American history
This isn't intended to be a detailed factual retelling of America's short history, a subject to which I pretend no specialised knowledge. Rather, I intend to provide a broad outline of each period in American history, starting with the 'heroic' phase of the Revolution and culminating in the United States' contemporary position as the world's only superpower and first-order world-historical actor. I end with a brief look at the future.
Such a task could be accomplished an almost infinite number of ways. This is mine. I'd be happy to hear from you about yours and possibly incorporate your comments to make my arguments stronger.
The Revolution
When European historians and commentators discuss the genesis of the idea that government is accountable to the people and that each person has unalienable rights which exist prior to any government sanction, they often point to the example of the French Revolution as the first practical expression of these ideas. Of course, they are correct only in the context of Europe. Like the French Revolution, the American Revolution was the outcome of the impact of these revolutionary ideas on an increasingly untenable political situation. Revolutions have a tendency to happen when, in the words of Macauley, 'nations move onwards, while constitutions stand still'.
The American nation had moved on in two distinct ways with which the colonial government did not keep up - indeed, could not keep up. Firstly, new political ideas were impacting the colonies, emanating from the European Enlightenment. They stressed the importance of natural law and natural rights as opposed to deference to established authority and property. Situated far away from King George III, ties to the motherland came to be seen as more of a burden than a boon. A distinctively American colonial nationalism sprung up as the colonists began to imagine the existence of an 'American' political community.
Benedict Anderson has argued strongly that the emergence of newspapers added greatly to the formation of this 'imagined community'. Through reading stories about one another in the press, the people of each of the thirteen colonies begin to conceive of themselves as linked by a common bond of circumstance. This was reinforced by the fact colonial officials might move to different jobs in any of the thirteen colonies, but never to London. Hence their journeys up the rungs of the civil service ended in the colonial environment, underlining the fact they were citizens of the colonies rather than citizens of Britain as their ancestors had been.
These feelings were reinforced by the feeling of oppression that began to spread among the colonies after the accession of George III and his program to make the American colonies more profitable for Britain. The King felt that he and his Parliament had the right to impose whatever taxes he pleased on the colonies, despite the fact the citizens of these colonies were not represented in the Parliament. Yet was not this precisely the doctrine which had been repudiated in Britain itself in the Glorious Revolution of 1688? The colonists were not impressed by the double standards, and began to co-ordinate together in opposition to the King.
A crucial moment was the Stamp Act of 1765, which attempted to impose a stamp tax on all printed material, such as official documents, legal documents, newspapers, pamphlets and playing cards. This was part of an effort by the British government to make the colonists share some of the burden for their own protection, as at the time there were 6,000 British troops stationed in North America to guard the frontier to the West. However, to the colonists it appeared to be an attempt to suppress their freedom of speech and to deprive them of the myriad benefits of printed material to civilised man.
British troops began to arrive in the colonies, and encountered constant abuse from the colonists. In 1770, the so-called 'Boston massacre' occurred, in which five unarmed Americans were shot by redcoats after the Americans had pelted them with snow and trash. Five years later, full-scale violence broke out between the Americans and the British. The British enjoyed the support of a substantial number of colonists, and ex-slaves and native Americans fought on either side. German mercenaries were crucial to the British effort, showing the character of the British state - dynastic and with a German King. The Americans fought a nationalistic war - their allies, the French and Spanish, had their own reasons to fight the British and aid the nascent United States.
The Constitution
Once the dust was settled, the British were defeated. The Constitutional Convention of 1787 set about deciding the character of the new nation, and in so doing created one of the legends about America's founding. Like all good legends, much of it is true. The Constitution is considered sacrosanct by almost all American politicians, which leads to the paradox that those on either side of the partisan divide believe their opponents would rather see it torn to shreds. Whenever an argument arises over a particularly contentious issue, such as the debate over substantive due process as a protection of property, or the limits of the state's ability to carry out surveillance, the Constitution is invoked, usually without reference to any specific article. Proponents of a measure argue that innovation is needed lest the Constitution be outmoded and people lose respect for it; opponents that the measure clearly indicates that such respect is already lost.
The Constitution has a number of features which at the time, and for some time afterwards, remained unique and a model for those in other countries seeking equal freedom. Firstly, it established the separation of church and state, a product of the 'Great Awakening' which can legitimately be seen as a child of the European Reformation. It allowed for broad freedom in political expression, declaring "Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort". This was in sharp distinction to British laws, which could see you charged with treason for seditious speech.
