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▪ Abstract  American exceptionalism is the oldest and most contentious of the alleged national exceptionalisms—arguments that a given nation must be understood in essentially idiosyncratic fashion. John Winthrop, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Karl Marx helped develop and sustain an American variant for the first 350 years of a separate American political life. Modern political scientists have addressed the notion in a more systematic and methodologically self-conscious manner during the past half century. Nevertheless, much of the argument revolves around conceptual issues, operational difficulties, and empirical traps, so that these must provide the contours of the subject here. Two major recent books with sharply divergent conclusions, both marshaling extensive empirical evidence, serve not only as a means of updating the classical argument and of presenting its modern opposition. Both also suggest—indeed, contribute—further reasons for the continuing lure of a difficult and divisive notion.

American Samoa has been a territory of the United States for 108 years. For fifty ears of this period, American Samoa was administered by the U.S. Navy. Thepolicies of the naval administration established practices of militarization—that is, integrating the military and its values into the lives of the locals—that continue today. Significant numbers of American Samoans serve in the various branches of the U.S. military; Samoans participate in, and support, the 'incoherent empire' of the United States. The ideology of 'American exceptionalism'—the incorporation of democracy, freedom and human rights as features purportedly distinguishing U.S. imperialist practice from its colonizing forebears—was never effectively part of the administration of American Samoa. Nevertheless, when debating their future political status, Samoans choose to keep the present political arrangement as long as they can control their land and titles system and practice faʻaSamoa, the Samoan way.

A medical anthropologist's analysis of pandemic attitudes in her Midwestern hometown draws on social science to explain lack of trust in expertise. But Americans had much greater trust in science and vaccines in the mid-twentieth century.

As the 2024 presidential election approaches, three broad camps are visible in America's debate over how the United States should relate to the rest of the world: the liberal internationalists who have dominated since World ...

The history of American philosophical thought is marked by a skepticism of epistemology and immutable truths, which is drawn under the term pragmatism. This skepticism is the genesis for the political and social attitudes that makes the United States exceptional. This thesis argues that this exceptionalism is important to the makeup of the American character and that it is being threatened by two front: ideologically driven politics, and the abuse of power by the majority. In the course of writing this essay I evaluated a large portion of the body of American philosophy as well as political and judicial writers in order to show that American exceptionalism is based upon a philosophical rejection of epistemology and immutable truth claims and that exceptionalism is integral to the progress of America as a nation.

There is no issue on which the U.S. is as exceptional as civilian ownership of firearms. There are an estimated 330 million firearms in private hands; there is at least one firearm in 40% of American households. With 5% of the world's population, the U.S. has more than half of the world's civilian gun stock. How can this situation be explained? What problem or problems does it cause? How can Americans tolerate mass shootings that seem to occur more and more regularly? How come the National Rifle Association exerts so much political influence? To what extent does the U.S. constitution constrain policy options? What is the prospect for sensible gun control in the near future?