American Mind Research Articles

Reescrituras de los procesos por brujería de Salem en la literatura popular actual

Los procesos por brujería que tuvieron lugar en Salem (Massachusetts) en el año 1692 han sido objeto de gran interés por parte de los historiadores y de los autores de ficción, aunque no suceda lo mismo en la literatura crítica sobre su presencia en el ámbito literario. Muchas novelas históricas han utilizado este acontecimiento histórico como parte de sus argumentos. Pero no solamente la ficción histórica más canónica se ha ocupado de esta famosa caza de brujas; géneros populares como la novela romántica, la fantasía, la ciencia ficción y la novela de detectives han creado versiones literarias de la caza de brujas de Salem debido en gran parte a la falta de acuerdo sobre lo que realmente sucedió en Salem. El objetivo del presente artículo es mostrar cómo este acontecimiento histórico se ha introducido en la literatura popular actual con el fin de mostrar el interés que aún hoy en día sigue despertando y reivindicar la elaboración de más estudios centrados en la construcción literaria de uno de los acontecimientos históricos que más huella ha dejado en la mentalidad norteamericana.

Response to Elvin T. Lim’s review of The Founders and the Idea of a National University: Constituting the American Mind

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THE PATTERN OF AMERICAN RHETORIC ON THE SPIRIT OF MISSION: AN ANALYSIS ON THE TEXT OF BUSHS INAUGURAL ADDRESS

As a textual study, this research paper aims at elaborating the rhetorical patterns in the American mind by examining the inaugural addresses George W Bush particularly on the spirit of mission. The study on this topic becomes urgent to be discussed in relation to the importance of understanding a rhetoric pattern in terms of developing teaching material for cross cultural awareness and language skills. The choosing of the presidents inaugural address as the mental evidences is not apart from the synthesis that they represents a formal speech which covers the socio-cultural aspects and they will bring a certain pattern of rhetoric in their attempt to communicate with public. For the purpose of achieving the aim of this research, the library research is carried out by applying Goffman?s Frame Analysis. The results show that the president constructs a certain pattern of rhetoric by using the Puritan expressions particularly for engaging American people with the spirit of mission. The rhetoric patterns are found to convey the national and world mission. The expressions used in the inaugural addresses seem to meet with peoples expectations as a new presidency is begun

George Thomas. The Founders and the Idea of a National University: Constituting the American Mind. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Pp. x+241. $95.00.

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewGeorge Thomas. The Founders and the Idea of a National University: Constituting the American Mind. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Pp. x+241. $95.00.Murray DryMurray DryMiddlebury College Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by American Political Thought Volume 5, Number 3Summer 2016 Published in association with the American Political Thought organized section of the American Political Science Association and the Jack Miller Center Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/687405 Views: 65Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Nihilism, democracy and liberalism: Maudemarie Clark’s ‘Nietzsche on Ethics and Politics’

Maudemarie Clark is a leading interpreter of Nietzsche’s theory of truth, and as such we are fortunate to have her papers on his ethics, politics and metaphysics collected in one volume. Opening her section on politics – the subject of this review – with a critique of Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, she condemns Bloom’s Straussian demand that philosophers lie about the fact that no truth exists to protect their way of life as a recurrence of the nihilist ascetic ideal Nietzsche rejected at the end of the Genealogy. In doing so, she definitively frees Nietzsche from Strauss’ grip, and opens up the possibility of questioning anew Nietzsche’s relationship to feminism, queer theory, democracy and community. Her most striking claim is that Nietzsche’s aristocratic ethics can be reconciled with modern democratic politics. Whether that is the case or not is up for debate, but what clearly isn’t, as this collection reminds us, is that we cannot do our thinking about politics without him.

Forging African American Minds: Black Pragmatism, “intelligent labor,” and a new look at industrial education, 1879–1900

ABSTRACTThis article examines black thought and black ideas about racial consciousness after Reconstruction in order to rethink the way African American leaders conceived the relationship between work and intellectual achievement in the late nineteenth century. Conventional scholarly accounts of the politics of black knowledge and education – including the still very prevalent paradigm of industrial and classical education – have missed a fascinating transformation of thought among many African American leaders after 1879 who sought to reinvent black identity. At the root of this transformation were shifting ideas about the black worker and a new industrial economy. The leaders who represented the transformation embraced progressive, pragmatist, and very modern approaches to intellectual cultivation – approaches that were more in line with theories of manual training and object-learning than with classical education. In other words, the intellectual rationales for industrial education among black educators were as important as the economic and practical ones. Those rationales were articulated not just by more conservative black voices intent on fitting into a new industrial order, but also by black progressives and radicals who hoped to cultivate black “self-consciousness,” vigorous engagement with the “real world,” and intellectual independence from white norms.

