Making the Case for Continued National History in a Global Age

History and Theory 50 (February 2011), 1-70 © Wesleyan University 2011 ISSN: 0018-2656
amerIcaN HIStory IN a global age1
JoHaNN N. Neem
Without common ideas, there is no common action,
and without common action, men may still exist,
but they will not constitute a social body.2
—alexis de tocqueville
abStract
Historians around the world have sought to move beyond national history. In doing so, they
often conflate ethical and methodological arguments against national history. This essay,
first, draws a clear line between the ethical and the methodological arguments concerning
national history. It then offers a rationale for the continued writing of national history in
general, and american history in particular, in today’s global age.
the essay makes two main points. First, it argues that nationalism, and thus the national
histories that sustain national identities, are vital to liberal democratic societies because
they ensure the social bonds necessary to enable democratic citizens to sacrifice their im-
mediate interests for the common good. the essay then argues that new methodological
and historical work on the history of nations and nationalism has proven that nations are as
real as any other historical group. rejecting national history on critics’terms would require
rejecting the history of all groups. Instead, new methods of studying nations and national-
ism have reinforced rather than undermined the legitimacy of national history within the
discipline.
Keywords: nations, nationalism, national history, globalization, world history, atlantic his-
tory, cosmopolitanism, pluralism
We live in an age of globalization, or so we hear constantly. the formation of
global economic and information networks, as well as the development of global
political, economic, and civil society institutions, means that all of us are now
shaped by and involved in communities that transcend our national borders. many
historians have embraced the globalization paradigm and proclaimed that the era
1. an early draft of this paper was presented in 2007 to the centre for the Study of Historical
consciousness at the University of british columbia. I thank Peter Seixas for his invitation, and
michel ducharme for his comments on that occasion. gary gerstle and allan megill spurred me to
think through some difficult questions. thomas bender graciously responded to an earlier version
with constructive comments. conversations with Kate destler and a. ricardo lópez were essential
to refining my argument. I also thank thomas Fallace, Patrice Higonnet, david Hollinger, aaron
Sheehan-dean, rogers Smith, mart Stewart, John tambornino, and History and Theory’s editors.
the views expressed are my own.
2. alexis de tocqueville, Democracy in America, transl. arthur goldhammer [1835, 180] (New
york: library of america, 200), 89.

JoHaNN N. Neem
2
of national history is over.3
ever since david m. Potter warned that nations can
use historians as tools,american historians have been rightly wary of an uncritical
alliance between historical writing and nationalism.
globalization offers histori-
ans of the United States the opportunity to liberate themselves from the national
box. essay after essay, book after book, criticizes the tradition of national history
writing and celebrates the perspectives gained from a transnational vantage point.
other works turn to regional or local studies that examine groups that have been
below the national narrative’s radar screen. Few have stopped to mourn the pass-
ing of national history. even fewer have stepped up to defend it. given the deep
tradition of national history within the american historical profession, however,
historians must address its benefits as well as its flaws before deciding whether
to continue it.
by taking account of both the ethical implications and the methodological in-
novations that historians have brought to the study of national history, this essay
makes a case for the continued importance of national history in a global age. It
begins with an exploration of two of the most important ethical critiques of the
american national history tradition: the cosmopolitan and the pluralist critiques.
the issue for both is identity, namely which identity historians ought to support: a
national identity; a universal, cosmopolitan human identity; or the multiple alter-
native identities people hold, including those concerned with race/ethnicity, gen-
der, class, sexuality, and religion. critics of national history assume rightly that
the writing, reading, and teaching of history play a fundamental role in shaping
the identities—the self-conceptions—of history’s consumers. Here historians are
concerned with what Kwame anthony appiah has called the “ethics of identity”
and its relationship to the historical craft.5
3. akira Iriye, “the Internationalization of History,” American Historical Review 9, no. 1
(1989), 1-10; Ian tyrrell, “american exceptionalism in an age of International History,” American
Historical Review 96, no. (1991), 1031-55; Writing National Histories: Western Europe since
1800, ed. Stefan berger, mark donovan, and Kevin Passmore (london and New york: routledge,
1999); organization of american Historians, The La Pietra Report: A Report to the Profession, ed.
thomas bender (http://www.oah.org/activities/lapietra/final.html [accessed September 27, 2010]);
eric Foner, “american Freedom in a global age,” American Historical Review 106, no. 1 (2001),
1-16; Rethinking American History in a Global Age, ed. thomas bender (berkeley: University of
california Press, 2002); dorothy ross, “liberalism and american exceptionalism,” Intellectual
History Newsletter 2 (2002), 72-83; c. a. bayly et al., “aHr conversation: on transnational
History,” American Historical Review 111, no. 5 (2006), 11-16; raymond grew, “expanding
Worlds of World History,” Journal of Modern History 78 (2006), 878-898; carl J. guarneri, America
in the World: United States History in Global Context (New york: mcgraw-Hill, 2007); Stefan
berger, “towards a global History of National Historiographies,” in Writing the Nation: A Global
Perspective, ed. Stefan berger (basingstoke, UK: Palgrave macmillan, 2007), 1-29; christopher
grasso and Karin Wulf, “Nothing Says ‘democracy’ like a Visit from the Queen: reflections on
empire and Nation in early american Histories,” Journal of American History 95, no. 3 (2008), 76-
781. See also the Journal of American History’s two special issues on transnational history edited by
david thelen, JAH 86, no. 2 (September 1999) and 86, no. 3 (december 1999).
. david m. Potter, “the Historian’s Use of Nationalism and Vice Versa,” American Historical
Review 67, no. (1962), 92-950. See also arthur Schlesinger, Jr., “Nationalism and History,”
Journal of Negro History 5, no. 1 (1969), 19-31.
5. Kwame anthony appiah, The Ethics of Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).
For a recent critical appraisal of the effort to connect historical scholarship with identity forma-
tion, see allan megill, “Historical representation, Identity, allegiance,” in Narrating the Nation:
Representations in History, Media and the Arts, ed. Stefen berger et al. (New york: berghahn books,
2008), 19-3.

amerIcaN HIStory IN a global age 3
this essay argues for the continued value of national history by invoking mi-
chael Walzer’s distinction between thin and thick languages. thin language, Wal-
zer writes, is composed of liberalism’s abstract claims about human dignity and
freedom. It reminds us of the rights belonging to all human beings and our obliga-
tion to care for all persons. Nonetheless, Walzer argues, our deepest commitments
emerge in real communities through thick language, the specific and rich histories
of the particular communities to which we belong.6
even as post-national histo-
rians seek to move us to thinner, less robust notions of national community, this
essay concludes that americans and the world continue to need thick national his-
tories that appeal to a particular political community’s shared past and symbols.
calls to move beyond national history are as much methodological as ethical,
however. critics argue that national narratives hide more than they reveal. the
final sections of this paper respond that nations are as real (and are thus as legiti-
mate objects of historical inquiry) as any other group. despite the hope of some
scholars that studies of the historical processes of nation-making would weaken
the nation’s hold over us, recent work has shown how the nation became a social
fact. Unless historians are willing to abandon the study of groups, nations remain
a legitimate lens through which to view the past.
Nationalism may be distinct from liberalism, but liberal democracy, this es-
say argues, requires nationalism; the two are historically and theoretically inter-
twined. Historically, liberal democracy has presupposed bounded territorial com-
munities. In liberal theory from John locke to John rawls, individuals in the
state of nature did not create global communities but particular polities with ter-
ritorial limits—hence the discussion of the status of foreigners in locke’s Second
Treatise.7
theoretically, nationalism and liberalism were and remain premised on
similar assumptions about the integrity of the interior moral life of the individual
person or nation-state, and the need for rights—among individuals within a polity
and among states in the international arena—to protect this integrity.8
the liberal
model of the nation-state also exerts power in the modern world by determining
the form groups must take if they wish to be recognized by the existing world
order. aspiring to sovereignty, therefore, requires giving expression to the inter-
national community’s presuppositions about what makes a legitimate nation.9
although directed primarily to historians of the United States, many of whom
also consider themselves american, this essay’s concerns are not limited to amer-
6. michael Walzer, Thick and Thin: Moral Argument at Home and Abroad (Notre dame, IN:
University of Notre dame Press, 199).
7. craig calhoun, Nations Matter: Culture, History, and the Cosmopolitan Dream (london:
routledge, 2007), chap. 2. For a discussion of liberalism and community, see michael J. Sandel,
Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (New york: cambridge University Press, 1982).
8. Jean bethke elshtain, Sovereignty: God, State, and Self (New york: basic books, 2008);
Prasenjit duara, “Imperialism and Nationalism in the twentieth century,” in Sovereignty and
Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern (lanham, md: rowman and littlefield, 2003),
1-16; Nicholas onuf and Peter S. onuf, Nations, Markets, and War: Modern History and the
American Civil War (charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 200); charles taylor, Modern
Social Imaginaries (durham, Nc: duke University Press, 200), chap. 8.
9. calhoun, Nations Matter; duara, “Imperialism and Nationalism”; Peter S. onuf, “Nations,
revolutions, and the end of History,” in Revolutionary Currents: Nation Building in the Transatlantic
World, ed. michael morrison (lanham, md: rowman and littlefeld, 200), 173-188, esp. 183-86.
See also John rawls, The Law of Peoples (cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1999).

