American Exceptionalism

Ian Tyrrell is emeritus professor of history at the University of New South Wales and the author of Crisis of the Wasteful Nation: Empire and Conservation in Theodore Roosevelt’s America and Historians in Public: The Practice of American History, 1890–1970, both published by the University of Chicago Press.

• Introduction: The Peculiar Tale of American ExceptionalismChapter 1: The Puritans and American ChosennessChapter 2: Looking Back, Looking Forward: Remembering the RevolutionChapter 3: Cultural Nationalism and the Origins of American ExceptionalismChapter 4: Lyman Beecher, Personal Identity, and the Christian RepublicChapter 5: Women and Exceptionalism: The Self-Made Woman and the Power of Catharine BeecherChapter 6: Race, Anglo-Saxonism, and Manifest DestinyChapter 7: In the Hands of an Angry God: The Antislavery Jeremiad and the Origins of the Christian NationChapter 8: Fin de Siècle Challenges: The Frontier, Labor, and American ImperialismChapter 9: Two Isms: Americanism and SocialismChapter 10: The Dream and the Century: The Liberal Exceptionalism of the New Deal State, 1930s–1960sChapter 11: The Newly Chosen Nation: Exceptionalism from Reagan to TrumpAfterwordAcknowledgmentsNotesIndex

"Tyrrell, a distinguished Australian historian, has written a rich intellectual history of the dramatic shifts in the meaning of the defining but, it turns out, highly malleable idea of 'American exceptionalism,' from its roots in the revolutionary era to the present. Tracing the term’s changing significance illuminates U.S. history more broadly."