REVIEWS
“American Exceptionalism is a much-needed, erudite, wide-ranging, and persuasive study. There are many books addressing American exceptionalism but none like this. It is the most critically astute, synthetic, interdisciplinary, and balanced of all the studies made of the topic.”
— John Corrigan, author of Religious Intolerance, America, and the World: A History of Forgetting and Remembering
“In these troubled times, history cannot tell anxious Americans what—if anything—can sustain their collective identity. But Tyrrell’s illuminating history of the elusive, evolving, and contested complex of ideas about America’s place in the world and role in world history shows us how previous generations grappled with their own troubled times as they imagined the future. American Exceptionalism is a fresh, timely, and thought-provoking contribution to national self-understanding.”
— Peter S. Onuf, University of Virginia
“Here is the book Tyrrell was destined to write. Drawing on his distinguished career studying US history from abroad, he masterfully charts the history of this contested notion. Sweeping in scope, attuned both to the history of ideas and the social infrastructures upon which they rest, American Exceptionalism shrewdly assesses the course of an old idea that continues to exert a hold in the twenty-first century. Required reading for any student of American history.”
— Jay Sexton, University of Missouri
“Tyrrell makes us see American exceptionalism as a kaleidoscopic discursive formation, born of Europe’s early modern prehistoricist historical consciousness and American settlers’ ongoing imperialistic conquest—always in the background of American public discourse, but repeatedly coming to the fore as changing conditions and crises aroused advocates and opponents, who in turn focused attention on shifting religious, political, and material sources of uniqueness.”
— Dorothy Ross, Johns Hopkins University
"Tyrrell, a distinguished Australian historian, has written a rich intellectual history of the dramatic shifts in the meaning of the defining but, it turns out, highly malleable idea of 'American exceptionalism,' from its roots in the revolutionary era to the present. Tracing the term’s changing significance illuminates U.S. history more broadly."
— Foreign Affairs
"Tyrrell’s study offers an invaluable synthesis of how American exceptionalism has surfaced in US history. . . . Tyrrell tells this story in a highly readable style that captures the concept’s complexity without becoming reductive."
— Times Higher Education
"Tyrrell masterfully articulates the many forces that made American exceptionalism such a divisive and definitional concept. Today, he notes, the demands that people acknowledge America's exceptionalism have grown ever more strident, even as the material and moral evidence for that exceptionalism--to the extent that there ever was any--has withered away."
— New Books Network
"Since the 1980s, 'American exceptionalism,' Tyrrell argues, has become a pervasive belief system spread across the political spectrum in the United States. It is no longer as it was for the preceding century and a half, an enthusiasm enlivening the margins of political discourse. Given its integration, albeit in Manichaean forms, into the rhetoric of both the Republican and Democratic parties, Tyrrell assumes that 'American exceptionalism' will continue to be a disturbing force in U.S. political and cultural life for many more years."
— Society for US Intellectual History
"Building off his voluminous scholarship on temperance, missionaries, and empire, Tyrrell’s latest historiographical romp provides a concise history of American exceptionalism. . . . Take a deep breath. Tyrrell’s erudition and wisdom, along with his deft harnessing of sources, outweighs the risk of asphyxiation."
— Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture
“Daringly ambitious yet enticingly concise, American Exceptionalism traces several of the most timely themes of our present moment in a manner suitable for survey courses of both general and intellectual American history at an advanced undergraduate and graduate level. The extensive historiographical ballast, firm command of contextual textures, and cogent while never overbearing theoretical insights all make American Exceptionalism a successful testament to the virtues of a historical approach to exceptionalism, one that is as sobering as it is deeply instructive.”
— Australasian Journal of American Studies
"Ian Tyrrell studiously concentrates on the fascinating history rather than the
terrible folly of American exceptionalism. . . . American Exceptionalism: A New History of an Old Idea can effortlessly assume and incorporate the transnational throughout its
analysis. Exceptionalism is no longer an unthinking reflex to be avoided, but a
timely subject worth painstaking dissection."