JoHaNN N. Neem

ican historians. It addresses broader ethical and methodological questions that
concern all practicing historians. It responds to a global examination of the rela-
tionship between national history and power and whether historians, by carving
up the world into national units, have imposed and naturalized the nation in ways
that limit the possibility for a better future and a more accurate understanding of
the past. In the spirit of the essay’s central argument, I believe that by speaking
as an american and as a historian of the United States, my argument will reso-
nate more deeply among non-americans and non-americanists who struggle with
similar issues in their own national and disciplinary communities.
I
Nations form the dominant paradigm by which we organize the past. History de-
partments offer jobs and courses in the histories of specific nations; researchers
are trained to write within specific national historical traditions. The problem with
this structure, cosmopolitan critics of national history argue, is that american his-
torians and, more important, the readers they reach and the students they teach,
learn to think of the nation as a natural framework for dividing humanity. rather
than consider humanity a single whole, historians are part of the process that di-
vides the world into competing peoples. to such critics as akira Iriye, historians
should instead start “thinking of american history not just as national history,
or even as part of transatlantic history, but also as an aspect of human history.”
In fact, to Iriye, any effort “to confirm local, national, or cultural distinctions is
counter to the ideal of internationalization.”10
William mcNeill considers the ideal
of “national ethnic unity” to be “barbarous.”11
In their recent collection about na-
tional historical writing in europe, Stefan berger and his co-authors agree, warn-
ing today’s historians about “the fallacies and dangers of any attempt to provide
historical legitimacy to forms of national identity,” and concluding that “histori-
ans today would do well not to continue the unholy alliance with governments and
states in constructing diverse forms of national identity.”12
10. Iriye, “Internationalization of History,” 3. See also thomas bender, A Nation among Nations:
America’s Place in World History (New york: Hill and Wang, 2006); guarneri, America in the World;
William H. mcNeill, “mythistory, or truth, myth, History, and Historians,” American Historical
Review 91, no. 1 (1986), 1-10. For theoretical arguments in favor of abandoning national identity
from a cosmopolitan perspective, see Jürgen Habermas, “citizenship and National Identity: Some
reflections on the Future of europe,” Praxis International 12, no. 1 (1992), 1-19; Habermas, “the
european Nation-State—Its achievements and Its limits. on the Past and Future of Sovereignty and
citizenship,” in Mapping the Nation, ed. gopal balakrishnan (london and New york: Verso, 1996),
281-28; martha c. Nussbaum, For Love of Country?, ed. Joshua cohen (boston: beacon Press,
2002); Peter Singer, One World: The Ethics of Globalization, 2nd
ed. (New Haven: yale University
Press, 200); george Kateb, “Is Patriotism a mistake?,” in Patriotism and Other Mistakes (New
Haven: yale University Press, 2006), 3-20. recently, martha Nussbaum has modified her initial
position rejecting nationalism and national history outright, arguing instead that a certain level of col-
lective identity is permissible in liberal democracies. See Nussbaum, “toward a globally Sensitive
Patriotism,” Daedalus 137, no. 3 (2008), 78-93.
11. William H. mcNeill, Poly-Ethnicity and National Unity in World History (toronto: University
of toronto Press, 1986), 59.
12. Stefan berger, mark donovan, and Kevin Passmore, “apologias for the Nation-state in
Western europe since 1800,” in Writing National Histories, 13.

No historian of the United States has been more committed to moving ameri-
can national history to a cosmopolitan framework than thomas bender. In his
edited collection Rethinking American History in a Global Age (2002) and his
recent book A Nation among Nations: America’s Place in World History (2006),
bender argues that by privileging one set of people (one’s co-nationals) over oth-
ers we make unethical distinctions between ourselves and the rest of the world. at
a time of “heightened awareness of both transnational connections and particular-
istic solidarities,” or globalism and pluralism, bender urges american historians
to tell new stories that can make better sense of our place in the world.13
bender
hopes that globalization will allow us to embrace the universal. americans, bend-
er writes, should not be just “proud nationals” but also “humble citizens of the
world.”1
Historians should write narratives that emphasize the interconnected-
ness of the human species instead of those that carve us up into distinct clans. He
accuses national historians of “a narrow parochialism at a time when we need a
wider cosmopolitanism.”15
bender worries that cosmopolitan history will not have a constituency in a
world still defined by nation-states. Thus, pragmatically, he advocates not aban-
doning national history but making it a “history within a larger history, a his-
tory among histories.” By rendering American history a subfield in world history,
bender hopes to appeal to existing readers’ nationalism while also transforming
them into “rooted cosmopolitans, not nationalists.”16
In other words, bender rec-
ognizes a continued role for nation-states (and thus for national history) but hopes
to reframe our national identities and national narratives so that our starting point
is the globe rather than our own parochial community. If all human beings are
equally worthy of our respect, bender argues, why should we reinforce particular-
ism over human solidarity?
13. thomas bender, “Historians, the Nation, and the Plenitude of Narratives,” in Rethinking
American History, 1-2.
1. bender, A Nation among Nations, 1.
15. Ibid., 3. bender did not initially urge historians to take the globe as context. In the mid-1980s,
he was more concerned that post-1960s scholarship threatened to fragment the possibility for syn-
thetic narrative, and thus for social unity. local studies and studies of various social groups abounded,
bender then noted, but historians feared writing a new national narrative that, while inclusive of
these various groups, also provided a shared story for all americans. In his 1986 “Wholes and Parts,”
bender acknowledged that the nation-state remained the dominant paradigm for historical writing
but hoped that historians would construct a more cohesive national narrative. He proposed then “a
national synthesis, but with ‘the nation’ understood in a new way, as the ever changing, always con-
tingent outcome of a continuing contest among social groups and ideas for the power to define public
culture, thus the nation itself.” bender then suggested that competing synthetic national narratives are
vital to democratic civic life because they offer “images of society” that allow self-reflection. In A
Nation of Nations bender extends his concern for how to connect parts to wholes beyond the nation
to how nation-states (parts) fit together in a global context (whole). thomas bender, “Wholes and
Parts: the Need for Synthesis in american History,” Journal of American History 73, no. 1 (1986),
120-136, quoted at 122, 126. as editor of the Journal of American History, david thelen organized
a roundtable in response to bender’s call for synthesis in which skeptical appraisals were offered by
Nell Painter, richard Wrightman Fox, and roy rosenzweig, all of whom worried that a synthetic
narrative would favor certain groups (those with power) over others. See Journal of American History
7, no. 1 (1987), 107-130.
16. thomas bender, “the boundaries and constituencies of History,” American Literary History
18, no. 2 (2006), 267-282; bender, A Nation among Nations.