The Jefferson Rule: How the Founding Fathers Became Infallible and Our Politics Inflexible by David Sehat

Reviewed by: The Jefferson Rule: How the Founding Fathers Became Infallible and Our Politics Inflexible by David Sehat Jeffrey L. Littlejohn The Jefferson Rule: How the Founding Fathers Became Infallible and Our Politics Inflexible. By David Sehat. (New York and other cities: Simon and Schuster, 2015. Pp. [x], 309. $27.00, ISBN 978-1-4767-7977-5.) Historian David Sehat has a penchant for upsetting conventional wisdom. In his first book, The Myth of American Religious Freedom (New York, 2011), he revealed how Protestant Christians attempted to force their own beliefs on Roman Catholics, Mormons, and other groups in defiance of First Amendment protections of religious liberty. Now, in his most recent work, The Jefferson Rule: How the Founding Fathers Became Infallible and Our Politics Inflexible, Sehat has turned to another American myth: the belief that the Founding Fathers created a unified political philosophy that might be readily applied to current social controversies. Sehat rejects this idea and shows how “Founders talk” has degraded political debate by converting policy disputes into ideological contests over first principles (p. 2). Starting with the Founders themselves, Sehat points out that George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and the American Revolution’s other key leaders were distinct individuals who often disagreed on matters of “policy, governance, and constitutional theory” (p. 15). Skipping over more nuanced arguments against constitutional originalism offered by scholars like Jack N. Rakove, Sehat highlights the political disputes that occurred in the early republic. Here, his analysis might be compared with Joseph J. Ellis’s book Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation (New York, 2000). Where Ellis finds two competing political traditions emerging from the individualistic “Spirit of ’76” and the collectivistic Constitutional Convention of 1787, Sehat sees another story altogether. Placing Jefferson at the center of his narrative, Sehat portrays the Sage of Monticello as a Janus-faced political operator who labeled his Federalist opponents as heretics, only to adopt many of their ideas when he served as president. To justify his actions, Jefferson adopted the “mantle of restoration” and turned “the founding era into one of political purity that he himself had channeled.” Thereafter, as Sehat writes, “American politics would be fought by seeking a connection to Jefferson and, through him, to the Founders” (p. 37). Turning to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Sehat provides a series of engrossing chapters that are reminiscent of Merrill D. Peterson’s work in The Jefferson Image in the American Mind (New York, 1960). Sehat shows, for example, how Andrew Jackson, John C. Calhoun, Henry Clay, and Daniel Webster invoked the Founders in a series of internecine conflicts that ultimately failed to address the crucial issue of slavery. This failure led, in turn, to a war of words between Abraham Lincoln, Stephen A. Douglas, and [End Page 405] Jefferson Davis, which Sehat examines to illustrate both the futility of “Founders talk” and the “new birth of freedom” brought about by the Union’s victory in the Civil War. Following that climactic struggle, the American people turned away from the Founders, only to see them reappear when President Franklin D. Roosevelt confronted the American Liberty League and the U.S. Supreme Court in a constitutional crisis during the Great Depression. In an analysis inspired by Bruce A. Ackerman’s We the People series (3 vols.; Cambridge, Mass., 1991–2014), Sehat writes that both sides in the battle over the New Deal invoked the Founders, but that Roosevelt eventually won a costly “constitutional revolution” (p. 153). Roosevelt’s victory proved to be short-lived, however, because conservative activists soon adopted the American Liberty League’s strict construction of the Constitution in order to roll back the experimentation of the New Deal. Drawing from Sean Wilentz’s book The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974–2008 (New York, 2008), Sehat shows how Ronald Reagan called for a return to limited government, states’ rights, tax cuts, balanced budgets, and the Christian values of the Founders. Yet Reagan’s efforts to return America to an earlier era proved economically disastrous and culturally shortsighted. In recent times, the Tea Party and other groups have continued to invoke the Founders in debates over gun control, income inequality, religious liberty, and a...

