Gerstle s Historiographical Of Mainstream Americanism

Grant Klemann Dr. LaFevor HIST 1312-010 21 April 2016 Gerstle’s Historiographical of Mainstream Americanism Gary Gerstle attempts to reinterpret twentieth-century American history in light of the power of race (and to a much lesser extent, or even not at all, class and gender). The American Crucible conceptualizes American liberals as well as whiteness scholars’ synthetic historiographical interpretations on mainstream Americanism like Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt- Theodore Roosevelt especially, due the author’s attention to the meaning of the liberal state and liberalism. However, above all that, Gerstle argues that inherent tensions between two powerful types of nationalism- racial and civic- have decisively shaped American history, policy-making and political debates in the twentieth century (Gerstle 5). Gunnar Myrdal in the 1940’s takes American civil rights, as well as their ideological principles, and conjoins them into a political belief he called the â€Å"American Creed†, but Gerstle uses an all-purpose term--â€Å"civil nationalism† (Gerstle 4). These same ideas are even engraved on America’s founding documents; some historians argue that this is the reason why American people and their polity are so distinct. Nevertheless, civic nationalism has contradicted or even sometimes reinforced another ideological legacy, â€Å"†¦a racial nationalism that conceives of America in ethno-racial terms, as a people held together by common blood and skin color and by inherited