JoHaNN N. Neem
6
Pluralists approach the world from a different perspective than do cosmopoli-
tan critics of national history. rather than assume a universal history, they worry
that any master narrative, including those like bender’s that posit a universal hu-
manity, will threaten people’s other identities. In Prasenjit duara’s words, “the
process of remaking people according to alien (modern) values—often violent-
ly—is a form of cultural imperialism.”17
Inspired by michel Foucault’s theory of
power, pluralists view national narratives as a way of disciplining a social body
and of writing out the margins.18
david thelen, the former editor of the Journal of
American History, argues that national histories arose alongside nation-states and
serve to legitimize and reinforce nation-states’ authority: “History was invented
and has largely served to provide stories that link individuals to the nation—to
make the nation seem a logical or desirable or inevitable fulfillment of experi-
ences for diverse individuals.” thelen is critical of a historical tradition whose
primary function, as he sees it, is to reinforce the american nation-state’s political
power. He condemns professional historians who, in the latter nineteenth century,
sought to eradicate americans’ plural identities in order to forge national unity
through a common national narrative. Instead, thelen hopes that globalization
has taught us that our identities are shaped within multiple communities within
and across national borders. He urges historians to focus on the experiences of
individuals and groups that do not fit into national narratives. Historians should
be pluralists, celebrating the diverse identities of peoples in the past. National
histories, he argues, impose a common narrative over a given territory, silencing
groups that do not fit in. In essence, Thelen concludes that national history is un-
ethical because it delegitimizes the more authentic identities of ordinary people.
Invoking mexican immigrants who live and have familial and economic ties on
both sides of the U.S.–mexico border, thelen reminds us that such people’s his-
tories cannot be told through the lens of either american or mexican history. by
refusing to speak with, to, and for such populations, historians rob these groups of
their past. National historiography simply cannot capture the complex identities
of those living in the borderlands, in the spaces between nations, groups that are
becoming increasingly common in a mobile global society.19
the debate over the ethics of national history (and thus national identity) is
complex. Scholars continue to argue over whether nation-states and their cor-
responding national identities help humans flourish and whether they can be jus-
tified in liberal societies.20
Historians too must consider the ethical benefits of
17. duara, “Imperialism and Nationalism in the twentieth century,” 18-19.
18. duara, “Imperialism and Nationalism in the twentieth century”; duara, “transnationalism
and the challenge to National Histories,” in Rethinking American History, 25-6; and duara,
“Postcolonial History,” in A Companion to Western Historical Thought, ed. lloyd Kramer and Sarah
maza (oxford: blackwell, 2002), 17-31. See also Stuart Hall, “Who Needs Identity?” in Questions
of Cultural Identity, ed. Hall and Paul du gay (london and thousand oaks, ca: Sage Publications,
1996), 1-17.
19. david thelen, “making History and making the United States,” Journal of American Studies
32, no. 3 (1998), 373-397. on this point, see also carroll Smith-rosenberg, This Violent Empire: The
Birth of an American National Identity (chapel Hill: University of North carolina Press, 2010).For a
good example of such a borderlands history for an earlier period, see brian delay, War of a Thousand
Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S.–Mexican War (New Haven: yale University Press, 2008).
20. For important introductions to this debate, see Nussbaum, For Love of Country?; calhoun,

national history along with its costs. So far, historical journals have given more
prominence to national history’s critics, perhaps because our profession favors
the new over the old, or perhaps because we have accepted their critiques without
fully recognizing what is lost when we abandon national history. as historians
concerned about the ethical implications of our practice, however, we deserve to
hear both sides of the debate.
two questions emerge from american national history’s critics. First, are we
justified in favoring certain groups over others if we believe that all human beings
are created equal? Second, if we can favor certain groups over others, should na-
tion-states be one of them?
the place to begin answering these questions is with a recognition that com-
munities are ethically important because they shape our identities and our
conception(s) of the good. this is a sociological fact of human existence. Who we
are is closely connected to the communities to which we belong.21
Nation-states,
including the United States, are not just voluntary communities, of course. Na-
tional identity is reinforced by law, in schools, through patronage of the arts, and
by managing movement between borders. Nation-states seek to shape the identi-
ties of their citizens in order to forge and to sustain a territorial community over
time. In reinhold Niebuhr’s characterization, “nations are territorial societies,
the cohesive power of which is supplied by the sentiment of nationality and the
authority of the state.”22
more recently, sociologist craig calhoun writes that na-
tionalism “is the use of the category ‘nation’ to organize perceptions of basic hu-
man identities, grouping people together with fellow nationals and distinguishing
Nations Matter; appiah, Ethics of Identity; The Morality of Nationalism, ed. robert mcKim and
Jeff mcmahan (New york: oxford University Press, 1997). See also Seyla benhabib, Another
Cosmopolitanism (the berkeley tanner lectures) (New york: oxford University Press, 2006).
21. this is the essential lesson learned from the communitarian critique of liberalism. See michael
Walzer, “the communitarian critique of liberalism,” in New Communitarian Thinking: Persons,
Virtues, Institutions, and Communities, ed. amitai etzioni (charlottesville: University of Virginia
Press, 1995), 52-70; Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice; robert N. bellah et al., Habits
of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (berkeley: University of california
Press, 1985). See also duara, “transnationalism,” in Rethinking American History, 25-6; appiah,
The Ethics of Identity; mcNeill, “mythistory.” For a critical assessment of the communitarian starting
point, see Janna thompson, “community Identity and World citizenship,” in Re-Imagining Political
Community: Studies in Cosmopolitan Democracy, ed. daniele archibugi et al. (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1998), 179-197.
22. reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics [1932]
(lousiville, Ky: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001), 83. No recent critic of nationalism has
achieved Niebuhr’s clarity or force. Niebuhr argues that even if individual people are capable of
behaving morally, people in groups cannot. groups have “a collective egoism” that conflates group
interest with ethical activity. Nationalism “transmutes individual unselfishness into national egoism.”
In other words, when we sacrifice our individual interests for those of the nation, we are in fact
promoting our own egoistic interests without acknowledging them since we are in turn served by the
nation; national interests are no less just and good in the international arena than individual interests
within a society, yet we treat citizens who promote the national interest as heroes. Justice is universal,
but nations ask a citizen to limit its application to particular groups within the world, to act as if our
own “special and unique community” is one that “embodies universal values and ideals.” Niebhur
extended his analysis to the relations between classes within a nation. Not only do nations serve their
own collective interests against those of other nations, but often within nations the privileged classes
serve themselves and use nationalism to secure the loyalty of the lower classes. Whether to nation
or class, group loyalties interfere with the universal dictates of justice (Niebuhr, Moral Man and
Immoral Society, esp. 83-112, quotes at xxv, 91, 95).

JoHaNN N. Neem
8
them from members of other nations.”23
americans have invested vast resources
to ensure that the United States is not just a site of history but is also an imagined
community. National history is one major prop in this enterprise. In any kind of
community a shared history forges a shared identity by connecting our present
lives to a collective story that constitutes who we are.2
by emphasizing the teach-
ing of national history, americans hope to sustain, or, in the case of immigrants,
create, a common identity that connects past events that took place in a particular
geography with the present generation.
the importance we assign to this project was demonstrated during the 1990s
“History Wars.” although many americans agree that we need to know more
about our national past, we disagree about the particular narrative. When a team
of scholars led by gary Nash unveiled a proposed set of voluntary national history
standards for america’s schools, many americans balked. to critics, Nash’s stan-
dards favored formerly marginalized peoples rather than traditional stories; it had
a critical edge that some americans found unsuitable for fostering national iden-
tity and patriotism. National history is so important to americans that the U.S.
Senate took time out of its busy schedule to condemn the proposed standards.
the debate between the standards’ advocates and their critics did not concern
the legitimacy of national history; instead, both sides’ commitment to particular
national narratives demonstrates their awareness of a link between how we speak
about the past and who we are in the present. the power of history, in essence, is
its ability to tell collective narratives that shape present identity.25
even if collective stories about the past shape identity, there is no reason that
the relevant communities need be territorial nation-states. Identities depend on
networks, as bender argues in one of his earlier works: “territorially based in-
teraction represents only one pattern of community, a pattern that becomes less
and less evident over the course of american history. a preoccupation with ter-
ritory thus ultimately confuses our understanding of community.” He urges us to
think about community as an experience rather than a place. to understand the
communities in which individuals place themselves we must be attentive to the
“network of social relations in which the individual is embedded” even when
these networks transcend assumed territorial limits.26
Similarly, thomas Haskell
argues that markets can generate feelings of responsibility between strangers
separated by vast distances. Wondering how abolitionists connected their actions
23. calhoun, Nations Matter, 39. For a critical perspective, see rogers brubaker, “migration,
membership, and the modern Nation-State: Internal and external dimensions of the Politics of
belonging,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 1, no. 1 (2010), 61-78.
2. on the role of stories in forging collective identities, see rogers Smith, Stories of Peoplehood:
The Politics and Morals of Political Membership (cambridge, UK: cambridge University Press,
2003). the phrase “imagined community” is from benedict anderson, Imagined Communities:
Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (london: Verso, 1983).
25. gary Nash et al. History on Trial: Culture Wars and the Teaching of the Past (New york:
Knopf, 1997); diane ravitch and arthur Schlesinger, “the New Improved History Standards,”
Wall Street Journal (april 3, 1996). See also david lowenthal, “Identity, Heritage, and History,”
in Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity, ed. John r. gillis (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 199), 1-57; mcNeill, “mythistory.”
26. thomas bender, Community and Social Change in America (New brunswick, NJ: rutgers
University Press, 1978), 6-7, 122.

