Can I read The Nation That Never Was : Reconstructing America's Story on EtoBox?

The Nation That Never Was : Reconstructing America's Story by Kermit Roosevelt III is a history book available to read on EtoBox.

What is The Nation That Never Was : Reconstructing America's Story about?

Who are we-as a nation, as a people? There's a simple answer to that question: We are Americans. However, the simple answer raises the harder question: What does it mean to be an American? What does America mean? And there are even more fundamental questions that sit behind those: Where do our answers come from? What form do they take? What tells us who we are?The first point I want to make, one that explains the organization of this book, is that stories do all this. Stories organize the world for us; they put the stamp of meaning on the stuff of chaos. This is true, obviously, of individuals. When people think about their lives, they think about them in narrative form. They find themes, heroes, villains, and above all meaning. James Joyce said that this is the artist's task: "transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving life." In this sense, we are all artists-we are all the authors of our own stories, not because we decide what happens but because we decide what it means: how it's interpreted. And usually we are the heroes of our own stories. This is not just true for individuals. As Jill Lepore writes in This America, nations too need a story: "

Who reads The Nation That Never Was : Reconstructing America's Story?

Author

Kermit Roosevelt III

Publisher

The University of Chicago Press

Published

2022

Language

EN

ISBN

9780226829517

Category

history

Subjects

Political Science, History, Law

Rating

4.6 / 5 (117 ratings)

Updated

2026-03-14