| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Eric Rauchway. Blessed among Nations: How the World Made America. New York. Hill and Wang. 2006. Pp. 240. $24.00.
Eric Rauchway's brief but sweeping essay-style book is both suggestive and frustrating. A broad interpretation of the American past, it offers insights that might elude works of smaller scope. Rauchway suggests that a confluence of global trends helped to shape what he calls "Americanness": a set of unique characteristics that joined robust economic growth to a tradition of small government. He argues this case in thematic chapters that discuss capital, labor, welfare, and warfare before World War I. The interpretations in this short volume are well worth considering—in the best tradition of speculative historical essays—but readers may also find them stretched a bit thin.	1
Between the Civil War and World War I, in Rauchway's view, the United States developed its distinctive characteristics. This era of globalization, its openness arising partly out of Britain's imperial needs, brought capital, labor, and ideas from the rest of the world to the United States, and these global trends reinforced the nation's economic growth and its limited-state approach to governance.	2
Rauchway points out that the United States was the world's largest borrower of capital (and after World War I became its largest lender as well). Private bankers, not governments, built the infrastructure of America's transportation, communication, and industrial systems. The Federal Reserve System, when finally created in 1914, represented a peculiarly American compromise—a decentralized central bank.	. . .

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