The Genesis of America
US Foreign Policy and the Formation of National Identity, 1793–1815

Explores how foreign policy was used to promote American nationalism by creating external threats in the early republic.

Jasper M. Trautsch (Author)

9781108428248, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 13 September 2018

328 pages
23.5 x 15.7 x 2.3 cm, 0.6 kg

'Jasper Trautsch's examination of the crucial role played by foreign policy in the creation of American national identity during the founding decades of the United States is a masterwork of historical analysis. …His book will prove a landmark in the field … Trautsch has produced the twenty-first century's best account of the origins and nature of American nationalism.' Paul T. McCartney, National Identities

The Genesis of America investigates the ways in which US foreign policy contributed to the formation of an American national consciousness. Interpreting American nationalism as a process of external demarcation, Jasper M. Trautsch argues that, for a sense of national self to emerge, the US needed to be disentangled from its most important European reference points: Great Britain and France. As he shows, foreign-policy makers could therefore promote American nationalism by provoking foreign crises and wars with these countries, hereby creating external threats that would bind the fragile union together. By reconstructing how foreign policy was thus used as a nation-building instrument, Trautsch provides an answer to the puzzling question of how Americans - lacking a shared history and culture of their own and justifying their claim for independent nationhood by appeals to universal rights - could develop a sense of particularity after the conclusion of the Revolutionary War.

Introduction
1. Political ideologies and American identity in the era of the French Revolution
2. Foreign policies of unneutrality and the Jay Treaty
3. Federalists and the origins of the Quasi-War
4. Disentangling America from France
5. Republicans and the origins of the War of 1812
6. Disentangling America from Great Britain
Conclusion.

Subject Areas: National liberation & independence, post-colonialism [HBTR], Social & cultural history [HBTB], History of the Americas [HBJK]