America Imagined

Explaining the United States in Nineteenth-Century Europe and Latin America

Axel Körner, Adam I. P. Smith, N. Miller

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781137018977
• eBook ISBN: 9781137018984
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Why has "America" - that is, the United States of America - become so much more than simply a place in the imagination of so many people around the world? In both Europe and Latin America, the United States has often been a site of multiple possible futures, a screen onto which could be projected utopian dreams and dystopian nightmares. Whether castigated as a threat to civilized order or championed as a promise of earthly paradise, America has invariably been treated as a cipher for modernity. It has functioned as an inescapable reference point for both European and Latin American societies, not only as a model of social and political organization - one to reject as much one to emulate - but also as the prime example of a society emerging from a dramatic diversity of cultural and social backgrounds.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Land of Opportunity?
• 2 A Model Republic
• 3 Liberty, Lipstick, and Lobsters
• 4 Barbarous America
• 5 A World Apart, a Race Apart?
• 6 Slavery and Abolition
• Conclusion
• Select Bibliography
• Index