Carroll Smith-Rosenberg. This Violent Empire: The Birth of an American National Identity. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture. 2010. Pp. xxii, 484. $45.00.

In the run‐up to the 2008 presidential election, New York Times columnist Roger Cohen lamented that American exceptionalism “has taken an ugly twist of late.” Once an inspiring (if “flawed”) expression of America's unique role in the world, American exceptionalism “has morphed into the fortress of those who see themselves threatened by ‘one‐worlders’ (read Barack Obama) and who believe it's more important to know how to dress a moose than find Mumbai” (“Palin's American Exception,” New York Times, September 25, 2008). Two years and a rousing Tea Party later, the contest no longer seems to entail a showdown between “ugly” and uplifting exceptionalisms, in Cohen's terms, but between exceptionalism and no exceptionalism at all. Among the popular mandates claimed by triumphant Tea Partiers in the 2010 mid‐term election was a call to “restore American exceptionalism,” as if exceptionalism...