The Birth Of America: A Queer Story Of America's Independence And Supremacy

The United States originated as a concept, more so than practically any other country in the world. Trent James considers the American Revolution to be the single most significant event in our history for this reason. We have had to repeatedly resort to the origins of our country in order to understand who we are since American identity is so flexible and not founded on any widely shared tradition. He examines the beginning of American nationhood in The Idea of America and argues why the revolution is still so crucial.James examines the intellectual roots of the revolution, from ancient Rome to the European Enlightenment, as well as the founders' aspirations to create an American democracy in a series of beautiful and instructive articles.In place of the virtuous republic of yeoman farmers and disinterested elites that the country's founders had envisioned, a vast, licentious, and materialistic popular democracy was born.James reveals how the revolutionary age thought of itself as the most advanced people on earth while living in a remote, thinly populated nation. He also connects the roots of American exceptionalism to this time. Because the founding fathers thought their colonial uprising had worldwide meaning for oppressed peoples all over the world, the revolution gave Americans their messianic sense of purpose-and maybe our persistent predisposition to advocate democracy across the world.However, what now seems audacious reflected the fact that republicanism was a truly radical ideology in the eighteenth century, just as radical as Marxism would be in the nineteenth. Trent James examines the crucial moments, figures, and ideas of this time in this intriguing history of colonial America. Polk provides an introduction to the native Indians encountered in the New World and the black Africans who were taken across the Atlantic with vivid depictions of the communities that people from Europe came from and with an emphasis on what they imagined they were heading to.He also analyzes the contradictory realities of colonial societies "growing up" and "growing apart" with astute analysis. The prolonged period that saw the development of our national character and the expansion of our spirit of freedom were, in fact, the actual revolution. The Birth of America is based on that narrative.