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

Cambridge Studies in US Foreign Relations

by Jasper M. Trautsch

The Genesis of America investigates the ways in which U.S. foreign policy contributed to the formation of an American national consciousness. Interpreting American nationalism as a process of external demarcation, Jasper Trautsch argues that, for a sense of national self to emerge, the U.S. 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.

Genres: American History, History

320 pages, Hardcover

First published October 31, 2018