— Diplomatic History
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction: The Peculiar Tale of American Exceptionalism - Ian Tyrrell
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226812120.003.0001
[Barack Obama;social science exceptionalism;Winthropian myths;settler colonialism;subsidiary myths]
This chapter begins with an account of the rapidly rising reference to “American exceptionalism” since a Barack Obama speech of 2009, and the political reaction of the Republican Party. Two main types of exceptionalist claims are considered: “Lipsetian” (empirical social science) exceptionalism (pioneered by Seymour Martin Lipset) and “Winthropian” myths of chosenness associated with Robert Winthrop’s City upon a Hill sermon. A mediating alternative to these approaches, settler colonialism and its relationship to American exceptionalism, is considered. Three central pillars of exceptionalism are set out:religious, political,and material abundance. Various subsidiary myths, such as Manifest Destiny, are examined in their relationship with one another and with the discourse of exceptionalism; the false dichotomy of example and mission in the projection of American exceptionalism follows; finally, the collateral damage of the misapplication of exceptionalist doctrines is illustrated. (pages 1 - 19)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
1: The Puritans and American Chosenness - Ian Tyrrell
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226812120.003.0002
[Puritanism;chosenness;providentialism;City Upon a Hill;Christian nation]
This chapter examines the economic, religious, and political contribution of Puritanism to a sense of American chosenness; discounts a link between Puritanism and democracy and likewise the idea of a Calvinist responsibility for economic individualism as a supposed key characteristic of exceptionalism; the myth of the City upon a Hill is historicized; the idea of a Chosen Nation is shown to be common in world history; a key distinction is made between a chosen nation and a Christian nation; despite empirical problems with each of these ideal types, it is argued that the Puritan religious legacy was, through providential thinking, a contributor to American chosenness and to talk of an American Israel in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. (pages 20 - 30)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
2: Looking Back, Looking Forward: Remembering the Revolution - Ian Tyrrell
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226812120.003.0003
[American Revolution;memory;civic republicanism;national consolidation;post-colonialism]
This chapter examines the importance of the American Revolution as a distinguishing feature of exceptionalism; by historicizing the making of revolutionary memory, the chapter concludes that ideas of the revolution as the founding moment and as the conceptual grounding of American exceptionalism works not as empirical history but as a politicized and ideological process. The chapter focuses on the limitations of nation-state consolidation in the early republic and critiques the place of charismatic leadership as an underpinning for national exceptionalism; it treats early republican UShistory as a post-colonial experience with connections to transnational and global history. The chapter stresses the social tensions over attachment to a nation state; uses the Fourth of July and other patriotic narratives to track the contingencies of opinion on the present position and future greatness of the United States, contextualizing the revolutionary “example” to the world; and assesses the counter-narrative to exceptionalism emerging in the post-revolutionary period, especially challenges of Court versus Country notions of a civic (or classical) republicanism as a form of anti-exceptionalism shaped by political contingency and competing regional and local loyalties. (pages 31 - 44)
This chapter is available at:
University Press Scholarship Online
3: Cultural Nationalism and the Origins of American Exceptionalism - Ian Tyrrell
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226812120.003.0004
[cultural nationalism;Edward Everett;George Bancroft;self-making;discursive infrastructure]
This chapter argues that the building of a cultural nationalism independent from the former British imperial influence was essential to American exceptionalism. The complementary work of two leading exponents of this view, George Bancroft and Edward Everett, are examined in detail. Their positions in the 1820s presaged political debates between Jacksonian Democrats and Whigs. Everett emphasized the exceptional circumstances that would promote a national, networked culture based on language, education, and settler economic and communications development. Bancroft, on the other hand, synthesized providential and premillennial traits with German Romanticism into a cultural system based on religious liberty and democratic principles of universal significance. He identified providence with the self-making activity of democratic republican citizens for liberty and prosperity. The chapter sets out the discursive infrastructure for the transmission of these claims in schools, textbooks, and performance rituals. (pages 45 - 60)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
