Borstelmann Just Like Us

The American Struggle to Understand Foreigners
1. Auflage 2020
ISBN: 978-0-231-55035-2
Verlag: De Gruyter
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 272 Seiten

Americans have long considered themselves a people set apart, but American exceptionalism is built on a set of tacit beliefs about other cultures. From the founding exclusion of indigenous peoples and enslaved Africans to the uneasy welcome of waves of immigrants, from republican disavowals of colonialism to Cold War proclamations of freedom, Americans’ ideas of their differences from others have shaped the modern world—and how Americans have viewed foreigners is deeply revealing of their assumptions about themselves.

Just Like Us is a pathbreaking exploration of what foreignness has meant across American history. Thomas Borstelmann traces American ambivalence about non-Americans, identifying a paradoxical perception of foreigners as suspiciously different yet fundamentally sharing American values beneath the layers of culture. Considering race and religion, notions of the American way of life, attitudes toward immigrants, competition with communism, Americans abroad, and the subversive power of American culture, he offers a surprisingly optimistic account of the acceptance of difference. Borstelmann contends that increasing contact with peoples around the globe during the Cold War encouraged mainstream society to grow steadily more inclusive. In a time of resurgent nativism and xenophobia, Just Like Us provides a reflective, urgent examination of how Americans have conceived of foreignness and their own exceptionalism throughout the nation’s history.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Borstelmann, Thomas

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Kultur- und Ideengeschichte
• Sozialwissenschaften Ethnologie | Volkskunde Volkskunde Minderheiten, Interkulturelle & Multikulturelle Fragen
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Mentalitäts- und Sozialgeschichte
• Sozialwissenschaften Ethnologie | Volkskunde Ethnologie Kultur- und Sozialethnologie: Politische Ethnologie, Recht, Organisation, Identität
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Amerikanische Geschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Preface
1. The Challenge of Contact with Foreigners
2. Freedom: American Culture as Human Nature
3. Inbound: Immigrants from Internal Threat to Incorporation
4. Lurking: Communists and the Threat of Captivity
5. Outbound: U.S. Expansion Into Foreign Lands
6. Subversion: The Power of American Culture in a Global Era
Conclusion: Not So Foreign After All
Notes
Index

Über Autor(innen)

Thomas Borstelmann is the Elwood N. and Katherine Thompson Professor of Modern World History at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and a past president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. His previous books include The 1970s: A New Global History from Civil Rights to Economic Inequality (2012); The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena (2001); and Apartheid’s Reluctant Uncle: The United States and Southern Africa in the Early Cold War (1993).