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A review by aloyokon
Union: The Struggle to Forge the Story of United States Nationhood by Colin Woodard
4.0
What is American nationhood? What is an American? This is not a new question, but it is, in light of recent events, a very relevant one. When the US was founded, the former colonies that founded it had wildly different traditions, origin stories, political economies, etc., and the average "American" felt more loyalty to his own state than to a "United States". The struggle to form an unum out of this pluribus led to five different figures to show five different visions of American identity:
George Bancroft: Jacksonian, triumphalist, assimilationist
Willliam George Simms: Slavocratic, hierarchial, white supremacist
Fredrick Douglass: Abolitionist, egalitarian
Woodrow Wilson: Segregationist, ethnocentric, "herrenvolk democracy"
Frederick Jackson Turner: Frontiersman initially, but then regional in a manner similar to Woodard himself
The book ends on sort of a downer, as it appears that those who favor the more exclusionary, ethnostate version of nationhood seem to hold the levers of power at the moment, but as Woodard reminds the reader, the struggle to define American nationhood didn't stop with these men's deaths or with the Civil Rights revolution, and it will not stop now.
George Bancroft: Jacksonian, triumphalist, assimilationist
Willliam George Simms: Slavocratic, hierarchial, white supremacist
Fredrick Douglass: Abolitionist, egalitarian
Woodrow Wilson: Segregationist, ethnocentric, "herrenvolk democracy"
Frederick Jackson Turner: Frontiersman initially, but then regional in a manner similar to Woodard himself
The book ends on sort of a downer, as it appears that those who favor the more exclusionary, ethnostate version of nationhood seem to hold the levers of power at the moment, but as Woodard reminds the reader, the struggle to define American nationhood didn't stop with these men's deaths or with the Civil Rights revolution, and it will not stop now.