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A powerful dissection of a core American myth. The idea that the United States is unlike every other country in world history is a surprisingly resilient one. Throughout his distinguished career, Ian Tyrrell has been one of the most influential historians of the idea of American exceptionalism, but he has never written a book focused solely on it until now. The notion that American identity might be exceptional emerged, Tyrrell shows, from the belief that the nascent early republic was not simply a postcolonial state but a genuinely new experiment in an imperialist world dominated by Britain. Prior to the Civil War, American exceptionalism fostered declarations of cultural, economic, and spa...
Reforming the World offers a sophisticated account of how and why, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, American missionaries and moral reformers undertook work abroad at an unprecedented rate and scale. Looking at various organizations such as the Young Men's Christian Association and the Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions, Ian Tyrrell describes the influence that the export of American values had back home, and explores the methods and networks used by reformers to fashion a global and nonterritorial empire. He follows the transnational American response to internal pressures, the European colonies, and dynamic changes in global society. Examining the cultural...
In the beginning, there was the river — before the beach, before the drain, before the dredging, before the dams, before numerous other actions that altered the stream. River Dreams reveals the complex history of the Cooks River in south-eastern Sydney — a river renowned as Australia’s most altered and polluted. While nineteenth century developers called it ‘improvement’, the sugar mill, tanneries, and factories that lined the banks of Sydney's Cooks River had drastic consequences for the health of the river. Local Aboriginal people became fringe dwellers, and over time the river became severely compromised, with many ecosystems damaged or destroyed. Later, a large section was turn...
From lagging book sales and shrinking job prospects to concerns over the discipline's "narrowness," myriad factors have been cited by historians as evidence that their profession is in decline in America. Ian Tyrrell's Historians in Public shows that this perceived threat to history is recurrent, exaggerated, and often misunderstood. In fact, history has adapted to and influenced the American public more than people—and often historians—realize. Tyrrell's elegant history of the practice of American history traces debates, beginning shortly after the profession's emergence in American academia, about history's role in school curricula. He also examines the use of historians in and by the ...
Frances Willard founded the Woman's Christian Temperance Union in 1884 to carry the message of women's emancipation throughout the world. Based in the United States, the WCTU rapidly became an international organization, with affiliates in forty-two countries. Ian Tyrrell tells the extraordinary story of how a handful of women sought to change the mores of the world -- not only by abolishing alcohol but also by promoting peace and attacking prostitution, poverty, and male control of democratic political structures. In describing the work of Mary Leavitt, Jessie Ackermann, and other temperance crusaders on the international scene, Tyrrell identifies the tensions generated by conflict between ...
This study examines rising alarm over waste of natural resources, and its use by Theodore Roosevelt and his administration to further objectives of conservation and an American form of empire. These objectives encompassed both preservationist and utilitarian approaches, centred on efficiency, but interpreting efficiency in social and political rather than economic terms. These policies revealed an emerging idea of environmental 'habitability' that presaged modern interest in sustainability.
A half century after its founding in London in 1844, the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) became the first NGO to effectively push a modernization agenda around the globe. Soon followed by a sister organization, the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), founded in 1855, the Y movement defined its global mission in 1889. Although their agendas have been characterized as predominantly religious, both the YMCA and YWCA were also known for their new vision of a global civil society and became major agents in the worldwide dissemination of modern “Western” bodies of knowledge. The YMCA’s and YWCA’s “secular” social work was partly rooted in the Anglo-American notions...
Across the course of American history, imperialism and anti-imperialism have been awkwardly paired as influences on the politics, culture, and diplomacy of the United States. The Declaration of Independence, after all, is an anti-imperial document, cataloguing the sins of the metropolitan government against the colonies. With the Revolution, and again in 1812, the nation stood against the most powerful empire in the world and declared itself independent. As noted by Ian Tyrrell and Jay Sexton, however, American "anti-imperialism was clearly selective, geographically, racially, and constitutionally." Empire’s Twin broadens our conception of anti-imperialist actors, ideas, and actions; it ch...
One of the most critical environmental challenges facing both Californians and Australians in the 1860s involved the aftermath of the gold rushes. Settlers on both continents faced the disruptive impacts of mining, grazing, and agriculture; in response to these challenges, environmental reformers attempted to remake the natural environment into an idealized garden landscape. As this cutting-edge history shows, an important result of this nineteenth-century effort to "renovate" nature was a far-reaching exchange of ideas between the United States—especially in California—and Australia. Ian Tyrrell demonstrates how Californians and Australians shared plants, insects, personnel, technology,...
National parks are one of the most important and successful institutions in global environmentalism. Since their first designation in the United States in the 1860s and 1870s they have become a global phenomenon. The development of these ecological and political systems cannot be understood as a simple reaction to mounting environmental problems, nor can it be explained by the spread of environmental sensibilities. Shifting the focus from the usual emphasis on national parks in the United States, this volume adopts an historical and transnational perspective on the global geography of protected areas and its changes over time. It focuses especially on the actors, networks, mechanisms, arenas, and institutions responsible for the global spread of the national park and the associated utilization and mobilization of asymmetrical relationships of power and knowledge, contributing to scholarly discussions of globalization and the emergence of global environmental institutions and governance.