4: Lyman Beecher, Personal Identity, and the Christian Republic - Ian Tyrrell
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226812120.003.0005
[Lyman Beecher;identity formation;temperance movement;Christian republic;self-making]
This chapter focuses on the voluntary civil society developments molding the American republic through voluntary association. It pays particular attention to the role of the first mass moral reform movement, the temperance societies, and to the evangelical reform leadership of Lyman Beecher who articulated the idea of a Christianized republic. It emphasizes how exceptionalism was made through self-activity, assisted by a providentialist interpretation of individual action. This making of exceptionalism highlights the key role of individual agency buttressed by Arminian doctrines of personal responsibility for conversion. This process entailed a coalescence of personal and national identity formation. Evangelical reform and its connections to the so-called Benevolent Empire are assessed as integral to the machinery of this self-making exceptionalism, including the creation of a national imaginary presented by national-level reform as an aggregation of individual and local reform; the chapter also discusses the limits to evangelical leadership of a Christian republic represented in the challenges of Catholicism, secularism, and minority sectarianism to Northeastern Christian dominance through moral reform organizations. (pages 61 - 80)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
5: Women and Exceptionalism: The Self-Made Woman and the Power of Catharine Beecher - Ian Tyrrell
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226812120.003.0006
[women;domesticity;Catharine Beecher;gender;feminism]
This chapter continues the theme of the identification of exceptionalism with personal self-made moral improvement; it examines the key part played by ideas of domesticity’s national significance, and women’s integral role in that process as outlined in the work of Catharine Beecher; it discusses the alternative of liberal individualist feminism and its contrast with Beecher’s gendered notions of woman’s place as exceptionalist characteristics. Catharine Beecher’s trans-class perspectives on the primacy of gender helped establish exceptionalism’s moral hegemony within cultural, religious, and social discourse. The chapter argues that her program was intended to produce an organized and proto-professional woman’s sphere rather than a purely religious and individualist one, and thus extended the Christian republican agenda beyond the religiously inclined to a more secular version of woman’s role as the basis of an exceptionalist moral order. The chapter then compares the impact of equalitarian feminism with the Beecher program as representatives of American exceptionalism; finally, it shows how Harriet Beecher Stowe contributed to the dissemination of ideas of women’s special role while qualifying American exceptionalism by locating it within Anglo-Saxonism on a global scale. (pages 81 - 94)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
6: Race, Anglo-Saxonism, and Manifest Destiny - Ian Tyrrell
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226812120.003.0007
[Anglo-Saxonism;Manifest Destiny;settler colonialism;anti-Catholicism]
This chapter examines a new intellectual explanation of the nation’s singular importance coming from the rise of Anglo-Saxonism as an ideologyand the emergence of Manifest Destiny as a program for future American greatness, based on the right, duty, and God-ordained process of continental expansion. Anglo-Saxonism was understood as a providential, transnational, racialist project while Manifest Destiny was part of exceptionalism’s folding into space rather than time. Manifest Destiny rose to be a key subsidiary myth of exceptionalism, but neither it nor Anglo-Saxonism lacked ambiguity. Each faced opposition, and both ideas were shaped and limited by their temporal origins. The crystalizing event for the coalescence of these ideas was the Mexican War of 1846–48. Through this war, Manifest Destiny opened the possibility of reconciling, through spatial expansion, the evangelical religious outreach of the Benevolent Empire, both with the Jacksonian resistance to its religious and cultural leadership, and with the processes of indigenous dispossession. The imbrication of westward expansion with Manifest Destiny as a settler-colonial expansion is demonstrated. The final section deals with the attempted synthesis of and critical tension between the Catholic-born John O’Sullivan’s Manifest Destiny and Christian Republicanism revealed in the growth of both anti-Catholicism and the anti-slavery sentiment. (pages 95 - 110)
