A panoramic history of American individualism from its nineteenth-century origins to today’s bitterly divided politics Individualism is a defining feature of American public life. Its influence is pervasive today, with liberals and conservatives alike promising to expand personal freedom and defend individual rights against unwanted intrusion, be it from big government, big corporations, or intolerant majorities. The Roots of American Individualism traces the origins of individualist ideas to the turbulent political controversies of the Jacksonian era (1820–1850) and explores their enduring influence on American politics and culture. Alex Zakaras plunges readers into the spirited and rancorous political debates of Andrew Jackson’s America, drawing on the stump speeches, newspaper editorials, magazine articles, and sermons that captivated mass audiences and shaped partisan identities. He shows how these debates popularized three powerful myths that celebrated the young nation as an exceptional land of liberty: the myth of the independent proprietor, the myth of the rights-bearer, and the myth of the self-made man. The Roots of American Individualism reveals how generations of politicians, pundits, and provocateurs have invoked these myths for competing political purposes. Time and again, the myths were used to determine who would enjoy equal rights and freedoms and who would not. They also conjured up heavily idealized, apolitical visions of social harmony and boundless opportunity, typically centered on the free market, that have distorted American political thought to this day.

Sharpening the debate over the values that formed America's founding political philosophy, Barry Alan Shain challenges us to reconsider what early Americans meant when they used such basic political concepts as the public good, liberty, and slavery. We have too readily assumed, he argues, that eighteenth-century Americans understood these and other terms in an individualistic manner. However, by exploring how these core elements of their political thought were employed in Revolutionary-era sermons, public documents, newspaper editorials, and political pamphlets, Shain reveals a very different understanding--one based on a reformed Protestant communalism. In this context, individual liberty was the freedom to order one's life in accord with the demanding ethical standards found in Scripture and confirmed by reason. This was in keeping with Americans' widespread acceptance of original sin and the related assumption that a well-lived life was only possible in a tightly knit, intrusive community made up of families, congregations, and local government bodies. Shain concludes that Revolutionary-era Americans defended a Protestant communal vision of human flourishing that stands in stark opposition to contemporary liberal individualism. This overlooked component of the American political inheritance, he further suggests, demands examination because it alters the historical ground upon which contemporary political alternatives often seek legitimation, and it facilitates our understanding of much of American history and of the foundational language still used in authoritative political documents.

American individualism: It is the reason for American success, but it also tears the nation apart. Why do Americans have so much trouble seeing eye to eye today? Is this new? Was there ever an American consensus? The Cult of Individualism: A History of an Enduring American Myth explores the rarely discussed cultural differences leading to today's seemingly intractable political divides. After an examination of the various meanings of individualism in America, author Aaron Barlow describes the progression and evolution of the concept from the 18th century on, illuminating the wide division in Caucasian American culture that developed between the culture based on the ideals of the English Enlightenment and that of the Scots-Irish "Borderers." The "Borderer" legacy, generally explored only by students of Appalachian culture, remains as pervasive and significant in contemporary American culture and politics as it is, unfortunately, overlooked. It is from the "Borderers" that the Tea Party sprang, along with many of the attitudes of the contemporary American right, making it imperative that this culture be thoroughly explored.

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This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

Margaret Hoover has been a lifelong member of the Republican Party. She grew up a self-described “ditto head.” She worked in the White House for President George W. Bush. Today she is a political commentator for Fox News, where, as one of Bill O’Reilly’s Culture Warriors, she regularly champions the conservative cause. She also happens to be the great-granddaughter of the thirty-first president of the United States, Herbert Hoover. These impeccable conservative credentials underscore the gravity of her deep-seated concerns about the future of the Republican Party. Her party, she believes, has fallen dangerously out of step with the rising generation of young Americans. In American Individualism, Margaret Hoover chal-lenges the up-and-coming millennial generation to take another look at the Republican Party. Although millennials rarely identify themselves as Republicans, Hoover contends that these young men and women who helped elect President Barack Obama are sympathetic to the fundamental principles of conservatism. She makes a compelling case for how the GOP can right itself and capture the allegiance of this group. She believes that her party is uniquely positioned to offer solutions for the most pressing problems facing America—skyrocketing debt and deficits, crises in education and immigration, a war against Islamist supremacy—but that it is held back by the outsize influence within the party of social and religious conservatives. American Individualism is Hoover’s call to action for Republicans to embrace a conservatism that emphasizes individual freedom both in economic policy and in the realm of social issues in order to appeal to the new generation of voters. The Republican Party, Hoover asserts, can win the support of the millennials while at the same time remaining faithful to conservative principles. In a journey that is both political and personal, Hoover rediscovers these bedrock conservative values in the writings of her great-grandfather, President Herbert Hoover, who emphasized the vital importance of individual freedom to the American way of life and who sought to strike a delicate balance in identifying the limited yet essential role the federal government should play in the lives of Americans. Margaret Hoover advocates a conservatism that is fully consistent with the original impulses of the American conservative movement. It evokes her great-grandfather’s emphasis on the values of civic responsibility and service to others—instincts instilled in the millennial generation. She argues that the Republican Party today must evolve in order to achieve greatness, and that it can do so without compromising its tried-and-true fundamental principles. On the contrary, those enduring principles, if consistently applied, will enable the party to attract a younger following. An impassioned and persuasive political manifesto grounded in twentieth-century history and targeted at the most perplexing problems of the twenty-first century, Margaret Hoover’s American Individualism offers provocative ideas not just for reinvigorating the Republican Party but also for strengthening America in the decades ahead.

That shift, Davies argues, was part of a broader transformation in political values that had devastating consequences for the Democratic Party in particular and for the cause of liberalism generally.

As politicians and judges argue over the original intent of our country's founding fathers, the American Founding itself continues to inspire a prodigious amount of research and commentary, reflecting a bewildering array of methods and interpretations. Alan Gibson now offers readers an insightful and convenient guide through this daunting and sprawling body of scholarship. Comprehensive and judicious, Interpreting the Founding provides summaries and analyses of the leading interpretive frameworks that have guided the study of the Founding since the publication of Charles Beard's An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution in 1913. Gibson argues that scholarship on the Founding is no longer steered by a single dominant approach or even by a set of questions that control its direction. He also examines the challenges posed to Founding scholarship by this diversity and complexity and the possibilities opened by new avenues of inquiry that have recently emerged. scholars of the Founding - including Louis Hartz, Bernard Bailyn, Gordon Wood, and Garry Wills - that best exemplify different schools of interpretation. Gibson focuses on six approaches that have dominated the modern study of the Founding: Progressive, Lockean/liberal, Republican, Scottish Enlightenment, multicultural, and multiple traditions approaches. For each approach, he traces its fundamental assumptions, revealing deeper ideological and methodological differences between schools of thought that, on the surface, seem to differ only about the interpretation of historical facts. While previous accounts have treated the study of the Founding as the sequential replacement of one paradigm by another, Gibson argues that all of these interpretations survive as alternative and still viable approaches. each has simultaneously illuminated and masked core truths about the American Founding, he renders a balanced account of the current debate over the origins and foundations of the American republic and offers solid footing on the path to understanding the vast literature devoted to this important subject.