首页
登录
职称英语
From its birth, three powerful images have coloured ideas of what the United
From its birth, three powerful images have coloured ideas of what the United
游客
2025-01-11
24
管理
问题
From its birth, three powerful images have coloured ideas of what the United States was and what it stood for. One was "a city on a hill", a model commonwealth for the rest of humankind. Another, in Walt Whitman’s phrase, was a "teeming nation of nations": a near-empty continent of immigration and fresh starts. A third, given currency by Alexis de Tocqueville in 1831, was of a new and exceptional kind of society not bound by prevailing rules of history.
Each picture stresses what makes America different from other countries. Thomas Bender, a professor of history and humanities at New York University, wants us to focus instead on what makes the United States the same. More exactly, he is urging us to re-think key episodes in America’s past by relating them to what was happening elsewhere in the world. The United States, he suggests, is less of a nation apart than super-patriots or America-haters might want to believe. His aim is not to belittle the American achievement but to break the habit of treating it as a virtually isolated feat of self-creation. National histories, he argues, are always local responses to broader trends, and to that rule the United States is no exception.
Five episodes form the core of this challenging essay. "The Ocean World" contrasts the conventional account of American beginnings, which stresses political ideals, religious freedom and economic opportunity, with a wider view that brings in sea-borne trade and slavery. Next, Mr. Bender treats the American Revolution as a by-product of the "great war" mat France and Britain fought off and on throughout the 18th century until the defeat of Napoleon in 1815. The American civil war (1861-1865) becomes part of the democratic era of nation building that began with the European revolutions of 1848.
The United States did not join Europe’s scramble for empire at the end of the 19th century as a colonising power. But it fought a terrible war to control the Philippines, set a pattern of intervention in its own hemisphere and in Asia, and established a doctrine of untrammeled sea power that survives to this day. For his fifth episode, Mr. Bender likens the progressive social reforms of the 1890s onwards to changes Europeans also made to temper the free market.
The breadth of view is exhilarating, and the reading daunting in scope. Mr. Bender dots his essay with awkward reminders that the American past was not a smooth, inevitable rise to superpowerdom and moral beaconhood. Yet "A Nation Among Nations" suffers from an ambiguity of aim. At several points Mr. Bender talks of a global story in which the United States has a local part. What is that story? He does not say. This is not his fault. Only the rashest of historians would nowadays dream of telling us, Hegel-wise, where the spirit of world history had come from and where it was headed.
Nor is gesturing towards "global trends" much help: ocean trade, nationalism and democracy, for example, are such broad categories they explain little of the local variation that puzzles us, especially when the locale is the United States, with its oddities—a high birth rate and strong religions, for example—that modern states are supposed not to have.
For the rest, Mr. Bender is more modest, and more successful. American failures and successes are usually so large it is easy to forget that they are seldom unique or insulated from events elsewhere. The simple-sounding truth that the United States never was, and never could be, isolated from the world is worth repeating, and Mr. Bender repeats it well. [br] The word "currency" (Para. 1) can be best replaced by______.
选项
A、term
B、story
C、painting
D、phrase
答案
A
解析
转载请注明原文地址:https://tihaiku.com/zcyy/3908706.html
相关试题推荐
Fromitsbirth,threepowerfulimageshavecolouredideasofwhattheUnited
Fromitsbirth,threepowerfulimageshavecolouredideasofwhattheUnited
Fromitsbirth,threepowerfulimageshavecolouredideasofwhattheUnited
Fromitsbirth,threepowerfulimageshavecolouredideasofwhattheUnited
Fromitsbirth,threepowerfulimageshavecolouredideasofwhattheUnited
[originaltext]1.TheUnitedNationsplaysanequallyimportant,butlargelyuns
[originaltext]1.TheUnitedNationsplaysanequallyimportant,butlargelyuns
[originaltext]1.TheUnitedNationsplaysanequallyimportant,butlargelyuns
[originaltext]SentenceNo.1IntheUnitedStates,bigshoppingmallsandmajor
[originaltext]SentenceNo.1IntheUnitedStates,bigshoppingmallsandmajor
随机试题
AstheTitanicwassinkingandwomenandchildrenclimbedintolifeboats,th
[originaltext]W:Goodmorning.Weseemtobehearingmoreandmorenowadaysabo
Inrecentyearsfirmshavestuffedalotmoremoneyintotheirfinal-salary
可促进醛固酮分泌的因素是A.血管紧张素Ⅱ增多 B. C. D.血量增多
项目执行过程中,团队成员小王与小张针对一个问题产生了激烈的争吵,项目经理为了保持
根据企业的生产计划,对所需原材料、零部件和组件的数量、到达时间和其他要素进行分解
地表排水设施有( )。A.渗沟、渗井 B.截水沟及排水沟 C.蒸发池 D
根据《城镇老年人设施规划规范》,下列符合规定的是( )。A.老年人设施场地范围
统一指挥原则必须遵守()A.从最上层到最基层,等级链不能间断 B.允许多头领导
某500kV变电站的主变压器型式为:三相油浸自耦变压器,无载调压,冷却方式为强油
最新回复
(
0
)