This chapter is available at:
University Press Scholarship Online
7: In the Hands of an Angry God: The Antislavery Jeremiad and the Origins of the Christian Nation - Ian Tyrrell
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226812120.003.0008
[antislavery;jeremiad;Christian nation;model republic;Southern exceptionalism]
This chapter argues that exceptionalism first became self-consciously articulated as Europeans and Americans grappled with the meaning of the American Civil War; it studies the deployment of the Puritan-derived jeremiad by abolitionists to challengeAmerican exceptionalism, sometimes by condemning slavery as outright evidence that the United States was not exceptional, but, more commonly, employed a jeremiad against a collective lapse from exceptionalist ideals. The sectional use of the chosen nation and “model republic” ideas showed how exceptionalism was employed to justify the combatants and this interpretation of exceptionalism became sectionally aligned with the persistence of a Southern exceptionalism from the defeated South. The chapter then shows how the idea of a specifically Christian nation emerged from the wartime assessment that the United States was not created exceptional, but had to be made so by remaking the constitution into that of a Christian nation. The failure of the Christian nation idea to gain intellectual hegemony is then documented, along with its internal contradictions. (pages 111 - 124)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
8: Fin de Siècle Challenges: The Frontier, Labor, and American Imperialism - Ian Tyrrell
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226812120.003.0009
[Frontier;labor;imperialism;monumental exceptionalism;nature conservation]
Despite the North’s Civil War triumph and its Reconstruction-era liberal exceptionalist platform, exceptionalism’s meaning remained contested. The Statue of Liberty’s opening in 1886 is discussed as a form of monumental exceptionalism tending to align exceptionalism with the state and its political creed; then labor strikes, (Populist) farmer protests, and late nineteenth century imperial “expansion” raised concern over an end to exceptionalism. This trinity of issues challenged the democratic and patriotic traditions newly reinforced by the Civil War’s outcome. The chapter discusses the “end” of the Frontier highlighted by Frederick Jackson Turner and interprets his oeuvre as an anti-exceptionalist challenge. Historiographically, Turner’s thesis was effectively an endorsement of settler colonialism rather than exceptionalism. The chapter then examines nature conservation through national parks as monumental exceptionalism even as the movement behind it was a product of transnational conditions with intellectual parallels abroad. Theodore Roosevelt’s conservation legacy is interpreted as part of this national self-realization in “making” exceptionalism by enhancing USglobal power. The final section discusses how international missionary expansion re-ignited belief in national chosenness, a process that culminated in Woodrow Wilson’s “internationalism.”Though imperialist talk and action flourished, anti-imperialists critiqued empire as an end to exceptionalism. (pages 125 - 140)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
9: Two Isms: Americanism and Socialism - Ian Tyrrell
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226812120.003.0010
[Americanism;ethnonationalism;civic nationalism;American Creed;socialism;Marxism]
This chapter examines “Americanism” as an ethnonationalist exceptionalism spurred by growing Catholic religious strength and polyglot immigration. Noting the irony of Catholic confusion over the concept, the chapter shows how the predominant usage after the Civil War became a racial and ethnic rather than a religious one. While Americanism came to express an exceptionalist identity founded on the white race, Americanism remained a contested term with civic nationalism as a more liberal alternative later swamped by the xenophobia of World War I and post-war agitation against socialism and foreign immigrants. Wartime anxiety produced the American Creed as a patriotic point of national identification. As a result of the 1917 Russian Revolution’s global impact, Americanism became identified with the (political) nation-state and with capitalism in competition with communism. Next, the chapter considers how the term exceptionalism was employed to describe USfailures to conform with Marxist calls for international socialist revolution. The chapter concludes by examining how this Marxist materialist formulation underpinned modern social science exceptionalism. Here, the career of Seymour Martin Lipset was prominent. (pages 141 - 160)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
