914

Andrew M. Johnston, visiting professor

Kommentar

When we think of the United States in the 19th century, we tend to think of everything being divided by its brutal Civil War: everything before it was a cause, everything after it was a consequence. But these turbulent years were also part of a much wider world of nationalism, resistance to imperialism, labour militance, global migration, and fracturing racial identity. America’s continental expansion, driven by sectional strife, providentialism, and the growing expansive energy of the second industrial revolution, came at the expense of its Mexican, Caribbean, Canadian, and Indigenous neighbours. It sets its sights on a trans-Pacific world that drove its cultural views of the future, and the “vectors of its politics.” All this took place during a mid-century European era of failed revolutions, producing a migration of liberals and radicals and their ideas to the United States just as its industrial society was being dramatically transformed. If we want to understand the nature of American nation-building, how it emerged at the start of the 20th century as an industrial-capitalist society, infused with imperial ambition, then we need to understand its 19th century transformation. (Main book, Steven Hahn’s A Nation Without Borders) Schließen