American Renaissance painted decor: gilded stencilling on an olive green ground in the Office of the Secretary of the Navy in the Executive Office Building, 1879 (now the Vice President's Ceremonial Office)

The American Renaissance was the progressive and uplifting sense of self-confidence that Americans had in the period ca 1880 - 1914, a feeling that the United States was the heir to Greek democracy, Roman law, and Renaissance humanism. The preoccupation with a national identity could be expressed by modernism and technology as well as academic classicism. It found its cultural outlets in both Prairie School houses and in Beaux-Arts architecture and sculpture, in the "City Beautiful" movement, and high-minded American interference in the internal affairs of other states. Americans felt that their civilization was uniquely the modern heir, and that it had come of age.

The World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, 1893 was a demonstration that impressed Henry Adams, who was of the mind that in the future people would:

"talk about Hunt and Richardson, La Farge and St Gaudens, Burnham and McKay and Stanford White when their politicians and millionaires were quite forgotten."

— The Education of Henry Adams.

In the dome of the reading room at the new Library of Congress, Edwin Blashfield's murals were on the given theme, The Progress of Civilization.

The exhibition American Renaissance: 1876 - 1917 at the Brooklyn Museum, 1979, encouraged the revival of interest in this movement.

American Renaissance (AR) is also a monthly magazine published by the New Century Foundation, billed as a "literate, undeceived journal of race, immigration, and the decline of civility". Its detractors accuse it of being racist and white supremacist, although they usually concede that it is literate and intelligent. The magazine and foundation were created by Jared Taylor , with the first issue published in November 1990.

Among the most common themes in the magazine is that races differ in intelligence and behavioral features (see race and intelligence), that it is just as legitimate for white people to have loyalty to their own race and form organizations on their behalf as it is for other ethnic groups who have, e.g., the NAACP and La Raza Unida , that immigration to First World nations such as the United States should be greatly curtailed and race-conscious, and that there is strong media bias on the race question, for instance, that hate crimes against white people are vastly underreported whereas similar crimes against minorities receive great attention.

The organization holds bi-annual conferences, which are invariably greeted by protestors.

See also

• American Renaissance