The Genesis of America
US Foreign Policy and the Formation of National Identity, 1793–1815
Cambridge Studies in US Foreign Relations Series

The Genesis of America investigates the ways in which US foreign policy contributed to the formation of an American national consciousness. Interpreting American nationalism as a process of external demarcation, Jasper M. Trautsch argues that, for a sense of national self to emerge, the US needed to be disentangled from its most important European reference points: Great Britain and France. As he shows, foreign-policy makers could therefore promote American nationalism by provoking foreign crises and wars with these countries, hereby creating external threats that would bind the fragile union together. By reconstructing how foreign policy was thus used as a nation-building instrument, Trautsch provides an answer to the puzzling question of how Americans - lacking a shared history and culture of their own and justifying their claim for independent nationhood by appeals to universal rights - could develop a sense of particularity after the conclusion of the Revolutionary War.

Introduction; 1. Political ideologies and American identity in the era of the French Revolution; 2. Foreign policies of unneutrality and the Jay Treaty; 3. Federalists and the origins of the Quasi-War; 4. Disentangling America from France; 5. Republicans and the origins of the War of 1812; 6. Disentangling America from Great Britain; Conclusion.

Jasper M. Trautsch is a lecturer in American history at the Universität Regensburg, Germany. In 2013, his dissertation was awarded the Rolf Kentner Dissertation Prize for an outstanding work in the field of American studies. He is the editor of Civic Nationalisms in Global Perspective (forthcoming), and the author of numerous articles on US foreign policy and American nationalism in Early American Studies, the Journal of Military History, National Identities, Global Affairs, and Critical Muslim.