Can two nationalisms make the systhesis of American history?
In this book Gary Gerstle organizes his narrative of American history through two threads of nationalism: racial and civic. According to the author, Theodore Roosvelt established a prototype of American nation, the Rooseveltian nation (in Gerstle’s phrase), in which racial nationalism excludes several manority groups such as Asians and African-Americans and at the same time includes them in the body politic. FDR encouraged the civic nationalism to radicalize itself to promote economic reforms. The Cold War enabled the nation to invite Jewish and Eastern European people by intensifying an anticommunistic version of the civic nationalism. Antiwar activism led by New Left, Black Power movements, and the ethnic revival resulted in collapse of the Rooseveltian nation. Gerstle makes extensive research efforts and full use of recent fruits of social history such as whiteness studies. He defines the nature of civic and racial nationalisms as not rigid and fixed ideologies but as fluid sets of
