Books by Carrie Tirado Bramen

Amid the excesses of the Gilded Age, variety became for Americans a sign of national progress and development. Bramen pursues this idea through the works of regional and cosmopolitan writers, journalists, theologians, and politicians who rewrote the narrative of American exceptionalism through a celebration of variety.

The cliche of the Ugly American-loud, vulgar, materialistic, chauvinistic-still expresses what people around the world dislike about their Yankee counterparts. Carrie Tirado Bramen recovers the history of a different national archetype-the nice American-which has been central to ideas of American identity since the nineteenth century.