Join us for a roundtable discussion of Ian Tyrrell's new work, American Exceptionalism: A New History of an Old Idea (Chicago University Press, 2021). Professor Ian Tyrrell (UNSW) will be joined by Professor David Goodman (University of Melbourne) and Professor Jay Sexton (University of Missouri). A HistoryBooks@UNSW event.
About the book: The idea that the United States is unlike every other country in world history is a surprisingly resilient one. Throughout his distinguished career, Ian Tyrrell has been one of the most influential historians of the idea of American exceptionalism, but he has never written a book focused solely on it until now.
The notion that American identity might be exceptional emerged, Tyrrell shows, from the belief that the nascent early republic was not simply a postcolonial state but a genuinely new experiment in an imperialist world dominated by Britain. Prior to the Civil War, American exceptionalism fostered declarations of cultural, economic, and spatial independence. As the country grew in population and size, becoming a major player in the global order, its exceptionalist beliefs came more and more into focus—and into question. Over time, a political divide emerged: those who believed that America’s exceptionalism was the basis of its virtue and those who saw America as either a long way from perfect or actually fully unexceptional, and thus subject to universal demands for justice. Tyrrell masterfully articulates the many forces that made American exceptionalism such a divisive and definitional concept.
Today, he notes, the demands that people acknowledge America’s exceptionalism have grown ever more strident, even as the material and moral evidence for that exceptionalism—to the extent that there ever was any—has withered away.
This discussion forms part of the HistoryBooks@UNSW 2022 series. Contact n.parkinson@unsw.edu.au for further details.
Ian Tyrrell has worked on 19th and 20th century American history, on transnational social movements, U.S. historiography, and environmental history. His “American Exceptionalism in an Age of International History,” American Historical Review (1991), initiated a major debate in the American historical profession on the transnational “turn” in history. He is the author of eleven books and co-editor of three others; they include Reforming the World: The Creation of America’s Moral Empire (Princeton University Press, 2010) and Crisis of the Wasteful Nation: Empire and Conservation in Theodore Roosevelt’s America (University of Chicago Press, 2015). His current research interests concern the social and cultural history of the United States from the end of Reconstruction to World War I, c. 1876-1917, especially the religious roots of belief in American exceptionalism in that period, and cultural and economic interactions with the wider world.
Professor David Goodman is Professor of American history at the University of Melbourne. He is the author of Radio’s Civic Ambition: American Broadcasting and Democracy in the 1930s (Oxford University Press, 2011) and, with Joy Elizabeth Hayes, of New Deal Radio: The Educational Radio Project (Rutgers University Press, 2022). He is now completing a study of the local debate about American entry into World War 2.
Professor Jay Sexton is Rich and Nancy Kinder Chair of Constitutional Democracy and Professor of History at the University of Missouri, where he specialises in the political and economic history of the nineteenth century. His research situates the United States in its international context, particularly as it related to the dominant global structure of the era, the British Empire. His most recent book, A Nation Forged by Crisis: A New American History (Basic Books, 2018), argues that international forces have shaped the course of U.S. history during its greatest moments of transformative change. His other books include Debtor Diplomacy: Finance and American Foreign Relations in the Civil War Era, 1837-1873 (Oxford, 2005; 2nd ed. 2014) and The Monroe Doctrine: Empire and Nation in Nineteenth-Century America (Hill and Wang, 2011).
