Notes 1. John Winthrop made his famous sermon, “A Model of Christian Charity,” while on a ship to America in which he said the famous line, “wee must consider that wee shall be as a Citty upon a Hill . . .” 2. This trend started much earlier. Colony officials …
American Exceptionalism and the Myth of the Frontiers – 13: Notes and Bibliography Read More »
The Table summarizes how the Myth evolved in each stage of American history. It shows how the “us” was defined and evolved over time— from Puritans to Englishmen to Christians to White, and so forth. The Frontier was both a geographical location in any given period and also a set …
American Exceptionalism and the Myth of the Frontiers – 12: Evolution of Myth Read More »
In each instance ( encounters with the Internal Frontier as well as External Frontier) there was extensive literature developed and disseminated about the atrocities committed by the “savage” cultures. More generally, the literature showed them to have frontier-like attributes of chaos, lack of morality, lack of aesthetics, and certainly the …
The three ideas—aesthetics, morality and truth—have been inter-linked in Western thought. One finds numerous instances where a judgment about one is superimposed to implicate another aspect of that culture. That this was an “enlightened” view held by some of the greatest liberal thinkers of the West is illustrated by Kant’s …
American Exceptionalism and the Myth of the Frontiers – 10: Kantian Euro-centrism Read More »
American attitudes toward the Native Americans were complex. Internal conflicts among influential Americans remained and pro-native voices definitely existed throughout this long saga. BUT NATIVE AMERICANS WERE NEVER IN CONTROL OVER THE DISCOURSE CONCERNING THEM, AND BOTH SIDES TO THESE DEBATES WERE WHITES. Whites for one plan would argue against …
American Exceptionalism and the Myth of the Frontiers – 9 :The Failure of Discourse Read More »
Even as the Native Americans were being killed, relocated, and systematically subjected to conditions of genocide, there was considerable interest in governmental and private circles for documenting and preserving important aspects of the culture in museums and books. This was sometimes fired by the quest for knowledge or reputation via authorship. …
Once the “merciless savage” had been uprooted to a contained area away from his land, laws and customs, he could then be “managed” and raised as a child. His savage religion could be replaced with superior Christianity. This was the culmination of an Enlightenment idea that saw non-Whites as racial …
The greatest episodes of ethnic cleansing and genocide of Native Americans occurred in the period following independence that was dominated by Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson. Before Andrew Jackson’s presidency (and the massive “removal,” i.e., ethnic cleansing…
In early America, Christianity played a key role in forming the identity of the settlers and in justifying the brutalities against Native Americans once they refused to convert. But upon Independence, the generation known as the Founding Fathers of America was…
Encounter with Native Americans Christianity, Enlightenment ideas, and greed often colluded to produce a result that annihilated the natives and built up America into a super nation. These three forces are summarized below: Biblical Myths ● Lieven explains that the biblical myths…
Mutations of the Myth The Myth mutated from its Christian base to include an Enlightenment base over time. Between 1795 and 1830 the agrarian expansion was very successfully accomplished, and the Christian-eschatological substructure of the original Frontier Myth…
Author: Rajiv Malhotra. Americans not only have a deep and positive sense of history but are particularly invested in their own special place in the world. There is no need for the national myth to be explicitly stated as such and, in fact, leaving it implicit or denying its very …
American Exceptionalism and the Myth of the Frontiers – 2: The City upon a Hill Read More »
As part of the IK Masters Series, we re-publish a 2009 paper (book chapter) by Rajiv Malhotra on American Exceptionalism, published in the book,The Challenge of Eurocentrism: Global Perspectives, Policy, and Prospects. Given current events transpiring in 2020, this paper is all…
