Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 July 2009
In recent years, it has become fashionable in scholarly and journalistic circles to employ the image concept as a means of describing and interpreting historical, political, or social realities. A number of attempts have been made recently to sketch the picture or to present the image of America. It is both interesting and puzzling that the image concept should be so widely employed; yet it is, in some sense, understandable. We live in an era of communications through images. We are confronted by them on all sides through the media of mass communication such as television, press, billboards, and radio. Professor Daniel Boorstin recently pointed out that our age is dominated not by ideas but by images. This has had already and will have increasingly momentous consequences both for our national self-understanding and for our stance before the world.
1. De Tocqueville, A., Democracy in America, trans. Reeve, H., (New York: J. E. H. G. Langley, 1841) I, 337.Google Scholar
2. Grund, F. J., The Americans in Their Moral, Social, and Political Relations, (London: Lougman, Rees, Orme, Brawn, Green & Longman, 1837) I, 294.Google Scholar
3. Ibid., p. 295.
4. De Toequeville, op. cit., II, 68.
5. Ibid., I, 342.
6. Bryce, J., The American Commonwealth, (Chicago: C. H. Sergei & Co., 1892) II, 596Google Scholar. A. De Tocqueville, op. cit., I, 332.
7. F. J. Grund, op. cit., I, 297f.
8. De Tocqueville, op. cit., 331.
9. F. J. Grund, op. cit., 298.
10. De Toequeville, op. cit., 335.
11. F. J. Grund, op. cit., 281.
12. Ibid. p. 307.
13. George, W. L., Hail, Columbia!, (London: Chapman & Hall, Ltd., 1923) p. 112.Google Scholar
14. Munsterberg, H., The Americans, trans. Halt, E. B., (New York: McClure, Phillip & Co., 1907) p. 500.Google Scholar
15. De Tocqueville, op. cit., II, 6f.
16. Ibid., p. 12.
17. Ibid., p. 28.
18. Ibid., pp. 10–11.
19. F. J. Grund, op. cit., I, 11.
20. De Toequeville, op. cit., I, 335.