Many people opposed the inclusion of something like the Bill of Rights in the original Constitution because it might give the impression that whatever rights were not granted were withheld, when in fact the opposite was intended. However, there was criticism that the Constitution was an essentially aristocratic document that would not give the people the liberty they desired, so the Constitution was amended ten times in two years to add the Bill of Rights. These first ten amendments include the right to freedom of the press, freedom of religion, trial by jury, due process, the right to bear arms, and an article declaring that rights not listed are nevertheless retained by the people.
With a nation and Constitution duly established, the Americans were ready to enter the stage of history. Their first seventy years would be characterised by expansion westward into the Continent, and a fierce individualistic spirit which was the natural outcome of such unbridled opportunity.
The first seventy years
The dominant aspect of the history of the United States before the civil war was surely her expansion westward into land which was stateless, but housed the various native American nations. There are two broad interpretations of this expansion. One is that it was imperialist, and the only difference between it and European imperialism was the fact the land colonised was adjacent to the United States rather than overseas. The best analogy for the actions of the early Republic would, in this interpretation, be the Russian Empire or Nazi Germany. I would claim that this argument is analytically flawed, and that American expansion is best understood by a different framework. The conditions of this expansion shaped the early character of the Republic and left a pregnant ideological heritage to the twentieth century.
European imperialism was driven by the desire to augment the metropole's economic power through the exploitation of subject populations. The idea of any form of assimilation only came later when the colonial state had to increase the number of quislings it could count upon to participate in the political order, hence increasing the state's legitimacy. White settlement of the tropics was a side-effect, and not a particularly desirable one, as the climate and atmosphere was held to degrade the white race. American expansion was not based on a desire to exploit subject populations nor to provide economic resources for the metropole, but was a pure war of conquest. There was no white man's burden, no idea of bringing civilisation to the natives - simply the drive for land which white settlers could move into and develop. The new land would eventually become a full part of the Republic, in contrast to most European colonies.
The problem was that the land was inhabited by the native Americans. They would have to be, in the language of the time, "removed". Such was never really in doubt - what was up for discussion was how this removal would be carried out. As is so often the case on the borders between ethnic groups, locals were wont to take matters into their own hands if they did not feel the central government was doing enough to protect them. Hence a sense of urgency and inevitably was added to the desire of Americans to conquer the land, and the fate of the natives was sealed. They were pushed further and further westwards leaving trails of tears, or they were slaughtered on the frontier. In 1876 they were ordered onto reservations, and their culture began to decay.
Meanwhile, Americans set about taming the Continent. The Presidency of Andrew Jackson made the United States the most democratic country on the planet, and the seemingly unlimited economic resources of the Continent fostered an individuality which remains an important part of American political culture to this day. The isolationist strain in American foreign policy thought dates from this period, with James Monroe announcing in 1823 that America would not become entangled in European wars, but that the Americas were henceforth to be colony-free. European interference with the emerging states of Latin and Central America would not be permitted, and would be considered an act of war against the United States.
Perhaps the event of greatest symbolic significance in the expansion westward was the linking of east to west by the completion of the first transcontinental railroad. It took ten year, starting in 1859, to complete. Two companies began building - one in the industrial east, and one in the west, employing Chinese labourers who had fled to America from poverty in their homeland - and eventually met at Promontory Summit, Utah. This railroad would help to stimulate the unprecedented economic growth that occurred in America in the second half of the nineteenth century. However, first the country would nearly rip itself in two and doom its constituent parts to obscurity.
The Civil War
The United States of 1860 contained various cultures, rooted in different socio-economic circumstances. In the north east, the descendants of Puritan immigrants presided over a growing industrial civilisation, prone to periodic moral 'Awakenings'. A frontier culture in the West was made up primarily of isolated farmers not yet incorporated into states. In the south, there was a paternalistic slave-based culture which contained something akin to an aristocracy - which, as Alexis de Tocqueville remarked at length in 1832, was virtually unheard of in the north east. Of the six million white people living in the south, it is probable that only three hundred and fifty thousand were slaveholders. Of these, perhaps seven per cent owned three quarters of all the slaves.
However, as the wielders of economic power which they passed to their sons, these men were the focal points of social and political power as well. The rich are able to influence opinion, spread patronage, and give loans, and in so doing dominate the discourse of an agricultural society. This is not to absolve the lower sorts of their sins, because their acceptance of slavery and the racism implicit in it was beyond question. When critiques of their society began to spread from the north east, they were bound to view these Bible-thumping moralists with contempt and rally to the support of their own. The economic power the north east could wield over them by its monopoly on manufactures increased their resentment.
