This America: The Case for the Nation

This America: The Case for the Nation

A New York Times Book Review Editorsâ€™ Choice Selection

One of President Bill Clintonâ€™s â€œBest Things Iâ€™ve Read This Yearâ€

From the acclaimed historian and New Yorker writer comes this urgent manifesto on the dilemma of nationalism and the erosion of liberalism in the twenty-first century.

At a time of much despair over the future of liberal democracy, Jill Lepore makes a stirring case for the nation in This America, a follow-up to her much-celebrated history of the United States, These Truths.

With dangerous forms of nationalism on the rise, Lepore, a Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer, repudiates nationalism here by explaining its long historyâ€”and the history of the idea of the nation itselfâ€”while calling for a â€œnew Americanismâ€: a generous patriotism that requires an honest reckoning with Americaâ€™s past.

Lepore begins her argument with a primer on the origins of nations, explaining how liberalism, the nation-state, and liberal nationalism, developed together. Illiberal nationalism, however, emerged in the United States after the Civil Warâ€”resulting in the failure of Reconstruction, the rise of Jim Crow, and the restriction of immigration. Much of American history, Lepore argues, has been a battle between these two forms of nationalism, liberal and illiberal, all the way down to the nationâ€™s latest, bitter struggles over immigration.

Defending liberalism, as This America demonstrates, requires making the case for the nation. But American historians largely abandoned that defense in the 1960s when they stopped writing national history. By the 1980s theyâ€™d stopped studying the nation-state altogether and embraced globalism instead. â€œWhen serious historians abandon the study of the nation,â€ Lepore tellingly writes, â€œnationalism doesnâ€™t die. Instead, it eats liberalism.â€ But liberalism is still in there, Lepore affirms, and This America is an attempt to pull it out. â€œIn a world made up of nations, there is no more powerful way to fight the forces of prejudice, intolerance, and injustice than by a dedication to equality, citizenship, and equal rights, as guaranteed by a nation of laws.â€

A manifesto for a better nation, and a call for a â€œnew Americanism,â€ This America reclaims the nationâ€™s future by reclaiming its past.
Country USA
Manufacturer Liveright
Binding Kindle Edition
ReleaseDate 2019-05-28
Format Kindle eBook

Country	USA
Manufacturer	Liveright
Binding	Kindle Edition
ReleaseDate	2019-05-28
Format	Kindle eBook

This America: The Case for the Nation

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