Allan Bloom on the Value of the Ancients, or The Closing of the American Classics Department

Allan Bloom on the Value of the Ancients, or The Closing of the American Classics Department ERIC ADLER “The multiversity does not appeal to the students’ longings for an understanding of the most serious problems, in particular, their doubts about the route to follow in order to live a good life and their questions about the nature of justice.” —Allan Bloom, “The Crisis of Liberal Education” (1967) In 1987, Simon and Schuster published The Closing of the American Mind by the political philosopher Allan Bloom (1930–1992).1 The book created a firestorm. In it, Bloom presented a mordant critique of American higher education and argued in favor of a return to the Great Books tradition. A lengthy, abstruse tract, The Closing of the American Mind became a surprise smash in the publishing world, earning its author fame and fortune, praise and infamy . It was a mainstay on The New York Times nonfiction bestseller list in 1987 and 1988, and amounted to a seminal work in the academic culture wars. The book’s financial success launched a cottage industry of likeminded works, which ultimately ensured that debates concerning undergraduate education in the US remained a prominent feature of the national dialogue well into the 1990s. Unfortunately for those concerned about the past, present, and future of the humanities , the disputes surrounding The Closing of the American Mind typically generated more heat than light. It is thus worth revisiting Bloom’s cri de coeur, if only because the book helps explain classical studies’ near irrelevance in contemporary American colleges and universities. arion 24.1 spring/summer 2016 According to some classical scholars, Bloom’s jeremiad privileged the study of Greco-Roman antiquity. For instance, in a contribution to the 1989 edited volume Classics: A Discipline and Profession in Crisis?, Amy Richlin asserted that “Allan Bloom, in The Closing of the American Mind, suggests both that the classics are central to higher education and that only the best students are suited to work with the classics.”2 Agreeing with this assessment, Karl Galinsky suggested that The Closing of the American Mind, like other traditionalistic contributions to the academic culture wars, created a dilemma for many classicists, who had pragmatic reasons to support Bloom’s favoring of the Great Books, but who took issue with his political inclinations. In a 1991 article, Galinsky wrote: Do we want to pull the rug from under ourselves by agreeing that the importance of Greco-Roman culture should be diminished? Are we then prepared to relinquish some of our faculty positions to AfricanAmerican studies and the like? The perceived dilemma, inflicted by the usual limiting dichotomies, seems to be that as a proponent of western civilization, one is nolens volens allied with [William] Bennett and [Allan] Bloom, an impression any politically correct humanities professor wants to avoid, of course.3 But in truth this dilemma for classical scholars was greatly exaggerated. Although he grounded his conception of a proper undergraduate education in the examination of canonical Western authors, Bloom did not privilege the study of Greco-Roman antiquity as classical scholars typically approach it. In fact, Bloom proved acutely critical of the discipline of classics and professionalized, philological scholarship . This demonstrates that academic traditionalists such as Bloom were not nearly as supportive of classical studies as some believed. For this reason, the classics played a more negligible role in the academic culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s than many have supposed. And this role has, if anything , become even more negligible in recent years, in an intellectual environment uncongenial to the humanities. Although Bloom’s implicit recommendations for classical scholars canallan bloom on the value of the ancients 152 not be deemed a panacea, failure to take heed of his criticisms will ensure the continued marginality of the discipline. Before we turn to his views on classical studies, however, we need to get a sense of Bloom’s thesis in The Closing of the American Mind. Bloom called his polemic “a meditation on the state of our souls, particularly those of the young, and their education” (19). The book diagnoses the supposed soullessness of undergraduates at the most elite American universities and details the philosophical roots...

Diasporic Writer’s Self-Orientalisation or Self-Reflexivity: American Orientalist Discourse and the Rejection of Eileen Chang’s <i>The Rouge of the North</i>

By adopting the rules of exclusion in the Foucauldian idea of discourse, this paper explores why The Rouge of the North by Eileen Chang, a diasporic writer, was rejected for publication in the United States. During the early years of the Cold War, a “positive” stereotypical image of Chinese Americans as assimilable was constructed in the American Orientalist discourse, to win over Asian and American minds. Because the more negative image of the characters in the novel did not comply with this image, it was excluded from circulation. This invalidates some current accusations of Chang as self-orientalising. This paper contends that labelling diasporic writers like Chang as self-orientalisng dismisses the ambivalence of the construction of the stereotypes of Orientals in Orientalist discourse. Besides, the label ignores Chang's conscious refusal to contribute to the epistemic production desired by American hegemonic power to facilitate its function. Her refusal demonstrates her self-reflexivity as an intellectual, rather than self-orientalisation.

