American Blood
American Blood: A History of Spectacle and Power
University of California Press, forthcoming Spring 2027
A provocative history of the United States told through blood.
Nothing arrests us like blood. It seizes our attention, commanding us to act when it oozes into the open. Universally, blood has flowed at the center of life and culture, symbolically, metaphorically, and in the starkest, reddest material terms, representing both life and death. American public life, in its own distinctive fashion, has been tinged red with blood. American Blood focuses on public space in the United States, where blood has shocked us with its troubling appearances, catastrophically in the Civil War and its aftermath, and in the violence of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, not merely in foreign wars but in domestic strife, assassinations, and the medical crisis of HIV/AIDS.
American Blood reexamines key episodes in U.S. history to reveal blood as a main actor—how it has profoundly shaped our culture and politics. Zooming in on Jackie Kennedy’s red-stained suit or the biomedical bags of plasma unknowingly carrying the deadly HIV virus, we see that blood—as both symbol and substance—has the power to issue warnings, declare victimhood or martyrdom, articulate identity and belonging, and more.
This book examines not how blood works in the human body but how it has worked in the American public sphere historically—in ways symbolic and liquid, provoking and imposing material consequences.
Offering a fresh interpretation of our past, Matthew Dennis argues that blood has done more than stain the nation’s history—it has helped direct it. Blood has proven its ability to convey critical messages with unique authority and intensity, and in this moment of rising political violence, Dennis asks us to pay attention to what it has to say.
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“One of our finest narrative historians, Matthew Dennis never fails to elevate the unanticipated into the revelatory. In American Blood, he traces a word drenched in symbolic and fluid meaning, making it speak to the whole of the American past. Learned and wise, and at the same time a page-turner and bursting with ideas, this book is not to be missed.”—Philip J. Deloria, Leverett Saltonstall Professor of History, Harvard University
“In American Blood, Dennis autopsies the culture of the United States to reveal how the wounds of the Civil War, literal and metaphorical, have continued to fester in American life, shading attitudes towards race and righteousness, dispossession and decency. He shows us how blood can sanctify, horrify, and signify, and ultimately how spectacles of physical violence have come to play an outsize role in American politics. A compelling read, a tour-de-force of cultural history.”—Nicole Eustace, Julius Silver, Roslyn S. Silver, and Enid Silver Winslow Professor of History, New York University
“Blood is a measure of strength, but even more so of susceptibility and temporality. From its dramatic epigraphs to its exposition of violent events and rituals of purification, American Blood opens avenues of understanding reminiscent of the heralded writings of Yuval Noah Harari, whose book Sapiens awoke countless readers to continuities that defy our typical definitions of human progress.”—Andrew Burstein, author of Being Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History and Longing for Connection: Entangled Memories and Emotional Loss in Early America