Description: Asking readers to rethink America's history as being autonomous and self-sufficient, Bender proposes that America has grappled with circumstances, doctrines, new developments, and events that other nations, too, have faced, and that today's Americans can only benefit from recognizing this.
Brief description: Thomas Bender, professor of history and the humanities at New York University, is the author and editor of more than a dozen books. He lives in New York City.
Review Quotes:
"A sophisticated polemic combining intellectual precision with moral passion, written for a general audience in lively prose that is neither condescending nor arcane. Bender does not pretend to write an exhaustive history of the United States but rather whets our appetite with tastes of his global and spatial revisionism." --Tony Platt, San Francisco Chronicle
"Original, ambitious, and consistently provocative, A Nation Among Nations should change the way we study and teach American history. If ever we needed an approach to our past that emphasizes how it is embedded in global history, now is the time." --Eric Foner, Columbia University "Writing with verve and eloquence, Thomas Bender challenges much that we thought we knew in this profoundly disconcerting meditation on American history. His fresh, invigorating interpretations will make your old college textbooks feel obsolete, and he offers a new angle of vision on the ways the twenty-first-century world was shaped. I could not put this book down." --Linda K. Kerber, University of Iowa