While the concepts of manhood and masculinity have assumed an established place in gender and historical studies and masculinity is the subject of wide popular interest and discussion, there is currently no up-to-date, comprehensive historical overview of the subject. American Manhood will introduce readers to the dynamic interplay between the perceptions and experiences we call “masculinity” and major social, cultural, political, and economic developments in our history. Its central argument will be that Americans of different racial, class, ethnic, and regional groups have historically used concepts of masculine identity to gender relations of power and national belonging in ways that attempt either to entrench or to stake their claims to positions of authority and legitimacy in American life. Gender, the book assumes and will demonstrate, provides a crucial analytic category for understanding U.S. history.
The book will cover the period from roughly the early seventeenth century to the present. It will utilize a combination of chronological and topical approaches to present a state-of-the-art narrative, reflective of current historical scholarship, to a broad general audience. The anticipated audience will bring to their reading a familiarity with recent popular discussions of masculinity; American Manhood will use accessible prose to reveal to them the enormous complexity, diversity, and historical rootedness of the topic – to deepen readers’ understanding of a subject they thought they knew.
