Rome and America
Communities of Strangers, Spectacles of Belonging

Explores how Rome and the USA are communities comprised of Strangers who must continually wrestle with shared identities of belonging.

Dean Hammer (Author)

9781009249614, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 17 April 2025

266 pages, 10 colour illus.
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.4 cm, 0.436 kg

'… an extended and original meditation on the notion of Rome and America as being a collective of strangers bound together by common experiences of exile. … What makes “Rome and America” unique is its analysis of cultural artifacts and historical phenomena in depicting America as a unity of variant peoples, classes, and cultures.' Jesse Russell, Friends, Countrymen, Romans

Rome and America provides a timely exploration of the Roman and American founding myths in the cultural imagination. Defying the usual ideological categories, Dean Hammer argues for the exceptional nature of the myths as a journey of Strangers, but also traces the tensions created by the myths in attempts to answer the question of who We are. The wide-ranging chapters reassess both Roman antecedents and American expressions of the myth in some unexpected places: early American travelogues, westerns, bare-knuckle boxing, early American theater, government documents detailing Native American policy, and the writings of Noah Webster, W. E. B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, and Charles Eastman. This innovative volume culminates in an interpretation of the current crisis of democracy as a reversion of the community back to Strangers, with suggestions of how the myth can recast a much-needed discussion of identity and belonging.

Introduction
1. Memory, identity, and violence: founding in the Aeneid and The Outlaw Josey Wales
2. Imagining purity: the corrosive Stranger and the construction of a genealogy
3. The wild Stranger and the conquest of space
4. Playing culture: combat spectacles and the acting body
5. The experience of politics and the crises of two republics.

Subject Areas: History of ideas [JFCX], Classical history / classical civilisation [HBLA1], History of the Americas [HBJK]