Jill Lepore "A New Americanism"

According to Jill Lepore, why did historian Carl Degler accuse his colleagues of “nothing short of dereliction of duty” at the 1986 annual meeting of the American Historical Association? According to Degler, what will happen if historians “fail to provide a nationally defined history”?

They had abandoned the study of the nation; the less critical and less informed will take over the job for them.

Why was the nation-state thought to be in decline when Degler gave his 1986 talk?

The world had grown global, there was no need to study nationalism anymore.

. What did historians begin to study in the 1970s? Who replaced historians? According to Lepore, what happens when historians abandon the study of the nation?

They began to study the smaller or bigger things, such as cultures of social groups; Charlatans, stooges, and tyrants replaced historians; When historians abandon the study, nationalism doesn’t die, it eats liberalism instead

 How does Lepore define the nation-state? How did the nation-states that arose out of city-states and kingdoms and empires explain their origins? 

A nation-state is a political community governed by laws that unites a people with a supposedly common ancestry. When nation-states arose out of city-states and kingdoms and empires, they explained themselves by telling stories about their origins—stories meant to suggest that everyone in, say, “the French nation” had common ancestors, when they of course did not. As I wrote in my book These Truths, “Very often, histories of nation-states are little more than myths that hide the seams that stitch the nation to the state.”

Why were the Federalists “in fact, nationalists”? How did Noah Webster propose to manufacture a national character?

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The sense they were proposing to replace a federal system with a national system. urging americans to adopt distinctive spelling

Why has historian David Armitage suggested that the United States is a “state-nation”?

The state was formed before the development of any sense of national consciousness

How did George Bancroft help transform the United States from a state to a nation in his ten-volume History of the United States, From the Discovery of the American Continent (1834-1874)? What did he offer in place of the United States’ “British inheritance”?

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He was a politician. He wrote Americas history to make the founding inevitable, its growth inexorable, and its history ancient

Why was nineteenth-century nationalism liberal? How did nineteenth-century Americans understand the nation-state?

It rested on the analogy between the individual and the collective. The concept of national self-determination- transferring the ideal of liberty from the individual to the organic collectivity- was raised as the banner of liberalism.

According to Lepore, how was the Civil War a struggle over two competing ideas of the nation-state? What is the difference between liberal and illiberal nationalism?

It was a struggle between northern nationalism and southern sectionalism. We must cultivate a national struggle. Illiberal nationalism was ethnic while liberal was civic nationalism.

According to Confederate Vice President Andrew/Alexander Stephens, how was the Confederate constitution different from the U.S. Constitution?

Slavery was a black man’s natural and moral condition and that the us constitution relied on the assumption of races.

 How did the 14th and 15th Amendments mark a “second founding” of the United States?

Liberal ideas about the rights of citizens and the power of the nation-states

What did Frederick Douglass mean by his claim that ratification of the 14th and 15th Amendments would establish a “composite nation”?

America would gather their strength from tbe differences of the citizens and not the similarities

What myth did white Northerners and white Southerners invent to patch the United States back together after Emancipation and Reconstruction?

The war was not a fight over slavery at all but merely a struggle between the nation and the states

.Why did the emergence of mass politics drive the change from liberal to illiberal nationalism in the 1880s? How was this change reflected in the United States? What did American historians who delivered speeches at the annual meetings of the American Historical Association leave out of their national histories?

The rise of Jim Crow Laws and a regime of immigrant restriction, starting with the Chinese exclusion act, all helped to drive the change. All offered national histories that left out the origins and endurance of racial inequality

 As nationalism got uglier and more illiberal from the 1910s through the 1930s, how did liberals view liberal nationalism?

They viewed liberal nationalism as an impossibility

How did American historians write the history of the United States in the wake of World War II?

A story of consensus, an unvarying “liberal tradition in America”

Why did American historians stop studying the nation-state in the 1960s?  Who entered the historical profession in the 1960s and what type of histories did they write?

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Nationalism looked worse than anachronism and hatred drove American historians away from studying it. Minority historians entered the field and advocated a historical cosmopolitanism.

According to Lepore, what would a new Americanism and a new American history look like? 

They might look like a composite nationalism imagined by Douglas and the clear-eyed histories written by Du Bois

 According to Lepore, why hasn’t the American experiment ended?

A nation founded on revolution and universal rights will forever struggle against chaos and the forces of particularism.

According to Degler, what would happen if American historians “don’t start asking and answering” significant questions?

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People with agendas to push will begin to rise and answer those questions.