Rome and America : communities of strangers, spectacles of belonging / Dean Hammer, Franklin and Marshall College.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Hammer, Dean, 1959- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

National characteristics, American.

National characteristics, Roman.

United States--Civilization--Roman influences.

United States.

United States--History.

Rome--History.

Rome.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xi, 252 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Cambridge ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 2023.

Summary:

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:

Dedication

Foreword

List of illustrations

Introduction

Chapter 1. Memory, identity, and violence: founding in the Aeneid and the Outlaw Josey Wales

Chapter 2. Imagining purity: the corrosive stranger and the construction of a genealogy

Chapter 3. The wild stranger and the conquest of space

Chapter 4. Playing culture: combat spectacles and the acting body

Chapter 5. The experience of politics and the crises of two republics

Select bibliography

Index.

Notes:

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 03 Jan 2023).

ISBN:

1-009-24959-2

1-009-24957-6

1-009-24962-2