A nation without borders : the United States and its world in an age of civil wars, 1830-1910 / Steven Hahn.
Material type:
TextSeries: Penguin history of the United StatesPublisher: New York : Viking, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, [2016]Description: x, 596 pages : illustrations ; 25 cmContent type: - text
- unmediated
- volume
- 9780670024681 (hardcover)
- 0670024686 (hardcover)
- United States -- Territorial expansion -- History -- 19th century
- United States -- Foreign relations -- 1815-1861
- United States -- Foreign relations -- 1861-1865
- United States -- Foreign relations -- 1865-1921
- Nationalism -- United States -- History -- 19th century
- Slavery -- Political aspects -- United States -- History -- 19th century
- Capitalism -- Political aspects -- United States -- History -- 19th century
- Economic development -- Political aspects -- United States -- History -- 19th century
- Imperialism -- History -- 19th century
- Civil war -- History -- 19th century
| Item type | Home library | Collection | Call number | Materials specified | Status | Date due | Barcode | Item holds | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Adult Book
|
Main Library | NonFiction | 973.5 H148 | Available | 33111008492312 |
Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:
The era from 1830 to 1910 witnessed massive transformations in how people lived, worked, thought about themselves, and struggled to live and thrive. It also witnessed the birth of economic and political institutions that still shape our world. America's population grew more than ten-fold. The country expanded to the Pacific coast and then out into the Pacific itself. Civil warfare erupted. Three centuries of slavery ended. Native peoples were suppressed and remanded to reservations. Massive waves of immigrants from Europe and Asia arrived. From an agricultural society with a weak central government, the US became an urban and industrial society in which government assumed a greater and greater role in the framing of social and economic life.
A Nation Without Borders 's signature achievement is to place this history in a wholly new light, by capturing the tensions and contradictions between nation and empire. His new interpretations include the fact that slavery was national not sectional, that Jim Crow racism initially emerged in the Northeast and Midwest, that "sectionalism" was less a fact of politics than an important political construct in the battle over slavery's future, and that the principle struggle of the period was not between the North and South but rather between the Northeast and the Mississippi Valley for control of the continent and hemisphere. Hahn's strikingly original thesis resets the familiar framework of that of a country expanding from colony. He shows how, the United States had, from its colonial origins and birth as a union, significant imperial ambitions on the continent and in the hemisphere, and that the United States only became a nation, a nation-state - as many others did - in the midst of a massive political and military struggle in the 1860s. A nation is understood to have clearly defined borders, which delineate sovereignty and belonging. Empires, though they may expand and contract, lack real borders; they are more about vectors, claims, and alliances. By 1910, as the "long" nineteenth century came to a close, the United States stood as one of the most formidable empires on the globe.
Includes bibliographical references (pages 523-575) and index.
"A Pulitzer Prize-winning historian's provocative reinterpretation of the eight decades surrounding the Civil War (and leading into the twentieth century); the next volume in the Penguin History of the United States, edited by Eric Foner. In this ambitious story of American imperial conquest and capitalist development, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Steven Hahn takes on the conventional histories of the nineteenth century and offers a perspective that promises to be as enduring as it is controversial. It begins and ends in Mexico and, throughout, is internationalist in orientation. It challenges the political narrative of 'sectionalism,' emphasizing the national footing of slavery and the struggle between the northeast and Mississippi Valley for continental supremacy. It places the Civil War in the context of many domestic rebellions against state authority, including those of Native Americans. It fully incorporates the trans-Mississippi west, suggesting the importance of the Pacific to the imperial vision of political leaders and of the west as a proving ground for later imperial projects overseas. It reconfigures the history of capitalism, insisting on the centrality of state formation and slave emancipation to its consolidation. And it identifies a sweeping era of 'reconstructions' in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that simultaneously laid the foundations for corporate liberalism and social democracy. The era from 1830 to 1910 witnessed massive transformations in how people lived, worked, thought about themselves, and struggled to thrive. It also witnessed the birth of economic and political institutions that still shape our world. From an agricultural society with a weak central government, the United States became an urban and industrial society in which government assumed a greater and greater role in the framing of social and economic life. As the book ends, the United States, now a global economic and political power, encounters massive warfare between imperial powers in Europe and a massive revolution on its southern border--the remarkable Mexican Revolution--which together brought the nineteenth century to a close while marking the important themes of the twentieth"-- Provided by publisher.
Empire and union. Borderlands ; Slavery and political culture ; Markets, money, and class ; Continentalism ; Border wars ; Death of a Union -- Nation and empire. Birth of a nation ; Defining a nation-state ; Capitalism ; Imperial arms ; Alternative paths ; Reconstructions ; Revolution, war, and the borders of power.