Climate Change in the American Mind: Americans' Climate Change Beliefs, Attitudes, Policy Preferences, and Actions

Climate Change in the American Mind: Americans' Climate Change Beliefs, Attitudes, Policy Preferences, and Actions

The Continuously Managed Wild: Tule Elk at Point Reyes National Seashore

In Wilderness and the American Mind, Roderick Nash explores the etymology of the word “wild,” which originally meant self-willed or uncontrollable. Wild, he writes, conveys the “idea of being lost,...

Shakespeare's Fault or Yours? Melzer's Maxim: A Guide to Tentative Omniscience for the Congenitally Hyperfallible

Arthur Melzer's tremendous accomplishment is even greater than he may realize. The tradition of esoteric writing in political philosophy exists, as he convincingly demonstrates, and the consequences of this discovery are as significant as he claims. But the method of esoteric reading that he recommends applies more broadly than he seems to suggest. Applied liberally, moreover, as a corrective to nearly everything that's gone wrong with education in the humanities and social sciences over the last forty years, his humble heuristic—Melzer's Maxim, I call it—has the potential to reorient and renew the whole concept of Liberal Education for an age whose pedagogy is foundering. A boon to the sub-discipline of Political Theory in particular, Philosophy Between the Lines has even more to offer to classroom instruction in general. Read between the lines, Melzer's specialized work of scholarship promises nothing less than the opening of the American mind. It is the antidote to the poison of politically correct multiculturalism.

Hawthorne's Kantian Turn in “My Visit to Niagara” and Captain Hall'sTravels in North America

During the summer of 1832, while preparing for a sightseeing tour through New England and northern New York, Nathaniel Hawthorne revealed his motivation in a letter to Franklin Pierce: "I am very desirous of making this journey on account of a book by which I intend to acquire an (undoubtedly) immense literary reputation" (15:224). Hawthorne's ironically inflated expression of ambition underscores his limited success to that point, particularly when compared to the early political victories of Pierce, his college friend. The young Hawthorne's first short story collection, Twice-Told Tales, would not appear for another five years, and his first novel, Fanshawe (1828), had been issued anonymously and would remain unacknowledged. Two other early projects, "Seven Tales of My Native Land" and "Provincial Tales," yielded only excerpts placed in periodicals. (1) But those excerpts, along with other early pieces, display features Hawthorne's readers would find appealing throughout his career, such as gothic stylistic qualities and the use of historical topics. Thus, for example, "The Wives of the Dead," "Roger Malvin's Burial," and "My Kinsman, Major Molineux," which are among the dozen or so short stories predating his 1832 travels, offer foreboding treatments of colonial-era events, subject matter an obscure fiction writer might have hoped would generate a broader readership and the attention of literary nationalists. If, as Nina Baym has maintained, early nineteenth-century literary nationalists understood their mission to be the expression of "the special virtues of the American mind in literary form" (18), then Hawthorne's attempt in 1832 to expand his range with domestic travel narratives makes sense in light of his ambition. Evidence of Hawthorne's journey is scant: aside from the anticipatory letter to Pierce, there is one to his mother from Vermont as well as a certificate attesting to his having "passed behind the Great Falling Sheet of Water to Termination Rock" at Niagara Falls on September 28, 1832 (Mellow 51). Although the fear of cholera likely delayed his departure and altered his itinerary--1832 was an epidemic year--Hawthorne traveled more or less as planned. He wrote sketches based on these travels, and he composed a manuscript that interspersed the sketches with tales. This manuscript, which he called "The Story Teller," was never published intact and has not survived. Readers therefore can only speculate regarding the sequence of the works comprising the intended volume as well as its precise contents. (2) Nevertheless, we know that the travel sketches culminate with "My Visit to Niagara," which appeared in the February 1835 issue of New-England Magazine and was never republished while Hawthorne was alive. The sketch warrants scholarly attention for two interrelated reasons. The first is its representation of the sublime: it marks a departure from earlier responses to nature in "The Story Teller," and, in terms of Hawthorne's development, it dramatizes the encounter with the sublime as a basis for pervasive uncertainty. Until this time, intellectual or perceptual uncertainty accompanied by emotional anxiety had appeared only as a stylistic device in some of his more gothic tales. Uncertainty would evolve, however, into a key component of Hawthorne's aesthetics, psychology, and ethics. The second noteworthy feature is the textual source of Hawthorne's approach to the sublime in "My Visit to Niagara," for the sketch derives language, imagery, dramatic structure, and ideas from Basil Hall's Travels in North America, a three-volume narrative by the former British sea captain first published in 1829. Hawthorne could have forgotten to include "My Visit to Niagara" in collections of tales and sketches published during his lifetime, but his indebtedness to Hall's Travels may well have mattered to him. Given Hawthorne's willingness to suppress knowledge of his authorship of Fanshawe, one cannot assume he simply did not recall that the sketch existed. …

