Steven Hahn’s sweeping history of the United States in the age of expansion is a compelling narrative, and one that deserves a wide audience despite its flaws as an audiobook production. “Less is more” should be the mantra for all narrators of long, serious works of history—the steady trot rather than a full canter. Barry Press has a pleasing voice and is in many ways an appealing narrator. But he does tend to overemphasize. Worse, his mimicry of regional voices and historical bluster is just plain embarrassing. The story of America is a story of constantly changing borders, and Hahn has written an important work of history that speaks to our own divided time, as well as to the fractured eighteenth century. D.A.W. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine
In this monumental story of American imperial conquest and capitalist development, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Steven Hahn dismantles the conventional histories of the nineteenth century and offers a perspective that promises to be as enduring as it is controversial. It begins and ends in Mexico and, throughout, is internationalist in orientation. It challenges the political narrative of “sectionalism,” emphasizing the national footing of slavery and the struggle between the northeast and Mississippi Valley for continental supremacy. It places the Civil War in the context of many domestic rebellions against state authority, including those of Native Americans. It fully incorporates the trans-Mississippi west, suggesting the importance of the Pacific to the imperial vision of political leaders and of the west as a proving ground for later imperial projects overseas. It reconfigures the history of capitalism, insisting on the centrality of state formation and slave emancipation to its consolidation. It identifies a sweeping era of “reconstructions” in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that simultaneously laid the foundations for corporate liberalism and social democracy.
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A Nation Without Borders: The United States and Its World in an Age of Civil Wars, 1830-1910
In this monumental story of American imperial conquest and capitalist development, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Steven Hahn dismantles the conventional histories of the nineteenth century and offers a perspective that promises to be as enduring as it is controversial. It begins and ends in Mexico and, throughout, is internationalist in orientation. It challenges the political narrative of “sectionalism,” emphasizing the national footing of slavery and the struggle between the northeast and Mississippi Valley for continental supremacy. It places the Civil War in the context of many domestic rebellions against state authority, including those of Native Americans. It fully incorporates the trans-Mississippi west, suggesting the importance of the Pacific to the imperial vision of political leaders and of the west as a proving ground for later imperial projects overseas. It reconfigures the history of capitalism, insisting on the centrality of state formation and slave emancipation to its consolidation. It identifies a sweeping era of “reconstructions” in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that simultaneously laid the foundations for corporate liberalism and social democracy.
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A Nation Without Borders: The United States and Its World in an Age of Civil Wars, 1830-1910

A Nation Without Borders: The United States and Its World in an Age of Civil Wars, 1830-1910
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Product Details
BN ID: | 2940171332433 |
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Publisher: | HighBridge Company |
Publication date: | 11/01/2016 |
Edition description: | Unabridged |
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