to the sufferings of enslaved african americans, Haskell concludes that markets
teach us “to attend to the remote consequences of one’s acts.”abolitionists argued
that everyone involved in an economic system that sustains slavery is morally
responsible for it, including Northern merchants, manufacturers, and consumers.27
today’s humanitarians who connectamericans’appetite for consumer goods with
the exploitation of workers in distant countries are, by linking local activity to its
distant consequences, also participating in a translocal community generated and
connected by global markets.
If identities can be forged in both territorial and non-territorial communities,
why has nationalism emerged as the dominant form of historical identity? one
reason is that the modern history discipline and modern nationalism arose to-
gether, and thus historical writing quickly oriented itself around nations.28
Since
nation-states rely on their story being the dominant story within a territory, they
have sought to ensure national history’s success. Simultaneously, the success of
american nationalism infused historians with a desire to write the national story.
yet human beings are members of multiple communities each of which may tell,
and some of which do tell, their own stories. these stories can be sub-national,
as in the case of some minority communities in the United States, or they can
be transnational, as in the case of thelen’s mexican immigrants, some religious
communities, such multinational corporations as general electric, or such inter-
national groups as greenpeace, amnesty International, and al-Qaeda. even if we
are sociologically communal beings, then, there are many communities to which
we may belong.29
the nation-state is just one of these actual and potential com-
munities, and national history is just one of the actual and potential collective
stories we can tell about the past. the question remains whether nations deserve
our loyalty, and therefore whether it is legitimate for historians to continue to nar-
rate national stories.
27. thomas l. Haskell, “capitalism and the origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility, Part 2,”
American Historical Review 90, no. 3 (1985), 57-566, quoted at 560.
28. For a discussion of the relationship between the rise of nation-states and history, see allan
Smith, “Seven Narratives in North american History: thinking the Nation in canada, Quebec and
the United States,” in berger, ed., Writing the Nation, 63-83; duara, “transnationalism”; Imagined
Histories: American Historians Interpret the Past, ed. anthony molho and gordon S. Wood
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998); Joyce appleby, lynn Hunt, and margaret Jacob,
Telling the Truth about History (New york: Norton, 199), 91-125. See also marcus gräser, “World
History in a Nation-State: the transnational disposition in Historical Writing in the United States,”
Journal of American History 95, no. (2009), 1038-1052.
29. For a discussion concerning the tension between territorial national civic loyalty and that owed
to transnational religious or other kinds of groups, see yael tamir, Liberal Nationalism (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1993). tamir argues that nations are any communities with a shared past
that can make legitimate claims on their members. Nations include, for example, the Irish or Jewish
diaspora, even if their populations are scattered across the globe. Shared identities need not be limited
to geographical spaces with political boundaries. In fact, tamir argues that nations and states must
be separated from each other since, in tamir’s opinion, “most contemporary states are multinational
and under these circumstances, the demand that a state should reflect one national culture entails
harsh implications for members of minority groups” (10). In other words, individuals can choose their
national identities independent of their state-based citizenship and civic obligations. tamir’s prescrip-
tion favors what we would call transnational communities—which tamir labels “nations”—over
territorial ones and would disconnect national identity from citizenship and the political rights and
obligations that citizenship in a polity brings.

JoHaNN N. Neem
50
americans need national history because liberal democratic politics depends
on fostering territorial communities.30
National history’s critics assume that lib-
eral democratic politics can survive even if our identities are turned toward the
particular or the universal. yet, as charles taylor argues, democracies require “a
strong form of cohesion” to be successful. liberal democracies depend on the
willingness of citizens to play by the rules—for minorities to accept their losses,
for majorities to respect the rights of minorities. In a democracy, persuasion must
be used instead of force or violence to achieve one’s political goals. For a citizen
to be willing to sacrifice his or her immediate goals she must consider herself part
of an “ongoing collective agency,” taylor writes.31
In fact, taylor argues, without
some emotional or affectionate bond—without nationalism—citizens will have
little reason to put aside their immediate interests and desires for the good of
the whole, including the rule of law: “only those with a supermuscular Kantian
conscience would be willing to knuckle under to a majority with which they felt
no links.”32
because democracies rely on voluntary consent they actually require
from us “much more solidarity and much more commitment to one another in our
joint political project than was demanded by the hierarchical and authoritarian
societies of yesteryear.”33
like taylor, calhoun argues that democratic politics
“requires thinking of ‘the people’ as active and coherent and oneself as both a
member and an agent” and that liberal theory has always assumed, by necessity,
the existence of a bounded people. even if liberalism’s values are universal, their
implementation within a democratic framework, calhoun concludes, requires so-
cial solidarity: “democracy depends on social solidarity and social institutions.
Neither is given to human beings as a matter of nature; they must be achieved
through human imagination and action—in short, through history.” Nationalism
provides the “cultural supports for social integration” without which democratic
politics would be impossible.3
even if liberal democracies need cohesion between citizens—the kind provided
by nationalism, and thus by national histories—this need cannot warrant the un-
justifiable exclusion of minorities from the process of shaping what constitutes
a democratic society’s national identity. taylor acknowledges that nation-states
historically have committed violence against domestic minorities in order to forge
national homogeneity. although nation-states always exclude those outside their
borders from participating in their political processes, it is unjustifiable for liberal
democratic societies to exclude domestic minorities simply to protect an exist-
ing national identity. Instead, national identities in a liberal democracy, including
those depicted in the historical narratives we tell about ourselves, are constantly
30. although national identity may be a good in all kinds of societies, my discussion here is limited
to the relationship between nationalism and liberal democracy. For the central importance of liberal-
ism as a precondition for an ethically justifiable nationalism, see Nussbaum, “toward a globally
Sensitive Patriotism.”
31. charles taylor, “No community, No democracy, Part 1,” The Responsive Community 13, no.
(2003), 17-27.
32. charles taylor, “liberal Politics and the Public Sphere,” in New Communitarian Thinking,
20. See also charles taylor, “Why democracy Needs Patriotism,” in For Love of Country, 119-21.
33. taylor, “No community, No democracy, Part 1.”
3. calhoun, Nations Matter, 17, 152.

made and remade by citizens engaged in deliberation: “Political identities have to
be worked out, negotiated, creatively compromised between peoples who have to
or want to live together under the same political roof.”35
taylor’s recognition that minorities have often been silenced in the process
of nation-making is an important one that echoes pluralist critics of the ameri-
can national history tradition. many critics of national history agree with thelen
that the american liberal tradition has from its beginning been premised on eras-
ing the presence of others—or, worse, as edmund morgan argued in his clas-
sic American Slavery, American Freedom, on defining itself against the other.36
rogers Smith’s study of american citizenship laws between the revolution and
1900, for example, concludes that since independence, americans have combined
liberal universalism with such ascriptive identities as race, ethnicity, class, and
gender. the american liberal tradition, from this perspective, has always been
corrupted by illiberal assumptions.37
gary gerstle has found a similar tension be-
tween the universal aspects of liberal “civic nationalism” in the United States and
the ethno-racial particularism of its application during the twentieth century.38
In
his 2001 aHa presidential address, eric Foner suggested that the tension between
american freedom’s universal promise to the world and its parochial application
at home has been a constant in american history.39
one need not challenge these
conclusions; they are unfortunately all too true. despite american liberalism’s
claims to universal equality, it is undeniable that the history of american democ-
racy has more than its share of illiberal assumptions about the economic, racial,
ethnic, gender, and sexual bases for membership in the polity, and that these as-
sumptions have spawned violence against targeted groups.
the importance of the pluralist critique lies not in its rejection of national his-
tory, however, but in its effort to transform the american narrative.0
the story
americans tell themselves about themselves is always changing. thanks in part
to critical analyses of american history, many of which emerged as new people
and ideas entered the profession in the 1960s and 1970s, today’s national narra-
tive is much more aware of past abuses and wrongs, and much more inclusive.
take, for example, gary Nash’s recent synthetic account of the american revolu-
tion, The Unknown American Revolution. Pulling together scholarship from the
past thirty years, Nash examines how the revolution affected and was affected
by the actions of Native americans, african americans, women, and laborers.
35. charles taylor, “No community, No democracy, Part 2,” The Responsive Community 1, no.
1 (2003–200), 15-25. See also calhoun, Nations Matter, 17-168.
36. edmund S. morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia
(New york: Norton, 1975). See also ronald takaki, Iron Cages: Race and Culture in 19th
-Century
America (New york: oxford University Press, 1990) and, more recently, Smith-rosenberg, This
Violent Empire.
37. rogers Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (New Haven:
yale University Press, 1997). See also barbara young Welke, “law, Personhood, and citizenship
in the long Nineteenth century: the borders of belonging,” in The Cambridge History of Law
in America. Volume 2: The Long Nineteenth Century (1789–1920), ed. michael grossberg and
christopher tomlins (New york: cambridge University Press, 2008), 35-386.
38. gary gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2001).
39. Foner, “american Freedom in a global age.”
0. See, for example, gary gerstle, “liberty, coercion, and the making of americans,” Journal
of American History 8, no. 2 (1997), 52-558.