In the north, abolitionism was on the increase and the second 'Great Awakening' of religious values stressed the importance of individual thrift, industry and sobriety. The poor and unemployed were increasingly blamed for their own condition as they were being in Victorian England at the time. The emergence of mass politics in the north was leading to a groundswell of popular opinion against slavery, which was played upon by ambitious politicians. In the south this provoked a militant reaction as people leapt to the defence of the institution that kept body and soul together, and which was the ideological underpinning of their civilisation. When Abraham Lincoln, infamous in the south for his opposition to slavery was elected in 1860, seven states seceded from the Union shortly thereafter.
The Confederate States of America soon grew to encompass eleven states, with a new Constitution based on the original Articles of Confederation of the United States. Predictably, it had a weaker executive and placed more value on the right of States; it also specifically endorsed the institution of slavery. When Lincoln entered office on March 4, 1861, he declared that the secession of the southern states was 'legally void', begging for a return to normality. He declared his intention to use armed force to protect federal property, and the wanton disregard of the southern states for his threat soon led to full-scale war between the two halves of the union.
The North, known as the Union, ultimately prevailed in 1865. It is commonly thought that victory was due to the Union's much-superior industrial capacity, not to mention its greater manpower and infrastructure. The issuing by Lincoln of the Emancipation Proclamation, did much to raise the spirits of slaves in the south and confound the Confederate war machine. When the war was over, the thirteenth amendment was duly passed, banning slavery throughout the Union.
On the brink of world power
The period directly after the Civil War is commonly known as Reconstruction, the last few decades of the nineteenth century as 'the gilded age', and the period from then to World War I as 'the Progressive era'. As is often the case with historical demarcations, these are misleading. Taking this era as a whole, three themes predominate. The first is the rise of America to become the world's predominant industrial power, an outcome of the individualistic spirit and its nurturing in an environment of boundless possibility. The second is the concurrent rise of a new, collectivist spirit of the sort which inevitably arises under the dislocation of a rapidly-growing capitalist economy. The third is the brief practice of something similar to European imperialism, and then America's surprise engagement in the first world war.
America could become the world's primary industrial power thanks to a fortunate marriage of circumstance - the American ideology of individual thrift and industry, and its haloing of the concept of competition, along with a land of seemingly unlimited opportunity. In the first decades of expansion, there seemed to be enough resources for the taking for anyone with the gall to do it, and such men thrived in a rough, atomised society. Business was exalted; politics, considered a necessary evil conducted by the venal and corrupt. The spirit of 'Progressivism' and 'Populism' however, sought to reform government, even the Constitution, with what Walter Weyl called 'a new democratic spirit'.
Weyl castigated the democracy of 1787 as a 'shadow democracy', and went on to say that even though Jacksonian democracy had granted formal political rights to all, these rights were meaningless without economic and social rights. Turning American particularly on its head, he argued that the individual spirit of Americans worked against their achievement of a full democracy rather than for it. Now that the Continent had been conquered and most of the property in it become private, he believed a new spirit was needed for America to carry on in prosperity. Along with many other Progressives, he called for the redistribution of wealth by the government, and the reinterpretation of the Constitution to allow the federal government more leeway in such matters. He and others like him were castigated as socialists and revolutionaries, but Grover Cleveland was the last President who could govern by ignoring them, and he barely.
These ideas found fertile socio-economic ground in workers and farmers who were frequently upset by the business cycle and rapid structural change in the American economy. Elite groups were also afflicted by these developments, and some reached the same conclusion as their European counterparts - that an Empire would help to alleviate economic problems by providing new markets for American manufactures and agriculture. Some would answer Weyl by claiming that the individualistic spirit of America could only be fruitfully maintained by a continued expansion to a new frontier, something politicians down to George W. Bush have wrestled with. Hawaii was annexed, and after the Spanish-American war the USA took possession of the Philippines, Cuba, Guam and Puerto Rico.
Perhaps most surprising of all was the entry of the United States into World War I. Twice in the twentieth century America has elected Presidents on an antiwar ticket who have then taken them to battle, and Woodrow Wilson was the first example. Wilson was himself sympathetic to entering the war, and from the start aided the Allies economically; but he did not initially call upon Americans to prefer one side over the other. The reasons why the public eventually became convinced of the necessity of war were many, although an official commission reported in 1936 that the decision had been primarily economic. This could not be wholly true, as the public are rarely stirred by considerations of national debt.
The Zimmermann Telegram, an attempt by Germany to forge an alliance with Mexico and | 
