Death of a Nation: American Culture and the End of Exceptionalism

US: 9780816640812, 2002. Paperback. Very Good. A copy that has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting.The spine remains undamaged. In the 1940s, American thought experienced a cataclysmic paradigm shift. Be fore then, national ideology was shaped by American exceptionalism and bour geois nationalism: elites saw themselves as the children of a homogeneous n ation standing outside the history and culture of the Old World. This view repressed the cultures of those who did not fit the elite vision: people of color, Catholics, Jews, and immigrants. David W. Noble, a preeminent figur e in American studies, inherited this ideology. However, like many who ente red the field in the 1940s, he rejected the ideals of his intellectual pred ecessors and sought a new, multicultural, postnational scholarship. Through out his career, Noble has examined this rupture in American intellectual li fe. In Death of a Nation, he presents the culmination of decades of thought in a sweeping treatise on the shaping of contemporary American studies and an eloquent summation of his distinguished career. Exploring the roots of American exceptionalism, Noble demonstrates that it was a doomed ideology. Capitalists who believed in a bounded nationalism also depended on a boundless, international marketplace. This contradiction was inherently unstable, and the belief in a unified national landscape exploded in World War II. The rupture provided an opening for alternative narratives as class, ethnicity, race, and region were reclaimed as part of the nation's history. Noble traces the effects of this shift among scholars and artists, and shows how even.