JoHaNN N. Neem
52
Nash’s story is critical of the ways in which americans have treated marginalized
groups, but it is also an effort to reframe the revolution within national history.
Its moral strength comes from its self-conscious effort to teach americans about
themselves. In doing so it undermines older narratives about the revolution while
reinforcing the strength of the national community. the past limits of american
liberalism, then, are not a sufficient reason to reject writing national history but, if
Nash is an example, a reason to write more of it.1
National history is a civic enterprise, and at least one of its goals is to bring
americans together around shared stories, whether critical or celebratory. Nash’s
book, as well as his own work in crafting national history standards, demonstrates
that this effort need not lead to unthinking jingoism. there is, however, a danger
to carrying the pluralist critique too far—as far as thelen and duara do, for exam-
ple—because it could undermine the possibility of shared civic stories, and thus
the possibility of national community. Nash instead asks us to rewrite national
history, not to abandon it. He hopes we will embrace a more inclusive, and more
democratic, national story. In Nash’s example, multiculturalism is not against na-
tionalism, it is part of it.2
a truly democratic narrative would, as Nash argues,
include many groups, but it would also seek to teachamericans about themselves,
reinforcing americans’ commitment to their nation.
II
National identity is not just a prerequisite for liberal democracy; it furthers the
goals of social and economic justice within democratic societies by using national
sentiment to urge citizens to sacrifice for a common good. Calhoun concludes
that nationalism “helps mobilize collective commitment to public institutions,
projects, and debates” and “encourages mutual responsibility across divisions of
class and region.”3
Similarly, daniel bell argues that nations are “communities of
memory” which “carry a moral tradition . . . which entails an obligation to sustain
and promote the ideals and aspirations embedded in their history through memory
and hope.”
by binding individuals together via a common past and present, na-
tions help individuals work collectively toward a common, better future. Unlike
non-national group identities, american nationalism connects a territorial com-
1. gary b. Nash, The Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the
Struggle to Create America (New york: Viking, 2005). See also Nash, “History for a democratic
Society: the Work of all the People,” in Historical Literacy: The Case for History in American
Education, ed. Paul gagnon and the bradley commission on History in Schools (New york:
macmillan, 1989), 23-28. See Smith, Stories of Peoplehood, 15-16, on the ways in which com-
peting particularistic (national) accounts of peoplehood can support and promote universal liberal
ideals.
2. compare duara, “transnationalism,” and duara, “Postcolonial History” to Nash, “History for
a democratic Society.” See also arthur m. Schlesinger, Jr., The Disuniting of America (New york:
Norton, 1992).
3. calhoun, Nations Matter, 17-19.
. daniel bell, Communitarianism and Its Critics (New york: oxford University Press, 1993),
126. See also todd S. gitlin, “the Intellectuals and the Flag,” in The Intellectuals and the Flag (New
york: columbia University Press, 2006), 125-156.

munity to the democratic state that governs it, allowing citizens to become partici-
pants in both a shared past and future.
Nationalism can serve this important civic purpose because it is not just a coat
one wears but is ideally constitutive of one’s identity. as calhoun notes, “tradi-
tion is not a kind of possession, a good to which people have a right so long as it
doesn’t conflict with other more basic goods.” Instead, “culture is constitutive”
of who we are, and this is no less true of nationalism than of any other cultural
formation.5
bell argues that if individuals fail to live up to the moral ideals they
inherit from their national tradition, “they lose a source of meaning and hope in
their lives.” Nationalism, then, is not simply a source of social cohesion but, like
all cultural forms, cohesion premised on deeply held identities. to bell, in fact,
national identity can “provide the narrative unity of our lives.”6
Sheldon Wolin
carries this point further, arguing that democratic politics requires us to accept
our “birthright,” the ambiguous history of our own political community. collec-
tive political identities make possible “a citizen who can become an interpreting
being, one who can interpret the past experience of the collectivity, reconnect it
to past symbols, and carry it forward.”7
We are not born abstracted from commu-
nity, but are inheritors of a communal tradition that, rightly understood, obliges us
to our fellow citizens and enables us to imagine a shared, better future for which
it is worth striving.
essential to nationalism’s power is its ability to inspire shame. If we see our-
selves as constituted by historical communities, and thus responsible to and
for upholding the ideals espoused by our community’s moral traditions, we in
turn feel ourselves responsible for its failures in the past and present and work
to make good on our tradition’s promise in the future. this has spurred at least
some american public intellectuals to re-engage with the american nation-state.
richard rorty, for example, criticized the academic left for being “unpatriotic”
by refusing “to rejoice in the country it inhabits.” contrasting early twentieth-
century pluralism with certain strains of contemporary multiculturalism, rorty
argued that american intellectuals should not seek a nation divided into groups
“at odds with one another.” Instead we must recognize that “a sense of shared
identity is not an evil. It is an absolutely essential component of citizenship.”
liberal politics relies on a national community that “has an identity, rejoices in it,
reflects upon it and tries to live up to it.” Progressive politics are especially reliant
on nationalism. to feel shame at one’s nation’s failures requires one to identify
with the nation-state, to see its failings as one’s own failings: “there is no contra-
diction between such identification and shame at the greed, the intolerance and the
indifference to suffering that is widespread in the United States. on the contrary,
you can feel shame over your country’s behavior only to the extent to which you
feel it is your country.”8
5. calhoun, Nations Matter, 23. See also Samuel H. beer, “liberalism and the National Idea,” in
Left, Right and Center: Essays on Liberalism and Conservatism in the United States, ed. robert a.
goldwin (chicago: rand mcNally, 1967), 13-169, esp. 16-169.
6. bell, Communitarianism and Its Critics, 126. See also Smith, Stories of Peoplehood, chap. 2.
7. Sheldon Wolin, “contract and birthright,” in The Presence of the Past: Essays on the State and
the Constitution (baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 11.
8. richard rorty, “the Unpatriotic academy,” New York Times (February 13, 199), 15. See

JoHaNN N. Neem
5
one of the primary arguments against nation-states, and thus against national
history, is that they exacerbate global poverty. but if we accept that human be-
ings are always born into communities that shape their identities, nationalism
has been and can be one of the strongest forces to counter economic and racial
inequality. laborers have long relied on appeals to the nation to demand better
working conditions and wealth distribution.9
the rev. martin luther King, Jr.,
and other civil rights activists linked their calls for ending racial discrimination
to the highest ideals of american democracy, helping their cause resonate with
other americans. according to benjamin barber, “the american trick was to use
the fierce attachments of patriotic sentiment to bond a people to high ideals.” It is
love of country—and love of our fellow citizens—that makes us want to make the
world a better place. Invoking Woody guthrie’s songs, barber asks, “is guthrie’s
rooted love of america incompatible with justice? Hardly. In nearly every song
he transmutes that love into a demand for justice.” the issue is not whether to be
patriotic; it is whether we use nationalism to help the poor and needy within our
midst.50
The economic benefits of nationalism are even more important in a globaliz-
ing era. as the world’s corporations increasingly carry out their production using
global supply chains, there are few countervailing powers left on which workers
can rely to challenge the power of large, rootless, cosmopolitan corporations. the
one lever that still might work, however, is nationalism. to calhoun, nationalism
offers “among the few viable forms of resistance to capitalist globalization.”51
Unless we wish to live in a world dominated by global corporations and their
cosmopolitan managers, perhaps we should recognize, even celebrate, the im-
portant political work that nations and nationalism continue to do. one might
counter that nation-states are not the ideal means to secure redistributive justice
and to challenge exploitation precisely because corporations are no longer bound
by national boundaries. the problem, however, is that “any effective scheme of
distributive justice . . . presupposes a bounded world of people deeply committed
to each other’s fate,” or a nation, if individuals are going to be willing to support
also rorty, Achieving Our Country (cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1998); rorty,
“Postmodernist bourgeois liberalism,” in Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (cambridge, UK, and
New york: cambridge University Press, 1991), 197-202; Stanley Fish, “but I didn’t do It!” New
York Times (march 21, 2007); bruce ackerman, “rooted cosmopolitanism,” Ethics 10, no. 3
(199), 516-535. on the relationship between the left and nationalism, see mitchell cohen, “rooted
cosmopolitanism: thoughts on the left, Nationalism, and multiculturalism,” Dissent (1992), 78-
83; Wolin, “contract and birthright”; Walzer, Thick and Thin, chap. ; bell, Communitarianism
and Its Critics, 12-155.
9. For the nineteenth century, see Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York and the Rise of
the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (New york: oxford University Press, 198). For the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see gerstle, American Crucible, 139-155; gerstle, Working-
Class Americanism: The Politics of Labor in a Textile City, 1914–1960 (cambridge, UK, and
New york: cambridge University Press, 1989). See also michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion:
An American History (New york: basic books, 1995); elisabeth clemens, The People’s Lobby:
Organizational Innovation and the Rise of Interest Group Politics in the United States, 1890–1925
(chicago: University of chicago Press, 1997), 100-1.
50. benjamin r. barber, “constitutional Faith,” in For Love of Country, 30-37. For a response
that moves beyond the binary between nationalism and globalism, see ayelet Shachar, The Birthright
Lottery: Citizenship and Global Inequality (cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2009).
51. calhoun, Nations Matter, 11.

