Sublime

An issue that confused me for a while is why criticism of San Francisco seemed to anger some people irrationally. Couldn’t they also see that prices and feces were both up and to the right at the same time? Eventually what I realized is that everyone is patriotic about something, and those people were patriotic about their city, while others were p

jingoism

Call the first narrative Free America. In the past half century it’s been the most politically powerful of the four. Free America draws on libertarian ideas, which it installs in the high-powered engine of consumer capitalism. The freedom it champions is very different from Tocqueville’s art of self-government. It’s personal freedom, without other

For a hundred years after our Revolution, Americans credited Native Americans as a source of their democratic institutions. Revolutionary-era cartoonists used images of American Indians to represent the colonies against Britain. Virginia’s patriot rifle companies wore Indian clothes and moccasins as they fought the redcoats. When colonists took act

American exceptionalism, that sense that we are somehow special and ordained as such, is a myth sedimented on Southern prosperity: oil, coal, and cotton. Every piece of evidence of our national distinction has relied upon this wealth of the nation. As you certainly have already gleaned, I do not think genocide, slavery, and exploitation were worth

The fascination with Zion is now at the heart of the English Romanticism of the colonial era.

Europeans saw themselves as embattled against a triumphant Islam even while they plundered the New World and invaded the Indian Ocean. Their own achievements in political, military and commercial organization were matched or overshadowed by those of the Ottomans, Safavids, Mughals, Ming or Tokugawa. State-building and cultural innovation were strik