Curating a Nation’s Past: The Role of the Public Intellectual in Australia’s History Wars

Curating a Nation’s Past: The Role of the Public Intellectual in Australia’s History Wars

It's Not about Strauss

Melzer's irrefutable point is that what has been labeled “esotericism” in a condemnatory way is in fact the multilayered reality of written expression evident in all cultures across all history. There is virtually no text that does not call for some degree of interpretation, and any act of interpretation will turn up additional meanings “between the lines.” Philosophy Between the Lines is in a class by itself, but it has one very familiar echo: Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind (1987). Against all expectations, the common thread between the two books is more Alexis de Tocqueville than Leo Strauss. The argument taken up in each case pertains to the homogenized opinions and “presentism” that marks American democracy. Bloom's critics displayed no interest in this Tocquevillian strain; for them, the hot button was Strauss. The culture wars of the late 1980s and early 1990s displayed a fascinating confluence of elitism and populism: Bloom was attacked as an elitist absolutist at the same time that he was put down as a vulgar populist. That same confluence of elitism and populism reappears in Philosophy Between the Lines. But Melzer now owns the debate, in the full understanding that if one is going to address esotericism, that binary is going to arise. That has been the case since Socrates took on anyone in the marketplace who agreed to speak with him; his invitation was open to all, but his elenchus spared no one.

YouTube, Social Norms and Perceived Salience of Climate Change in the American Mind

This online experiment explored how contextual information embedded in new media channels such as YouTube may serve as normative social cues to users. Specifically, we examined whether the number of views listed under a YouTube video about climate change would elicit inferences regarding how “others” feel about the climate issue and, consequently, might influence perceptions of issue salience. Participants in this experiment were exposed to a YouTube video about climate change using two experimental conditions, one providing a small number of views under the video and the second listing a large number of views. Results suggest that the “number of views” cue did, indeed, influence participant perceptions of the importance assigned by other Americans to the issue of climate change. Further, compared to low self-monitoring participants, high self-monitoring participants registered an increase in their own judgment of issue importance.

Climate Change in the American Mind: Americans' Global Warming Beliefs and Attitudes in April 2013

This report is based on findings from a nationally representative survey – Climate Change in the American Mind – conducted by the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication. Interview dates: April 8-15. Interviews: 1,045 Adults (18+). Total average margin of error: +/- 3 percentage points at the 95% confidence level. Key findings include:• Nearly two in three Americans (63%) believe global warming is happening. Relatively few – only 16 percent – believe it is not. However, since Fall 2012, the percentage of Americans who believe global warming is real has dropped 7 points to 63%, likely influenced by the relatively cold winter of 2012-13 (compared to the prior year) and an unusually cold March just before the survey was conducted. !In March of 2012, after an unusually warm winter, 66 percent of Americans believed global warming was happening; thus, seasonal effects may account for at least some of the change we observe.• Those who believe global warming is happening are more certain of their convictions than those who do not. Of the 63% of Americans who believe global warming is happening, most say they are “very” (33%) or “extremely sure” (27%). By contrast, of the unconvinced, fewer are very (28%) or extremely sure of their view (18%).• About half of Americans (49%) believe global warming – if it is happening – is caused mostly by human activities, a decrease of 5 points since Fall 2012, but similar to levels stretching back several years.• More Americans believe that “most scientists think global warming is happening” than believe there is widespread disagreement among scientists (42% versus 33%, respectively). One in five Americans (20%) continue to feel they “don’t know enough to say” and fewer than one in 20 (4%) believe that “most scientists think global warming is not happening.”• About half of Americans (51%) say they are “somewhat” or “very worried” about global warming, a 7 percentage-point decline in worry since Fall 2012.• At least four out of ten Americans say global warming will harm people in their community (45%), their family (44%), or themselves (42%). Though Americans today, compared to Fall 2012, are slightly less likely to perceive these threats of harm, they are much more likely to do so today than they were a year ago.• Global warming is also perceived as a threat to people in developing countries (55%, down 9 points since September 2012, but similar to March 2012), in other modern industrialized countries (53%, down 4 points since September, but up 4 points since March 2012), and in the United States (52%, down 5 points since September, but up 6 points since March 2012).• Today, four in ten Americans say people around the world are being harmed right now by climate change (38%), while 34 percent say global warming is currently harming people in the United States.