the taxes and regulatory schemes that help redistribute wealth and health between
richer and poorer.52
although the majority of american historians, relying on professional inertia,
continue to practice national history without defending it, gertrude Himmelfarb
and david Hollinger have stepped up to support the relationship between nation-
al history and democratic politics. In a response to the cosmopolitan critique of
nationalism offered by philosopher martha Nussbaum, Himmelfarb argues that
democratic citizenship has no meaning outside the context of states. “this is not a
quibble,” she writes. Nussbaum hopes “to ground a universal morality in a univer-
sal—and stateless—community. If nationality, as she says, is ‘morally irrelevant’
to the cosmopolitan ideal, so is the polity that defines the nation, and so is the idea
of citizenship. and so too is all of history.”53
Historically, citizenship has always
been premised in membership in a polity. absent a polity, Himmelfarb asks, what
possibilities are left for citizenship?
Hollinger agrees with Himmelfarb that national identity is a prerequisite of
democratic citizenship because it fosters the emotional bonds that “appeal to a
common destiny—to a sense that we, as americans, are all in it together,” con-
tinuing that nationalism “has been a vital element in the mobilization of state
power on behalf of a number of worthy causes.” Solidarity enhances the possi-
bility of social and economic justice within the United States because it appeals
to a shared identity. Nationalism generates affections that inspire americans to
care about the poor and the discriminated-against in their midst, and gives them
a political context to address these problems. Nationalism, defined by citizenship
rather than blood, “mediates between the species and those ethno-racial varieties
of humankind represented within its borders,” Hollinger concludes.5
the nation-
state’s boundaries create the commons in which we promote the common good.
there remains a tension, however, between the universal values of liberalism
and the parochial communities generated by territorial nation-states and sustained
by national history.55
many of our most deeply held liberal commitments are uni-
versal in application: all people are created equal and are thus equally endowed
with rights, dignity, and respect. can we reconcile liberal universalism with the
sociological reality that communal identities are both a fact of human existence
and necessary for democratic politics, connecting, to use bender’s framework, the
parts (nations) to the whole (humanity)? this is an especially pertinent question
52. bell, Communitarianism and Its Critics, 137.
53. gertude Himmelfarb, “the Illusions of cosmopolitanism,” in For Love of Country?, 7;
Himmelfarb, “Is National History obsolete?,” in The New History and the Old (cambridge, ma:
Harvard University Press, 1987), 121-12; see also Senya benhabib, Situating the Self: Gender,
Community, and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics (New york: routledge, 1992).
5. david a. Hollinger, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (New york: basic books,
1995), 18 and 138; Hollinger, “the Historian’s Use of the United States and Vice Versa,” in
Rethinking American History, 381-395.
55. on the tension between liberalism and national history, and a critique of using national history
to foster patriotism, see, among others, Harry brighouse, “Should We teach Patriotic History?,” in
Education and Citizenship in Liberal-Democratic Societies: Teaching for Cosmopolitan Values and
Collective Identities, ed. Kevin mcdonough and Walter Feinberg (New york: oxford University
Press, 2003), 157-175; Patrice Higonnet, Attendant Cruelties: Nation and Nationalism in American
History (New york: other Press, 2007).

JoHaNN N. Neem
56
given that nationalism does not inherently promote liberalism nor democracy but
has, in such cases as Nazi germany and imperial Japan, as well as in the historical
illiberal assumptions that shaped american democracy’s history, worked against
it. Walzer offers us a path through this thicket by distinguishing between thin
and thick languages.56
Walzer recognizes the moral priority of liberalism’s uni-
versal values but argues that our deepest commitments emerge in real communi-
ties. those who assume morality can best be understood by starting with abstract
universal premises overlook the role of community in shaping and enabling our
moral commitments. to Walzer, “morality is thick from the beginning, culturally
integrated, fully resonant, and it reveals itself thinly only on special occasions,
when moral language is turned to specific purposes.”57
the issue is not whether
one can distinguish between thin and thick language—in theory, one can—but
whether that distinction matters in people’s daily lives. Walzer suggests that those
of us committed to liberalism’s universal values rely on thick culture to ensure
that thin values resonate among the democratic citizens of particular nation-states.
the key to Walzer’s discussion is the idea of resonance. “there are the makings of
a thin and universalist morality inside every thick and particular morality,” Walzer
argues. It is through the particular that the universal is made possible.58
National history is the source of americans’ thick language. It provides us a
shared identity. Humanity as a whole is an abstraction to which we are weakly
connected and to whom our bonds are mediated by the commitments we have
to our own communities. “Societies are necessarily particular because they have
members and memories, members with memories not only of their own but also
of their common life,” Walzer argues, continuing, “humanity, by contrast, has
members but no memories, and so it has no history and no culture, no customary
practices, no familiar life-ways, no festivals, no shared understandings of social
goods.”59
by appealing to a shared past, to common symbols, national history
enables individuals to do the right thing by their fellow citizens, to contribute
to justice, to fight poverty, and to provide aid to those in need. Without a shared
culture our thin obligations—our universal values—would never gain our deep
commitment.
National identity and liberal universalism need not always be in conflict. It may
be possible to be both “proud nationals” and “humble citizens of the world,” as
bender proposes. the Founding Fathers thought that the nation must embody uni-
versal values, and thus that the american experiment was relevant for humanity,
not just for themselves. they assumed that the particular and the universal would
reinforce each other.60
Walzer too argues that thick narratives reinforce thin ob-
56. Walzer, Thick and Thin. See also Walzer, “What does It mean to be an ‘american’?,” Social
Research 57, no. 3 (1990), 591-61; appiah, Ethics of Identity, 213-272.
57. Walzer, Thick and Thin, .
58. Ibid., xi.
59. Ibid., 8.
60. Seth cotlar, “reading the Foreign News, Imagining an american Public Sphere: radical
and conservative Visions of ‘the Public’ in mid-1790s Newspapers,” in Periodical Literature in
Eighteenth-Century America, ed. mark l. Kamrath and Sharon m. Harris (Knoxville: University
of tennessee Press, 2005), 307-338; cotlar, “the Federalists’ cultural offensive of 1798 and the
moderation of american democratic discourse,” in Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the
Political History of the Early American Republic, ed. Jeffrey l. Pasley, andrew W. robertson, and

ligations by making americans more capable of responding to others around the
world. For example, Walzer writes, the demands for “justice” invoked by Prague’s
8 demonstrators resonated with Americans even if the specific meanings of
justice would be understood and instituted differently within the two societies.61
It is precisely because americans’ thick traditions sustain certain values that
appeals made on those values’ behalf from minorities or from people in other
parts of the world resonate. cosmopolitan and other forms of transnational his-
tory aid this project by making clear how americans are affected by and affect
the world, but cosmopolitan history will almost always be thin in nature. Sub-
national and transnational pluralist histories, on the other hand, are often thick in
nature. every human being is part of myriad groups whose histories, traditions,
and values are constitutive of his or her identity. these diverse identities might
threaten democracy if they prevent citizens from relating to one another as mem-
bers of a shared nation, but they can also be vital to sustaining freedom by ensur-
ing that the national community does not have absolute dominion over our being.
moreover, depending on the particular role a person is playing—historian, parent,
church member—the self, as Walzer argues, “speaks with more than one moral
voice.”62
Plural sources for personal identity and role-dependent moral obliga-
tions are particularly important in the context of nationalism because the nation-
state is capable of coercion and violence in pursuit of its objectives. membership
in other groups—including ethnic, religious, professional, and political interest
groups—and an awareness of the obligations of one’s roles enables individuals to
balance their deep identification with the nation against other goods that connect
them to other human beings.63
Nonetheless, so long as human beings remain com-
munal creatures who gain their commitments through thick traditions, american
democracy and the demands of justice will depend on citizens sharing a common
culture, and national history will remain a legitimate means to this worthy end.
III
calls to move beyond national history do not just concern identity, however, but
also historians’ professional obligation to get the past right. this is what distin-
guishes us from those who invoke the past for other purposes, including com-
memoration.6
From daniel t. rodgers’s Atlantic Crossings to more recent work
david Waldstreicher (chapel Hill: University of North carolina Press, 200), 27-302; onuf and
onuf, Nations, Markets, and War; gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution
(New york: Knopf, 1992), 221-225. For a thought-provoking discussion of the complex inter-
relationship between cosmopolitanism and nationalism during the era of the american and French
revolutions, see Philipp Ziesche, Cosmopolitan Patriots: Americans in Paris in the Age of Revolution
(charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010).
61. Walzer, Thick and Thin, 1-3.
62. Ibid., 85.
63. It is worth noting that a similar process works for all groups. National identities can check
the dangers of other moral traditions and communities, including religious ones, that may otherwise
become totalitarian.
6. lowenthal, “Identity, Heritage, and History”; michael Kammen, “History is our Heritage:
the Past in contemporary american culture,” in In the Past Lane: Historical Perspectives on
American Culture (New york: oxford University Press, 1997), 213-225; History Wars: The Enola
Gay and Other Battles for the American Past, ed. edward t. linenthal and tom engelhardt (New

