The Intellectual Construction of America: Exceptionalism and Identity from 1492 to 1800. (1st edition.)

Jack Greene explores the changing definitions of America from the time of Europe's first contact with the New World through the establishment of the American republic.

Challenging historians who have argued that colonial American societies differed little from those of early modern Europe, he shows that virtually all contemporary observers emphasized the distinctiveness of the new worlds being created in America.

This concept of American societies' exceptionalism, suggests Greene, was a central component in their emerging identity.