首页
外语
计算机
考研
公务员
职业资格
财经
工程
司法
医学
专升本
自考
实用职业技能
登录
外语
From its birth, three powerful images have coloured ideas of what the United States was and what it stood for. One was "a city o
From its birth, three powerful images have coloured ideas of what the United States was and what it stood for. One was "a city o
admin
2017-03-15
36
问题
From its birth, three powerful images have coloured ideas of what the United States was and what it stood for. One was "a city on a hill", a model commonwealth for the rest of humankind. Another, in Walt Whitman’s phrase, was a "teeming nation of nations": a near-empty continent of immigration and fresh starts. A third, given currency by Alexis de Tocqueville in 1831, was of a new and exceptional kind of society not bound by prevailing rules of history.
Each picture stresses what makes America different from other countries. Thomas Bender, a professor of history and humanities at New York University, wants us to focus instead on what makes the United States the same. More exactly, he is urging us to re-think key episodes in America’s past by relating them to what was happening elsewhere in the world. The United States, he suggests, is less of a nation apart than super-patriots or America-haters might want to believe. His aim is not to belittle the American achievement but to break the habit of treating it as a virtually isolated feat of self-creation. National histories, he argues, are always local responses to broader trends, and to that rule the United States is no exception.
Five episodes form the core of this challenging essay. "The Ocean World" contrasts the conventional account of American beginnings, which stresses political ideals, religious freedom and economic opportunity, with a wider view that brings in sea-borne trade and slavery. Next, Mr. Bender treats the American Revolution as a by-product of the "great war" mat France and Britain fought off and on throughout the 18th century until the defeat of Napoleon in 1815. The American civil war (1861-1865) becomes part of the democratic era of nation building that began with the European revolutions of 1848.
The United States did not join Europe’s scramble for empire at the end of the 19th century as a colonising power. But it fought a terrible war to control the Philippines, set a pattern of intervention in its own hemisphere and in Asia, and established a doctrine of untrammeled sea power that survives to this day. For his fifth episode, Mr. Bender likens the progressive social reforms of the 1890s onwards to changes Europeans also made to temper the free market.
The breadth of view is exhilarating, and the reading daunting in scope. Mr. Bender dots his essay with awkward reminders that the American past was not a smooth, inevitable rise to superpowerdom and moral beaconhood. Yet "A Nation Among Nations" suffers from an ambiguity of aim. At several points Mr. Bender talks of a global story in which the United States has a local part. What is that story? He does not say. This is not his fault. Only the rashest of historians would nowadays dream of telling us, Hegel-wise, where the spirit of world history had come from and where it was headed.
Nor is gesturing towards "global trends" much help: ocean trade, nationalism and democracy, for example, are such broad categories they explain little of the local variation that puzzles us, especially when the locale is the United States, with its oddities—a high birth rate and strong religions, for example—that modern states are supposed not to have.
For the rest, Mr. Bender is more modest, and more successful. American failures and successes are usually so large it is easy to forget that they are seldom unique or insulated from events elsewhere. The simple-sounding truth that the United States never was, and never could be, isolated from the world is worth repeating, and Mr. Bender repeats it well.
According to the passage, the three images that describes the America does NOT include______.
选项
A、a city on the hill, and the one that was established from barren site
B、a country that can not be typecast into any established categories
C、immigrants moving from every corner of the world and form a new country
D、the country every historian wants to decode
答案
D
解析
转载请注明原文地址:https://kaotiyun.com/show/OwSO777K
本试题收录于:
NAETI高级口译笔试题库外语翻译证书(NAETI)分类
0
NAETI高级口译笔试
外语翻译证书(NAETI)
相关试题推荐
U.S.jobgrowthwassurprisinglystrongin2018,butdon’texpectthattohappenagainthisyear,witheconomicheadwindsintens
Howmuchphysicalactivityshouldteenagersdo,andhowcantheygetenough?Manyteenagersspendalotoftimebeingsedent
Butinadditiontobeingamanofsuperstition,Schmidtisaruralscientist,withtwomastersdegrees—oneeachinruraleducati
SurveysinBritainandAmericaconsistentlyshowthatthebiggestworryparentshavefortheirschool-agechildreniswhatthey
针对当前的形势,农业部要求各级畜牧兽医行政管理部门一定要按照全国防治高致病性禽流感指挥部的总体部署,总结前段防治工作的经验教训,将防治工作做得更加深入。//各地要继续保持高度戒备,做到思想不麻痹,领导不削弱,工作不松懈,确保机构的继续有效运转,确保各项防治
A、EastTimorvotedforindependence.B、TheIndonesian-militariesoccupiedEastTimor.C、Thesubsequentrecoverywasslow.D、Tour
A、Becausetheyhaddrivenforalongtime.B、Becausetheyhadbookedforanothertime.C、Becausetheyhadplannedtohavetheir
中国坚定不移地走和平发展道路,是基于中国国情的必然选择。1840年鸦片战争以后的100多年里,中国受尽了列强的欺辱。消除战争,实现和平,建设独立富强、民生幸福的国家,是近代以来中国人民孜孜以求的奋斗目标。今天的中国虽然取得了巨大的发展成就,但人口多,底子
A、Weshouldbuildmoreschoolstoensureoursuccess.B、Educationistheverycauseweshouldcontinuedevotingourselvesto.C、
A、Thehugerolesomepeopleplayintransmittingideas.B、Thetransmissionofepidemicdiseases.C、Exceptionalepidemicdiseases
随机试题
设则f(x)在()
非霍奇金淋巴瘤多发生于
下列关于器官移植的叙述错误的是
下列属于我国现行的建设项目财务管理制度的是()。
人口生育率降低和人均寿命延长造成的总人口中因年轻人口数量减少、年长人口数量增加而导致的老年人口比例相应增长的态势被称为()。
简述人民法院的基本制度。
下列关于OLE对象的叙述中,正确的是
将考生文件夹下JIAO\SHOU文件夹中的LONG.DOC文件重命名为DUA.DOC。
洗濯物はまだしめっぽいから、もっとかわかしたほうがいい。
A、 B、 C、 A
最新回复
(
0
)