American exceptionalism has emerged as the leitmotif of recent calls to transform the field of United States history. Effervescent, elusive, and parochial as it may be, scholars know it when they see it. But, as Lang’s powerful work deftly shows, it was also historically contingent, precise, and internationalist.
In A Contest of Civilizations, Lang places exceptionalist discourses front and center in the political crises of the Civil War era through a fine-grained reading of an impressive range of speeches, pamphlets, Congressional records, and personal papers. American citizens and statesmen alike emerge from Lang’s work comparing themselves habitually to an imagined turbulent, antidemocratic world of privileged aristocrats, reactionary monarchism, and overbearing imperialists. The result of this international gaze? “A powerful exceptionalist conviction that the United States remained a lone democratic nation surrounded by dangerous and radical influences”—if only Americans could agree on the meaning of Union (10). A Contest of...