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Full Description
Rome and America provides a timely exploration of the Roman and American founding myths in the cultural imagination. Defying the usual ideological categories, Dean Hammer argues for the exceptional nature of the myths as a journey of Strangers, but also traces the tensions created by the myths in attempts to answer the question of who We are. The wide-ranging chapters reassess both Roman antecedents and American expressions of the myth in some unexpected places: early American travelogues, westerns, bare-knuckle boxing, early American theater, government documents detailing Native American policy, and the writings of Noah Webster, W. E. B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, and Charles Eastman. This innovative volume culminates in an interpretation of the current crisis of democracy as a reversion of the community back to Strangers, with suggestions of how the myth can recast a much-needed discussion of identity and belonging.
Contents
Introduction; 1. Memory, identity, and violence: founding in the Aeneid and The Outlaw Josey Wales; 2. Imagining purity: the corrosive Stranger and the construction of a genealogy; 3. The wild Stranger and the conquest of space; 4. Playing culture: combat spectacles and the acting body; 5. The experience of politics and the crises of two republics.
