The United States in World History
Transnationalism v. Exceptionalism
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.13135/1592-4467/8626Keywords:
exceptionalism, the United States, transnationalism, Cold WarAbstract
American “exceptionalism” is a myth, not history. Classic works cited as the foundation of exceptionalist America do not make such a claim. John Winthrop and Alexis de Tocqueville are treated as the “originalists” of “exceptionalism,” but in fact they placed American history within a larger framework – the progress of Christianity or that of equality. Before the 1940s, classic American historians did not make reference to “exceptionalism”: not Parkman nor Adams, Turner nor Beard. “Exceptionalism” was a product of the early Cold War. With the end of the Cold War and the emergence of “globalization,” historians, and social scientists in general, began to see that many of the key events or movements in the United States were part of transnational developments: the discovery, the revolution, the Civil War, social politics – and more.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
RSAJournal applies a CC BY-NC-ND license to all its contributions. This license enables reusers to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the creator. CC BY-NC-ND includes the following elements:
- BY: credit must be given to the creator.
- NC: Only noncommercial uses of the work are permitted.
- ND: No derivatives or adaptations of the work are permitted.
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain the copyright and full publishing rights for their submissions to the journal.
- Authors grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License that allows others to share unedited work for non-commercial purposes with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.