Death of a Nation: American Culture and the End of Exceptionalism

Critical American Studies

by David W. Noble, George Lipsitz (Foreword)

In the 1940s, American thought experienced a cataclysmic paradigm shift. Before then, national ideology was shaped by American exceptionalism and bourgeois elites saw themselves as the children of a homogeneous nation standing outside the history and culture of the Old World. This view repressed the cultures of those who did not fit the elite people of color, Catholics, Jews, and immigrants. David W. Noble, a preeminent figure in American studies, inherited this ideology. However, like many who entered the field in the 1940s, he rejected the ideals of his intellectual predecessors and sought a new, multicultural, post-national scholarship. Throughout his career, Noble has examined this rupture in American intellectual life. In Death of a Nation, he presents the culmination of decades of thought in a sweeping treatise on the shaping of contemporary American studies and an eloquent summation of his distinguished career. Exploring the roots of American exceptionalism, Noble demonstrates that it was a doomed ideology. Capitalists who believed in a bounded nationalism also depended on a boundless, international marketplace. This contradiction was inherently unstable, and the belief in a unified national landscape exploded in World War II. The rupture provided an opening for alternative narratives as class, ethnicity, race, and region were reclaimed as part of the nation's history. Noble traces the effects of this shift among scholars and artists, and shows how even today they struggle to imagine an alternative postnational narrative and seek the meaning of local and national cultures in an increasingly transnational world. While Noble illustrates the challenges thatthe paradigm shift created, he also suggests solutions that will help scholars avoid romanticized and reductive approaches toward the study of American culture in the future.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

400 pages, Paperback

First published November 30, 2001

Reviews

[Vince · Rating 4 out of 5]

A historian examines the history of US historiography. Very interesting review of the mythmaking of what is America. Beginning with the writings of FJ Turner in the 1890s and continuing through the Beards, Schlesinger, Hofstadter, etc. to 2000 (too man names to mention here. The emphasis is on the period from about 1830 (when enough "history" had passed to give late 19th C historians something to chew on) through all the permutations of America as it evolved. Noble is at pains to discuss how each particular era of historical writing was inflected by the core values of the age and how individual historians over time would change their conclusions/estimations based on those shifts (frequently without acknowledging them). The academese is pretty thick and the book is probably more suitable to a graduate seminar in the American Studies Dept in which Noble taught, but if one is interested in the myth of "who we are" and how we got that way this volume will reward persistent effort. Copious notes and citations of other works, especially of more recent publication provide much grist for the mill of anyone wishing to grind out more particulars.

[Zubair · Rating 1 out of 5]

I wish I could rate it 0 stars.

[Tim.]

I have heard interesting things about this one...I probably won't be able to get to it until later this year.

[Joseph Volk · Rating 5 out of 5]

a great introduction to post-national american studies and one of those helpful books that filled in a bunch of holes in my knowledge very quickly.