Americanness

They begin with a hypothesis; they employ a common vocabulary; they depend upon “the idea of Americanness” or “the idea of the best”; that is, they are an explanation of “some qualitative essence.”

Archive 2009-12-01 2009

They begin with a hypothesis; they employ a common vocabulary; they depend upon “the idea of Americanness” or “the idea of the best”; that is, they are an explanation of “some qualitative essence.”

Updating fallacy 2009

Another important Gestetner duplicator, by Raymond Loewy constituent of the idea of Americanness was the belief in material prosperity and the abundance of commodities, which thus needed to be freely available and identifiably American.

Recently Uploaded Slideshows 2009

People prove they that they accept that identity by flying the flag everywhere, over their gas station, over their cottage, over their boat; but it does indicate that a lot of Americans, including the most patriotic, have a sense that there are fault lines in this country and that there is a national identity that is not completely reliable under all circumstances and that holding the country together and preserving a sense of Americanness, that is a job politicians and statesmen have to worry about.

Dead Right 1994

This brings up the definition of "Americanness" itself.

Frankie Martin: Discovering America 2009

And this is where the quarrel over Obama's "Americanness" comes in.

Manfred B. Steger: Barack Obama and the Global Imaginary 2008

Clinging to the safety of traditional "Americanness," many voters are afraid of the senator's globalism while at the same time recognizing him as the harbinger of an even more interdependent world.

Manfred B. Steger: Barack Obama and the Global Imaginary 2008

This as well as other attempts by the Nisei to prove their "Americanness" during the prewar period, including through military service, belied any sense that the Nisei were essentially Japanese.

IsThatLegal? 2004

For many years I found myself questioning this "Americanness" as against some other sense of history or collectivity that I centered around the Mediterranean and that I explored deeply but, in coming back more strongly to myself as a poet rooted in this language, I have come to see these writers with ever more resonant layers from which I feel there is always more to learn.

languagehat.com: ALCALAY INTERVIEW. 2005

Page view page image: of local-color fiction and nonhumorous dialect sketches in the last quarter of the century, with their obligatory attention to idiosyncratic speechways: differences between North and South, East and West, urban and rural are subsumed under the essential "Americanness" that is felt to bind us together in spite of superficial dissimilarities.

Mark Twain's Languages 1987