Carroll Smith-Rosenberg

Essays look at feminist history, female friendships, Davy Crockett, sex roles, the feminine cycle, hysteria, abortion, and androgyny in nineteenth-century America

Visions of Gender in Victorian America

Disorderly Conduct

Blanche Wiesen Cook

Alice Kessler-Harris

Judith Friedlander

A Century of Change

Women in Culture and Politics

This Violent Empire traces the origins of American violence, racism, and paranoia to the founding moments of the new nation and the initial instability of Americans' national sense of self. Fusing cultural and political analyses to create a new form of political history, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg explores the ways the founding generation, lacking a common history, governmental infrastructures, and shared culture, solidified their national sense of self by imagining a series of "Others" (African Americans, Native Americans, women, the propertyless) whose differences from European American male founders overshadowed the differences that divided those founders. These "Others," dangerous and polluting, had to be excluded from the European American body politic. Feared, but also desired, they refused to be marginalized, incurring increasingly enraged enactments of their political and social exclusion that shaped our long history of racism, xenophobia, and sexism. Close readings of political rhetoric during the Constitutional debates reveal the genesis of this long history.

The Birth of an American National Identity

This Violent Empire

Carroll Smith-Rosenberg

Books

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