Chosen Nation A History of the American People Since 1776 - Wiley Blackwell Concise History of the Modern World

This bold new history of the United States takes choice and change as the defining themes in American history. It's not simply that Americans were, as the early Puritan settlers believed, a 'chosen people'. They were, more importantly, a people by choice, and a people who had the right and obligation to make further choices as need and opportunity arose. The notion of America as a self-consciously 'chosen nation' brings some measure of order to two and a quarter crowded and complicated centuries of history, but it is not applied indiscriminately, as though a metaphor is adequate to shape the unshapable. This history also recognises that choice and change were not, at all times and for all America's people, equally available. The ancestors of African-Americans did not choose to leave their own continent for the New World, and Native Americans did not choose to be removed from their ancestral lands to make way for white newcomers. Even among the majority white population, the consensus that existed as to the value of being a chosen and choosing people did not imply any consensus as to what collective choices the nation should be making. Six hundred thousand Americans died as a result of the disagreement over what choice the nation should make about the future relations of free and slave states.