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  1. Home
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  3. Thomas Jefferson and American Nationhood
  • Cited by 17
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
August 2012
Print publication year:
2012
Online ISBN:
9781139105842
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139105842
Subjects:
American History: General Interest, History, Early Republic and Antebellum History, History of Ideas and Intellectual History
Series:
Cambridge Studies on the American South
Information

Book description

This book emphasises the centrality of nationhood to Thomas Jefferson's thought and politics, envisioning Jefferson as a cultural nationalist whose political project sought the alignment of the American state system with the will and character of the nation. Jefferson believed that America was the one nation on earth able to realise in practice universal ideals to which other peoples could only aspire. He appears in the book as the essential narrator of what he once called the 'American Story': as the historian, the sociologist and the ethnographer; the political theorist of the nation; the most successful practitioner of its politics; and its most enthusiastic champion. The book argues that reorienting Jefferson around the concept of American nationhood recovers an otherwise easily missed coherence to his political career and helps make sense of a number of conundrums in his thought and practice.

Reviews

'Steele's Jefferson is much more complicated than a provincial Virginia planter with a cosmopolitan twist; he is the consummate architect of American nationalism precisely because he imagined and articulated a powerful understanding of Americans as a special people - a cultural and political nation - whose unique character transcended region or class and had universal significance.'

Drew R. McCoy Source: Journal of Southern History

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