American exceptionalism 
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SOURCE: Professor Buzzkill History Podcast
1/23/2023
David A. Bell Discusses "American Exceptionalism" with the Professor Buzzkill Podcast
"Dr. David Bell relates the long and strange history of the concept of “American Exceptionalism,” analyzing various interpretations of the phrase from the Puritan John Winthrop to President (and non-Puritan) Donald Trump."
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SOURCE: Activist History Review
11/8/2022
No, Liberal Historians Can't Tame Nationalism
by Eran Zelnik
Liberal historians confronted with both right-wing nationalism and renewed "history wars" have tried to thread a needle by telling a positive story of nationalism. The author contends the exclusionary and belligerent aspects of nationalism can't be domesticated by surrounding them with the right narrative.
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SOURCE: TomDispatch
3/24/2022
America *IS* Exceptional. It's Not a Good Thing
by Aviva Chomsky
The climate emergency requires Americans to reject the nation's exceptional consumption of resources and hoarding of wealth in favor of a political economy that enables a global good life for all within the limits of the planet.
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SOURCE: Washington Post
1/24/2022
The Threat of the US Becoming an "Anocracy" Again? Civil War
by Barbara F. Walter
Anocracies combine the superficial trappings of democracy, like elections, with the suppression of civil liberties and the press and the hardening of factions in place of a common civic culture. By some measures, the US is now an anocracy, like Yugoslavia in the early 1990s.
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SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
1/25/2021
The Capitol Siege wasn’t like the ‘Third World.’ It was Uniquely American
by Benjamin R. Young
American leaders who compared the Capitol riots to "Third World" politics were right, but not in the way that they meant: the US has long used political violence as a tool to sustain right-wing leadership in the developing world.
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SOURCE: The Atlantic
12/3/2020
The New Comedy of American Decline
Two new comedy series revisit the trope of the American abroad; one works because it looks critically, if humorously, at the idea of American exceptionalism.
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SOURCE: The New Yorker
10/26/2020
What Do Foreign Correspondents Think of the U.S.?
Journalists from around the world are reporting on the 2020 Presidential race—and offering perspectives not found in American media coverage.
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SOURCE: Made by History at The Washington Post
10/16/2020
American Exceptionalism Gives Voters a False Sense of Security about the Election
by Melissa J. Gismondi and Shira Lurie
American democracy won’t endure just because it always has. In this moment, American exceptionalism could prove fatal.
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SOURCE: The New Yorker
9/8/2020
Is America a Myth?
Writer Robin Wright looks to historians Richard Kreitner and Colin Woodard to explain that the idea of a unified American nation has not been the historical norm.
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7/5/2020
But Why Is America Exceptional?
by Guy Chet
Political separation from Britain allowed old English traits to remain preserved in America, like a bug in amber, even as they were whittled away by change in the old country.
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SOURCE: New York Times
4/27/2020
Will a Pandemic Shatter the Perception of American Exceptionalism?
Historians including David Kennedy, Andrew Bacevich, David Oshinsky and Wilfred McClay discuss whether the idea of American uniqueness has hurt national preparedness for an epidemic, if it will help or hinder recovery, and if the COVID-19 crisis will dislodge the idea from popular consciousness.
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SOURCE: The Nation
4/13/2020
The Tangled History of Illness and Idiocy
by Jessi Jezewska Stevens
Opining in public on things you don’t really understand is a form of idiocy in which Americans, in particular, are known to indulge.
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11/24/19
American Exceptionalism and Why We Must Impeach Trump
by Greg Bailey
The weight of our heritage and the promise of our future demand that we act in the present to restore our exceptional place in the world and in our hearts.
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SOURCE: Los Angeles Review of Books
2/19/19
Winthrop's "City" Was Exceptional, Not Exceptionalist
by Jim Sleeper
There are compelling anthropological reasons why almost every society in history has invented “special covenant” and “origin” myths, or “constitutive fictions.”
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SOURCE: Politico
1-7-18
How Trump Is Making Us Rethink American Exceptionalism
by Joshua Zeitz
This past year has shown that the U.S. is far from immune to the forces shaping the rest of the world.
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SOURCE: Foreign Affairs
1-3-17
Trump and American Exceptionalism
by Stephen Wertheim
He may be the first president to take office who explicitly rejects American exceptionalism.
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SOURCE: The New Yorker
11-4-16
Donald Trump and the Death of American Exceptionalism
by Jelani Cobb
The problem of Trump is not simply that his opinions far exceed his knowledge; it’s that what he does know is so hostile to democracy, not only in the Republican Party or the United States but in the world.
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8-14-15
Did the Founding Fathers Believe In American Exceptionalism?
by Sheldon Stern
Like John Adams, they were for the most part confident that the new United States was on the cusp of a brilliant future. But they did not believe that Americans, as a people, were exempt from the flaws and faults of other nations and peoples.
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SOURCE: The Washington Post
6-3-15
Obama’s New Patriotism
by Greg Jaffe
How Obama has used his presidency to redefine ‘American exceptionalism’
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SOURCE: We're History
2-24-15
Sticks, Stones, and American Exceptionalism
by R. B. Bernstein
How are we to take polemicists’ rhetoric seriously, when it celebrates a past and a nation that never was?
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