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Loading... This America: The Case for the Nation (edition 2019)by Jill Lepore (Author)
Work InformationThis America: The Case for the Nation by Jill Lepore
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. A good book relating differing themes that have been used, then abandoned, and then due to be reconsidered. As well, it undercuts those that were - and are - clearly erroneous themes. Well worthwhile, small and quick-to-read comments on history of the U.S. ( ) Reads like a full-throated, final chapter to Lepore's These Truths. Essentially she restores a case for a "liberal" politic, "liberal" in the original sense as the common focus and "common history for a people." [Liberalism] requires grabbing and holding onto a very good idea: that all people are equal and endowed from birth with inalienable rights and entitled to equal treatment, guaranteed by a nation of laws" (p20). no reviews | add a review
"From the best-selling author of These Truths, a work that examines 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, Harvard historian Jill Lepore makes a stirring case for the nation in This America. Since the end of the Cold War, Lepore writes, American historians have largely retreated from the idea of 'the nation,' in part because postmodernism has corroded faith in grand narratives, and in part because the rise of political nationalism has rendered it suspect and unpalatable. Bucking this trend, however, Lepore argues forcefully that the nation demands scrutiny. Without an honest reckoning with America's collective past, we will be at the mercy of unscrupulous demagogues who spin their own version of the national story for their own purposes. 'When serious historians abandon the study of the nation,' Lepore tellingly writes, 'nationalism doesn't die. Instead, it eats liberalism.' A trenchant work of political philosophy as well as a reclamation of America's national history, This America asks us to look our nation's sovereign past square in the eye to reveal not only a history of contradictions, but a path of promise for the future"-- No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)320.973Social sciences Political Science Political Science Political situation and conditions North America United StatesLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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