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This book is a study of public culture, concerned more with popular perceptions

of United States foreign policy than with the policy itself. Like practitioners

of the ‘‘new cultural history,’’ I approach popular perceptions primarily

through the prism of public discourse.1 Language shapes thought in significant

ways, and language in the public sphere sets the terms readily available to ordinarycitizens

for thinking aboutpublic issues.As Iuse it, the term‘‘public culture’’

is defined as the sphere in which the various segments of a society contend over

its development. Public culture is the arena in which social and political conflict

is played out and in which consensus is forged, manufactured, and maintained,

or not. It is the place where all the segments of the society either speak to each

other or fail to speak to each other—where they must contend if they wish to

advance their own interests and values or to influence the direction of the larger

society. It is a ‘‘place’’ that exists in print, on the airwaves, and in the meeting hall.

To the extent that nations are ‘‘imagined communities,’’ as the political scientist

BenedictAnderson has argued, they are imagined in and through the public culture.

2 I use the term‘‘discourse’’ primarily in its ordinary-language sense, rather

than in the more rarefied sense associated with poststructuralist literary criticism

and philosophy. Nonetheless, I believe that any given discourse develops

its own patterns, involving key words, phrases, metaphors, and images that set

the contours of legitimate discussion within its field. In examining public discourse

about America’s world role from  to , I have attempted to discern

the development of such patterns. Following DanielRodgers’s shrewd analysis of

‘‘keywords in American politics,’’ I treat public discourse as contested terrain