Barack Obama: American Historian

✍ Scribed by Steven Sarson

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2018
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 377
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Barack Obama's politics are deeply informed by his profound knowledge and understanding of his country's history. His articles, books, and speeches are replete with references to America's past and how that relates to the present he sees and the future he envisions.

Exploring Obama's own words, Steven Sarson examines his interpretation of American history from colonial times to the present, showing how Obama sees American history as beginning with the “common creed” of equality and liberty proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence and the “more perfect union” created by the Constitution. He analyses Obama's understanding of the colonies, revolution, and early nation, slavery and the civil war, segregation and civil rights, economy and society, Native Americans and foreign policy. An epilogue explores how Obama personifies the American dream through the stories of individuals, including his own.

A unique and fascinating take on the past and how we interpret it, this book will appeal to all students and scholars of American history, as well as anyone interested in Obama's presidency.

✦ Table of Contents

Cover
Half Title
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Landscape of Our Collective Dreams
A more perfect union
The landscape of our collective dreams
Barack Obama: American historian
Prologue: A More Perfect Union: Barack Obama’s American History
God damn America
America can change
The substance of our common creed
The audacity of hope
WE HOLD THESE truths
What makes us exceptional—what makes us American
The arc of the moral universe
Where the perfection begins
Chapter 1 Our Starting Point as Americans: The American Colonies
Our starting point as Americans
In a hall that still stands across the street
The spring of 1787
Farmers and scholars; statesmen and patriots
Who had traveled across an ocean to escape tyranny and persecution
;
A city upon a hill
You would have thought I was Cotton Mather
We are no longer just a Christian nation
Community, democracy, and homespun virtues
He lived usefully
The first settlers
America’s original sin
A question that divided the colonies
Our starting point as Americans
Chapter 2 The Substance of our Common Creed: The Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution
The substance of our common creed
Creed
A subject of King George
In the year of America’s birth
Let it be told to the future world
From this time forward forever
Enlightenment thinkers like Hobbes and Locke
Its roots in eighteenth-century liberal and republican thought
What makes us exceptional
What makes us American
Farmers and scholars
Farmers and scholars; statesmen and patriots
All men are created equal
An American family
Liberty
Where the perfection begins
The pursuit of happiness
Chapter 3 The Foundation of our Government: The Constitution and the New Nation
The foundation of our government
Stained by this nation’s original sin
Finally made real
WE THE PEOPLE
A “deliberative democracy”
One of the Founders’ central insights
Before the ink on the constitutional parchment was dry
A sufficient defense against tyranny
The Supreme Court’s role in determining the law
Fundamentalist faith
The freedom of the apostate
Fidelity to our founding principles
The context of an ever-changing world
A “wall of separation” between church and state
Defending organized religion
In God We Trust E Pluribus Unum
Through the early days of the Union
Conservative or liberal, we are all constitutionalists
Chapter 4 A New Birth of Freedom: Slavery and the Civil War
This nation’s original sin
A house that was built by slaves
The answer to the slavery question
The hope of slaves
We’re the slaves who built the White House
Any final resolution
Government of the people, by the people, for the people
The self-imposed gag rule
A lawmaker was beaten unconscious on the Senate floor
Who would walk into the Supreme Court a free man and leave a slave
A house divided against itself
What does this say about our democracy?
The cranks, the zealots, the prophets, the agitators, and the unreasonable
William Lloyd Garrison
Denmark Vesey
Frederick Douglass
Harriet Tubman
John Brown
I’M LEFT THEN with Lincoln
Power in words
We unified a nation and set the captives free
Chapter 5 We Shall Overcome: Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and Civil Rights
. . .
The Nation’s Second Founding
While the Civil War raged in the background
The United States fiercely debated
Robert Smalls, came to prominence
To build a nation of free and equal citizens
To vote here in Selma and much of the South
“Separate but equal”
How far we’ve come
A long line of heroes
The students who walked passed angry crowds
Dr. King’s mighty cadence
The culmination of it all
The strength and courage of nonviolence
The folks whose names you never heard of
As old as our beginnings and as timeless as our hopes
For we were born of change
We know the march is not yet over
Chapter 6 The Chief Business of the American People: Property and Liberty
She touched her finger to a screen and cast her vote
An active national government
Our starting point as Americans
The earliest settlers
Farmers and scholars
Government has been called upon
Hamilton understood
Jefferson ... feared
The government’s vital role in regulating the marketplace
The transition from an agricultural to an industrial society
The triumph of a real democracy
“The chief business of the American people is business”
FDR understood
The era of big government is over
The dogmas of the quiet past
Economic rights that have to be dealt with
That he may “ride the storm and direct the whirlwind”
Chapter 7 Beyond our Borders: Native Americans and Other Foreign Affairs
A conquest that ... contradicted America’s founding principles
America’s “original sin”
The impulse to expand
Manifest destiny
Before the court of the conqueror
Washington thought it knew what was best
What makes us American
The history that we share
A beacon of freedom and opportunity
The world’s dominant power
The distortions of politics, the sins of hubris, the corrupting effects of fear
Their world turned upside down
A part of America’s story
A useful metaphor
We might live as Indonesians lived
He lived to see
Epilogue: Out of Many, One: American History’s Barack Obama
She lived to see
The Joshua generation
The stories—became our story, my story
A tall, gangly, self-made Springfield lawyer
My story is part of the larger American story
E pluribus unum. Out of many, one
WE THE PEOPLE
Yes, we can
A more perfect union
Notes
Introduction
Prologue
Chapter 1 Our Starting Point as Americans
Chapter 2 The Substance of our Common Creed
Chapter 3 The Foundation of our Government
Chapter 4 A New Birth of Freedom
Chapter 5 We Shall Overcome
Chapter 6 The Chief Business of the American People
Chapter 7 Beyond our Borders
Epilogue
Index