Description: In engaging and lucid prose, Depkat offers general readers and students of American history an invaluable lens through which they can evaluate for themselves the merits of the many ways in which Americans have understood their country as exceptional.
Review Quotes:
"This is a well-balanced, incisive account of what exceptionalism means to scholars, students, and general readers across the political spectrum. Depkat explores the concept's origins and development and the reality that its meaning, which changes over time, depends on one's political persuasion.... Depkat covers the span of American history, referencing both primary and secondary sources to create this forceful, insightful analysis of American exceptionalism, something that is more a dream for the future than simply an analysis of the past.Highly recommended. General readers through faculty; professionals." --Choice Reviews
"Most Americans believe in the idea that their nation is not only different from other countries but that it occupies a unique place in the moral universe of world history. In this compelling and very readable book, Volker Depkat, one of the leading German historians of the United States, moves beyond the stale debates of the past and offers a concise account of how Americans - and Europeans - have imagined America as exceptional and how competing concepts of American Exceptionalism have shaped US history until today." --Manfred Berg, Curt Engelhorn Professor of American History, Heidelberg University "With this magisterial synthesis of a vast range of source materials in which competing versions of this notion have been made to serve different, at times mutually exclusive, social, geographic, political economic, and cultural agendas, Volker Depkat has accomplished what I once thought impossible: a comprehensive, systematic, yet utterly accessible conceptual history of American exceptionalism from its colonial and revolutionary beginnings to the present." --Donald E. Pease, professor of English, Director of the Futures of American Studies Institute at Dartmouth College, and author of The New American Excpetionalism "Volker Depkat's highly readable account of the conceptual workings and practices justified by exceptionalism expertly navigates centuries, shifting geographical boundaries, myriad types of sources and artistic works, as well as transnational and regional outlooks and experiences. Looping back and forth in time, thematically organized chapters drive home the fluidity of positive and negative exceptionalisms. This in-depth study demonstrates why one person's new beginning was often another person's premature demise and why high-flying hopes were frequently disappointed. American Exceptionalism, with its compact yet intricate chapters and its immensely useful bibliographical essay, is an asset for American Studies classes on competing conceptualizations of the US and for anyone interested in fathoming US history." --Nassim W. Balestrini, University of Graz, Austria "Those who join the author on a journey through several centuries of history of American exceptionalism are richly rewarded intellectually. Depkat discerningly points to the central texts. Since the American idea of exceptionalism will continue to exist in the future, we do well to know its developmental history." --H/Soz/Kult