This Violent Empire

<i>This Violent Empire</i> 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.<br/><br/>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.