The Routledge History of the American Dream

This handbook tracks the emergence, transformations, contradictions, and global circulation of the American Dream from the colonial period to the present.

Bringing together scholars from history, literary studies, American studies, media studies, and related fields, the volume demonstrates how the Dream has functioned simultaneously as a promise of opportunity and a mechanism of exclusion. The chapters examine how narratives of chosenness, settler colonialism, westward expansion, and imperial ambition laid the foundations for American exceptionalism long before the term itself was coined by James Truslow Adams in 1931. They explore how migrants from Europe, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean helped construct and reinterpret the Dream through mobility, labor, and struggles for belonging. Other chapters analyze labor movements, homeownership, automobility, masculinity, LGBTQ+ activism, neoliberalism, environmental crises, and popular culture as central sites where the Dream was produced, contested, and reinvented. Throughout, the handbook emphasizes that the American Dream has never been universally accessible nor confined to the borders of the United States. Instead, it emerges as a transnational and deeply intersectional formation whose enduring power lies precisely in its flexibility, contradictions, and emotional force.

The Routledge History of the American Dream will be of interest to scholars of American history, American studies, cultural studies, political history, and migration history. It is also suitable for general readers seeking a historically grounded understanding of the American Dream.