10: The Dream and the Century: The Liberal Exceptionalism of the New Deal State, 1930s–1960s - Ian Tyrrell
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226812120.003.0011
[New Deal;Nation of Immigrants;American Dream;American Century;liberal exceptionalism]
This chapter first asks whether the New Deal could be seen as a fulfillment of or a deviation from American exceptionalism. It shows how a new, reformed liberal version of exceptionalism reflected two key concepts: the American Dream and the American Century. These concepts became important subsidiary myths sustaining American exceptionalism at a time of economic and geopolitical upheaval. New Deal liberal exceptionalism served to displace Americanism by championing cultural pluralism, but its focus on the Nation of Immigrants idea as a representation of American historical reality became a modern expression of the settler colonialism underpinning of American exceptionalism. The chapter then examines competing exceptionalist and non-exceptionalist visions of America'splace in the Cold War world, with the American Century becoming the leading (and exceptionalist) expression of post-1945 hegemony. The chapter examines the complicated interplay of religion and material abundance in American Cold War rhetoric and practice, including the role of consumer capitalism and conceptions of women’s place in a materialist iteration of American power, and considers therein the limits to, and criticism of, exceptionalism at the apex of this post-war hegemony. (pages 161 - 181)
This chapter is available at:
University Press Scholarship Online
11: The Newly Chosen Nation: Exceptionalism from Reagan to Trump - Ian Tyrrell
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226812120.003.0012
[modern evangelicalism;Shining City;Indispensable Nation;jeremiad;declinism]
This chapter argues that a post-1970 crisis in exceptionalism facilitated a reassertion of American chosenness powered by a politically active evangelicalism. In theory, this process subordinated material abundance and political ideology to religion, but political ideology fused with chosenness, and both rested on assumptions of continued material abundance. The City Upon a Hill idea, previously highlighted academically by Perry Miller, was politically misappropriated as the Shining City; this formulation is contrasted with Jimmy Carter’s failed invocation of the Protestant jeremiad. Instead, Ronald Reagan successfully proposed a positive-thinking alternative. The role of the 1970s and its portents of anti-exceptionalism is the key material underpinningthese changes in ideology and politics to a conservative, politico-religious exceptionalism. This shift was seemingly validated by the collapse of the Soviet Union, which allowed an untrammeled American exceptionalism to triumph as the “Indispensable Nation.”The quick emergence of the terminology of American exceptionalism, previously obscurely academic, is analyzed as a response to the post-9/11 challenges to USmaterial and politico-economic hegemony in global perspective. Finally, the chapter discusses the paradoxical flourishing of declinism as a discourse—at the same time as the insistence upon exceptionalism as a party-political dogma and a patriotic necessity soared. (pages 182 - 197)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Afterword - Ian Tyrrell
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226812120.003.0013
[social science exceptionalism;democracy;difference;racism;Trump;exceptionalism]
In contrast with the discourse of exceptionalism analyzed in this book, the afterword rebuts objections of those who insist upon or assume the actual identifiable exceptionalism of the United States in empirical “reality.” It examines the core of social science and historical findings on the reality of American exceptionalism and explains the methodological difficulties in using national comparisons in establishing their arguments. As test cases, political historical development is discussed comparatively and transnationally to show the problems in proving exceptionalism from empirical data on democracy, equality, and exemplar statusand shows that even cumulative national differences do not amount to a systemic exceptionalism across time as exceptionalism requires. Rather, elements of distinctiveness are grounded in historical particularities and processes shared with other societies. In this argument, the afterword uses the complementary analytical and comparative framework of settler colonialism to critique exceptionalist assumptions. At bottom, assertions of exceptionalism are qualitative ones that cannot be proven, and yet their veracity is essential to contemporary exceptionalism. The afterword concludes with a discussion of the American Dream, racism, immigration, and the Trump presidency’s denouement in 2021 as part of the renewed, contemporary COVID-era debate over exceptionalism. (pages 198 - 208)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