JoHaNN N. Neem
58
emphasizing international and/or transatlantic connections, historians suggest
that the national box cannot capture the basic causes that produce historical ef-
fects.65
For example, mae m. Ngai argues that the nation-centeredness of both the
way americans conceptualize immigration and the legal regime that shapes and
sustains those conceptions enables americans to imagine migrants as voluntary
agents, whereas a transnational perspective would recognize that global migra-
tion is shaped by the disproportionate power of and relations between different
nation-states. migrants come to the U.S. in part because of america’s relations
with the world—migration is both cause and effect.66
the concern here is whether
the close connection between national history and the nation-state has artificially
distorted how historians have constructed their interpretations.
In A Nation among Nations bender writes that from the moment of european
contact with the New World—if not before—american history has been part of a
larger global history. Historians must accept the “transnational nature of national
histories. National histories are part of global histories; each nation is a province
among the provinces that make up the world.”67
bender recognizes that nation-
states have played too large a role in world history to be ignored, but, he argues,
“the nation cannot be its own historical context.” this is an extremely important
methodological claim. Historians have long assumed that the importance of their
studies lies in their ability to alter parts of the national story. bender believes
that historians must think beyond the nation as they contextualize the historio-
graphical importance of their work. by conceptualizing american history as part
of global history, historians will better understand the political, economic, social,
and intellectual forces that have shaped the development of the modern world,
including the United States. If they impose artificial national boundaries on their
objects of study, however, historians will fail in their mission to explain the causes
and the effects of past actions. “History and humanity are not in fact enclosed in
boxes, whether national, ethnic, local, or continental,” bender concludes: “good
empirical history ought to reflect this truth; it then proffers, as well, a fundamental
ethical principle.”68
york: metropolitan books, 1996). See also allan megill, “History, memory, Identity,” History of
the Human Sciences 11, no. 3 (1998), 37-62; yosef Hayim yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and
Jewish Memory [1982] (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1996).
65. daniel t. rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (cambridge, ma:
Harvard University Press, 1998). examples include delay, War of a Thousand Deserts; leslie butler,
Critical Americans: Victorian Intellectuals and Transatlantic Liberal Reform (chapel Hill: University
of North carolina Press, 2007); david armitage, The Declaration of Independence: A Global History
(cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2007); Ian tyrrell, Transnational Nation: United States
History in Global Perspective since 1789 (Houndmills, UK, and New york: Palgrave macmillan,
2007); guarneri, America in the World; mae m. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the
Making of Modern America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 200).
66. Ngai, Impossible Subjects, esp. 26. See also matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The
United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876–1917 (New york: Hill and
Wang, 2000). For a perspective that combines international perspectives with a focus on national
politics, see carl J. bon tempo, Americans at the Gate: The United States and Refugees during the
Cold War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008).
67. bender, A Nation among Nations, ix.
68. Ibid., 301. See also bender, Rethinking American History, 11-12.

Whereas bender urges historians to reframe narratives in a global context,
thelen asks us to begin with “individuals instead of nations.”69
Historical inter-
pretation should emerge from the bottom up, from how individuals conceptualize
their own identities and from the communities to which they claim to belong. glo-
balization has made us aware of the artificiality of national borders. Thelen urges
us now to question the longstanding assumption that the historical experiences
of people can be captured by national narratives. globalization has unleashed a
plurality of experiences across and within national borders that must now be un-
derstood. Our interpretations must be crafted to better reflect better how ordinary
people conceptualize their own lives.
to the extent that transnational and sub-national histories help us better under-
stand U.S. history, national historians should welcome them. to extent that they
help us understand the history of the world, all historians must of course embrace
them. but there remains a difference between understanding the relationship be-
tween the american nation-state and the world and vice-versa, which continues to
place the american nation-state front and center, and assuming either that ameri-
can history is, in bender’s framing, a province of world history or, as thelen
concludes, a violation of individual integrity. From the perspective of national
history, the nation remains the center of historiography.
Is this methodologically justifiable? The answer is “yes” because national his-
tory and the identity it sustains are no more real or artificial than cosmopolitan or
ethnic/racial/gender/class histories and identities. cosmopolitans ignore the fact
that cosmopolitanism, like any other group identity, is an identity. all identities
are premised on their relationship with other identities. there can be therefore no
universal identity, and thus no universal framework for historical writing so long
as historians continue to write about human communities. cosmopolitans are in
this sense no less provincial than other groups—they are a group.70
cosmopolitan
identity, first, relies on a conception of humanity abstracted from the communities
to which actual individuals belong. as Himmelfarb writes, “to pledge one’s ‘fun-
damental allegiance’ to cosmopolitanism is to try to transcend not only national-
ity but all the actualities, particularities, and realities of life that constitute one’s
natural identity.”71
more important, like nationalism, cosmopolitanism is a nar-
rative project, a historical story that we tell ourselves in order to create the iden-
tity we prefer. as michael lang argues, the narrative of globalization emerged
from the study of economics, reinforces the autonomy of economics from poli-
tics, and ultimately promotes a neoliberal economic agenda by framing market
interdependence as a natural, rather than historically defined and ever-changing,
phenomenon. In other words, contemporary cosmopolitanism is susceptible to a
69. thelen, “making History and making the United States,” 395. See also roy rosenzweig and
david thelen, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (New york:
columbia University Press, 1998).
70. benhabib, Situating the Self; craig calhoun, “the class consciousness of Frequent travelers:
toward a critique of actually existing cosmopolitanism,” South Atlantic Quarterly 101, no.
(2002), 869-897; calhoun, Nations Matter, 165-167. more generally, see edward Said, Orientalism
(New york: Vintage, 1979).
71. Himmelfarb, “Illusions of cosmopolitanism,” 77. See also michael J. Sandel, Justice: What’s
the Right Thing to Do? (New york: Farrar, Straus and giroux, 2009), 208-269.

JoHaNN N. Neem
60
critique much like the one it makes about national history: if national history’s
cosmopolitan critics claim that the nation distorts history by providing artificially
circumscribed narratives, lang and others teach us that that the contemporary
presumption of a globalized world and a universal humanity is doing the same
thing—sending historians back in time to find a supposed global humanity’s pri-
mordial roots.72
efforts to globalize history, then, do not simply analyze past transnational
transactions—which historians have long done—but do so to cultivate a new,
alternative narrative that sustains and justifies global capitalism. In doing so cos-
mopolitan historians make the same mistakes that they accuse national historians
of making.73
In addition, the assumptions that guide much contemporary cosmo-
politanism are rooted in Western enlightenment notions of universality and ratio-
nality, and express claims to universality that have long accompanied american
imperialism.7
they assume that liberalism, however universal it may be, is also
natural. In contrast, the work of Foucault and other scholars demonstrates that
liberal moral agents, with a sense of interiority and identity, are made by culture
rather than found in nature.75
ethnic and other, more local, identities are also historically constructed.76
all
identities are made over time and often serve particular interests. We must there-
fore ask ourselves of all identities—whether they be national, transnational, or
sub-national—where did they come from and whose interests do they serve? as
Hollinger argues, there is neither an ethical nor disciplinary reason to favor sub-
72. michael lang, “globalization and Its History,” Journal of Modern History 78, no. (2006),
899-931. See also raymond grew, “expanding Worlds of World History,” Journal of Modern
History 78, no. (2006), 878-898, on the effort to construct a global narrative. For thoughtful exam-
ples, see margaret c. Jacob, “the cosmopolitan as a lived category,” Daedalus 137, no. 3 (2008),
18-25; david Porter, “Sinicizing early modernity: the Imperatives of Historical cosmopolitanism,”
Eighteenth-Century Studies 3, no. (2010), 299-306. one might also add that economic globaliza-
tion may serve the marxian expectation of producing a world-historical proletariat.
73. bender is aware of this risk: “It will do historiography no good to work free of the nation and
its ideology only to embrace the ideology and process of globalization. Such a move promises new
blindnesses, and there is besides the danger of complicity, conscious or not, in a triumphalism that
justifies the current phase of capitalism.” bender, Rethinking American History, 12.
7. See charles bright and michael geyer, “Where in the World is america? the History of the
United States in a global age,” in Rethinking American History, 63-99; Foner, “american Freedom
in a global age.”
75. michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, transl. alan Sheridan (New
york: Vintage, 1977); Foucault, Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, ed. luther
H. martin, Huck gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton (amherst: University of massachusetts Press, 1988).
Similar conclusions can be drawn from different perspectives: see charles taylor, Sources of the
Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1989); dipesh
chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2000), esp. 117-18; Jean l. cohen and andrew arato, Civil Society and
Political Theory (cambridge, ma: mIt Press, 1992), 375-382.
76. For the invention of ethnicity, see Kathleen Neils conzen and david a. gerber, “the Invention
of ethnicity: a Perspective from the U.S.a.,” Journal of American Ethnic History 12, no. 1 (1992), 3-
1; david a. Hollinger, “authority, Solidarity, and the Political economy of Identity: the case of the
United States,” Diacritics 29, no. (1999), 116-127. See also rogers brubaker, “ethnicity without
groups,” Archives Européenes de Sociologie 3, no. 2 (2002), 163-189; calhoun, Nations Matter,
160-161; Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People, transl. yael lotan (london: Verso,
2009); James Sidbury, Becoming African in America: Race and Nation in the Early Black Atlantic
(New york: oxford University Press, 2007).