Extreme Weather and Climate Change in the American Mind, April 2013

This report is based on findings from a nationally representative survey – Climate Change in the American Mind – conducted by the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication. Interview dates: April 8 - 15, 2013. Interviews: 1,045 Adults (18+) Total average margin of error: +/- 3 percentage points at the 95% confidence level; regional margins of error are +/- 7 percentage points for the Northeast and West; +/- 6 percentage points for the Midwest; and +/- 5 percentage points for the South.Key findings include:• About six in ten Americans (58%) say “global warming is affecting weather in the United States.”• Many Americans believe global warming made recent extreme weather and climatic events “more severe,” specifically: 2012 as the warmest year on record in the United States (50%); the ongoing drought in the Midwest and the Great Plains (49%); Superstorm Sandy (46%); and Superstorm Nemo (42%).• About two out of three Americans say weather in the U.S. has been worse over the past several years, up 12 percentage points since Spring 2012. By contrast, fewer Americans say weather has been getting better over the past several years – only one in ten (11%), down 16 points compared to a year ago.• Many Americans (51%) also say weather in their local area has been worse over the past several years.• Overall, 85 percent of Americans report that they experienced one or more types of extremeweather in the past year, most often citing extreme high winds (60%) and extreme heat (51%).• Of those Americans who experienced extreme weather events in the past year, many (37%) say they were significantly harmed. Moreover, the number who have been harmed appears to be growing (up 5 percentage points since Fall 2012 and 4 points since Spring 2012). For example, about one in five Americans today say they suffered a moderate or great deal of harm from extreme high winds (18%, up 8 points since Fall 2012) or extreme cold weather (10%, up 5 points). More also say they were harmed by a hurricane (6%, up 3 points).• Most Americans (80%) have close friends or family members (not living with them) who experienced extreme weather events in the past year, including extreme high winds (47%), an extreme heat wave (46%), an extreme snowstorm (39%), extreme cold temperatures (39%), an extreme rainstorm (37%), or a drought (35%).• Over half of Americans (54%) believe it is “very” or “somewhat likely” that extreme weather will cause a natural disaster in their community in the coming year.• Americans who experienced an extreme weather event are most likely to have communicated about it person-to-person – either in person (89%) or on the phone (84%) – although some used social media, such as writing about the experience on Facebook (23%) or sharing a photo of the event or its aftermath using Facebook, Tumblr, or Instagram (19%).

The Mormon Image in the American Mind: Fifty Years of Public Perception

The Mormon Image in the American Mind: Fifty Years of Public Perception

American Exceptionalism in the American Mind: Presidential Discourse, National Identity, and U.S. Public Opinion

The idea of American exceptionalism has lived a vibrant life in American political discourse, yet little research has focused on the effects that these messages have on U.S. public opinion. To bridge this gap, the present study examines the psychological dynamics that shape how Americans respond to messages that champion the idea of American exceptionalism. Specifically, I draw on scholarship on American exceptionalism in political discourse and on social identity to conduct a message experiment on a nationally sampled population of U.S. adults. The experiment examined the differential impacts of American exceptionalism messages on (a) people's own sense of American exceptionalism, (b) their sense that other countries are inferior by comparison, (c) their attitudes about whether the United States should be exempt from international laws and institutions, and (d) their attitudes about whether the United States should seek to spread its influence and values in the world.