Tag Archive

Eugen Weber

Assessing the Early United States by way of the French Peasantry

As I have mentioned several times before over posts in this blog (see for example this post), I have found nationalist mythology to be the most enduring and crucial challenge I face as an historian of early America. This is one of the reasons I turned to ‘settler colonialism’ as a conceptual tool, for I found no other framework that helped me wrestle with this mythic predicament. As theorist Lorenzo Veracini noted, the U.S. is, alongside Israel,  one of the “two polities” in which “the very invisibility of settler colonialism is most entrenched.” And, he added, “the more it [settler Read more