Making a Nation The United States and It's People

Every human life is shaped by a variety of different relationships. Cultural relations, diplomatic relations, race, gender, and class relations, all contribute to how an individual interacts with the larger global community. This was as true in the past as it is today.Making a Nationretells the history of the United States by emphasizing the relationships that have shaped and defined the identities of the American people. For example, to disentangle the identity of a Mexican American woman working in a factory in Los Angeles in the year 2000 is to confront the multiple and overlapping "identities" that define a single American life.Making a Nationassumes that the multiplicity of cultures, classes, and regions, the vast changes as well as the enduring elements of our past, can nonetheless be told, as the story of a single nation, always in the making. There are many ways to explore these relationships. Making a Nation views them through the lens of political economy. This is an especially appropriate way to approach American history. In March of 1776, Adam Smith published his masterpiece,The Wealth of Nations,a few months before American colonists declared their independence from Great Britain. The imperial crisis had been building for some time and was a topic of international discussion. Smith delayed publication of his work for a year so that he could perfect a lengthy chapter on Anglo-American relations. ThusThe Wealth of Nations,one of the most important documents in a new branch of knowledge known aspolitical economy,was written with a close eye to events in the British colonies of North America, the colonies that were soon to become the United States. The fact that a large portion of Smith's book was framed as a history of England is equally important. Smith believed that history was one of the best ways to approach the study of political economy.Making a Nationshares that assumption; it takes political economy as an organizing theme for the history of the United States. What did Smith and his many American followers mean by "political economy?" They meant, firstly, that the economy itself is much broader than the gross national product, the unemployment rate, or the twists and turns of the stock market. They understood that economies are tightly bound to politics, that they are therefore the products of history rather than nature or accident. And just as men and women make history, so to do they make economies--in the way they work and organize their families as much as in their fiscal policies and tax structures. The term "political economy" is not commonly used any more, yet it is a way of thinking that is deeply embedded in American history. To this day we casually assume that different government policies create different "incentives" shaping everything from the way capital gains are invested to how parents raise their children, from how unmarried mothers on welfare can escape from poverty to how automobile manufacturers design cars for fuel efficiency and pollution control. This connection between government, the economy, and the relationships that shape the daily lives of ordinary men and women is the essence of political economy. But that connection points in different directions. Politics and the economy do not simply shape, but are in turn shaped by, the lives and cultural values of ordinary men and women. In short, political economy establishes a context that allows students to see the links between the particular and the general, between large and seemingly abstract forces such as "globalization" and the struggles of working parents who find they need two incomes to provide for their children.Making a Nationshows that such relationships were as important in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as they are today. So, for example, we begin this history of our nation by stepping back to view an early modern "world in moBoydston, Jeanne is the author of 'Making a Nation The United States and It's People' with ISBN 9780130337719 and ISBN 0130337714.