Ark of the Liberties: America and the World

by Ted Widmer

Book Overview

The United States stands at a historic crossroads; essential to the world yet unappreciated. America's decline in popularity over the last eight years has been nothing short of astonishing. With wit,... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0809027356
• ISBN13: 9780809027354
• Release Date: June 2008
• Publisher: Hill & Wang
• Length: 355 Pages
• Weight: 0.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 6.4" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

Intelligent

Many authors have looked at America, liberty and her relationship with the world, but Widmer does it with a unique intensity and wealth of knowledge and references. Not to mention that it is beautifully written. Even if you are steeped in American history, there is something to be learned on every page.

Timely and Highly Readable

Let's face it. We Americans have a pretty sad track record when it comes to knowing much about our nation's history, and understanding how our history shapes our current lives and futures. With the United States now having more interaction than ever with the rest of the world, it is even more critical for each of us to gain knowledge of our past, and especially in the area of foreign relations. This book offers a timely and highly readable portrait of a fascinating part of America's story: how the country was shaped from earliest moments to become "the world's guarantor of liberty," and how it has variously grappled with and cultivated that role in different eras. The author is informed and entertaining. He sweeps readers through five centuries of colorful, often uplifting, sometimes disturbing aspects of America's unique qualities, beginning well before colonization and moving through to the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I'm one of those Americans who is sheepishly ignorant of a lot of the standard US history we're meant to have learned in high school or college. I was worried that this book would assume that I already knew the basics, and that it would contain too much about specialized foreign policy matters to hold my interest. But I enjoyed Ark of the Liberties as an overview of American history through the framing subject of liberty. It turns out that even pre-colonial aspects of America are shaped by ancient ideas and images, such as the Garden of Eden, are associated with freedom from rules. The book explains how freedom became part of America's identity even before it existed as a nation. And, as someone with ancestors and close relatives who have served in foreign wars including in Iraq, I was especially interested in the coverage of American ideas of freedom as they have been used in different wars and in diplomatic relations that prevented military conflict. The book follows some major threads that carry the theme of liberty through America's history. The most enduring ones are religious, and associate liberty with heavenly paradise or, at times, with diabolical lawlessness (America as Satan!). Other recurring themes (isolationism, internationalism, realism, idealism) appear in foreign policy arenas such as our presidents' views of liberating others or 'exporting freedom'. The author examines how variations on initial building blocks of America's humanistic (universal) ideals have influenced US foreign policy for good and ill throughout the country's history. I count myself among those Americans who are tired of hearing how pathetically ignorant we are about our past. I would recommend this book to anyone eager to break the bad habit of avoiding American history lessons. Ark of the Liberties is a fun read. Many of its details will grip you, and overall it will equip you with an understanding of the big patterns that form America's exceptional place in the world, its real and imagined qualities as a country like no oth

A revelation on every page - a treasure trove for history-lovers

This book is a delicious series of essays documenting America's relation to and impact on the concept of liberty, beginning with the earliest days of colonialization. Widmer has assembled an unprecedented collection of material, selecting the most provocative and telling events in the history of our self-assigned role as liberty's hero. A treat for those prone to despair in these benighted - but, as Widmer shows, not unprecedented - times.