national or transnational communities over national ones when we craft interpre-
tations of the past:
If people do need to belong, and if there is no escaping the drawing of boundaries, these
insights can apply to the national community of the United States as well as to more global
and to more local solidarities. If all solidarities are ultimately constructs, and not primor-
dial, it will not do to pronounce as artificial the cultural continuities that have developed in
relation to the american nation-state, and to then take at face value the claims to authen-
ticity made on behalf of other cultures. Indeed, the distinction between civic and ethnic
eventually breaks down because over the course of time civic affiliations can help create
those that are eventually recognized as ethnic.
the history that has led so many citizens of the United States to call themselves ameri-
cans is just as real as is the history that yields the identities brought here amid diasporas.77
rejecting national history therefore does not solve the disciplinary problem na-
tional history’s critics raise. Non-national groups, including those defined by eth-
nicity, are as likely as the nation to turn historians into tools because they too have
agendas and interests that historians should not accept uncritically. the problem is
not national history itself but that historians always risk becoming boosters, or at
least reinforcing the vitality, of the groups about which they write. Since this is an
ongoing disciplinary problem, getting rid of national history will not resolve it.
The question, then, is how to maintain sufficient distance from one’s own sub-
ject when one shares in its group identity, whether that be a nation or an ethnicity,
gender, religion, class, or any other group.78
the place to start is to recall Haskell’s
recognition that “objectivity is not neutrality.” Neutrality requires us to have no
agenda whereas objectivity asks us to engage with competing perspectives, to un-
derstand them sympathetically, to respond to them, and thus to make a compelling
case for why our particular interpretation is more complete than others. Historians
need not give up their allegiances, including their national ones, but rather they
ought to be open to “collision with rival perspectives.” these collisions, Haskell
argues, happen within scholarly communities that subject participants to norms
concerning scholarship.79
It is vital therefore that national historians who share a
group identity with their subject also see themselves as members of, and therefore
responsible to, the historical profession. In other words, we must value what al-
lan megill calls “disciplinary objectivity” by honoring those historians who apply
the rules of their craft consistently and open themselves to critical peer review.
77. Hollinger, Postethnic America, 160-161. See also Hollinger, “the Historian’s Use of the
United States”; Hollinger, “authority, Solidarity, and the Political economy of Identity.” like
Hollinger, michael mcgerr wonders “how much should we bend the discipline of history to suit the
needs of internationalism.” mcgerr agrees that transnationalists have an agenda and interests that
are equally worthy of suspicion as those held by national(ist) historians. See mcgerr, “the Price of
the ‘New transnational History,’” American Historical Review 96, no. (1991), 1066-1067. robert
H. Wiebe, in contrast, has sought to disentangle the legitimate human yearning for community that
is expressed through nationalism with the dangers of state power and the alliance between nations
and states in Who We Are: A History of Popular Nationalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2002).
78. In many ways the struggles about being Jewish and writing the history of Judaism with which
yerushalmi grapples in Zakhor are similar to those of an american writing the history of the United
States.
79. thomas Haskell, “objectivity is Not Neutrality: rhetoric vs. Practice in Peter Novick’s That
Noble Dream,” History and Theory 29, no. 2 (may 1990), 129-157.

JoHaNN N. Neem
62
While absolute objectivity may be impossible, by subjecting our work to constant
criticism, we can hope to root out some of the prejudices that may bias it.80
dis-
ciplinary objectivity is possible because our selves are capable of being members
of more than one group and therefore of balancing competing goods against one
another. That part of our selves that identifies with the values, norms, and prac-
tices of professional history serves as a check on that part of us that identifies with
another group. living up to the historian’s obligations may in fact be a source of
pride for individuals, especially when it involves criticizing the groups they love
most in the interest of historical knowledge.
Another antidote to correct for the dangers of group identification—whether
that group be national or any other—is, as Hollinger urges, to expand the profes-
sional community to include non-member historians. If we accept a continued
role for american national history but also recognize that american historians’
insularity too often leads to justification, we might subject national history to peer
review by historians of the United States based abroad. Foreign historians, less
likely to share americans’ love of their country, will root out excesses and correct
prejudices.81
the same is true for historians of any other group. National history’s
critics incorrectly treat a problem of group history as limited to national groups.
IV
National history remains a viable methodology not only because rejecting na-
tional history on its critics’ terms requires rejecting the history of all groups but,
equally important, because recent theoretical and historical work has transformed
our understanding of what constitutes a nation, making our understanding of na-
tions align better with our understanding of other groups in history. there is an
irony between what eric Hobsbawm, one of the most prominent historians of
nationalism, hoped for and what his insight, as well as those of such theorists as
ernest gellner and benedict anderson, has in fact produced.82
Hobsbawm antici-
pated that by better understanding the historical processes behind nation-making
we would finally put nations to rest. “The owl of Minerva, which brings wisdom,
said Hegel, flies out at dusk. It is a good sign that it is now circling round na-
tions and nationalism,” Hobsbawm wrote.83
Instead, historians have used the new
theoretical tools offered by Hobsbawm, gellner, and anderson to understand the
development of American national identity. In doing so they have confirmed the
historical reality of the american nation (and other nations), allowing us to be
more confident that the nation is at least one of the containers of history.
80. allan megill, “objectivity for Historians,” in Historical Knowledge, Historical Error: A
Contemporary Guide to Practice (chicago: University of chicago Press, 2007), 107-12.
81. Hollinger, “the Historian’s Use of the United States.” For a recent call to internationalize the
community of scholars studying the United States, see emory elliott, “diversity in the United States
and abroad: What does it mean When american Studies is transnational?,” American Quarterly
59, no. 1 (2007), 1-22.
82. eric Hobsbawm and terence ranger, The Invention of Tradition (New york: cambridge
University Press, 1983); eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth,
Reality (New york: cambridge University Press, 1993); ernest gellner, Nations and Nationalism
(Ithaca, Ny: cornell University Press, 1983); anderson, Imagined Communities.
83. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism, 192.

there is an important difference between the new foundation for national his-
tory and the assumptions that once guided national historians. Nineteenth-cen-
tury national historians took the nation for granted. george bancroft’s generation
believed that nations express the spirit of a people, that they are natural, and, as
advocates of manifest destiny made clear, have a divine purpose. most historians
no longer think in these terms. the nation is now considered a human creation
best understood not from the perspective of god’s will nor of nature but of hu-
man beings.8
this is a profound shift. It has turned the nation into a technology.
like any other technological innovation, nations have been used for good and for
ill. With Hobsbawm’s help, nations have been brought down to earth, which has
opened the door for some to imagine a future without them, but also has made
nations more tangible and therefore less dangerous.
If nationalism’s theorists have not succeeded in undermining nationalism they
have been more successful in changing how historians approach the question of
nationalism. older works on american national identity were usually intellec-
tual histories that assumed the existence of an american nation. New work has
focused on the institutional foundations of national identity. It asks us to think of
nation-making as a historical process. by outlining an institutional, material basis
for american nationhood, it has also provided a new foundation for intellectual
historians wishing to study american identity. but this is not the same old thing
again. Historians must now be attentive to how national identity and nations are
always being formed, changed, and challenged. by paying attention to the institu-
tional bases for nationhood, american historians have become more careful about
when and where they ascribe a national identity to past actors. When we write
about “americans,” we are forced to ask whether the people about whom we write
would have considered this a relevant category.
although this essay cannot go into detail about the development and transfor-
mation of american nationalism over its long history, it can provide a brief sketch
of what historians have done in the period between the revolution and the civil
War. our starting point is recognizing that colonial britishamerica was not proto-
american. Not only was it ethnically diverse, but even the british settler major-
ity did not identify with a nascent “american” identity. Instead, the majority of
white inhabitants were embedded—politically, economically, and culturally—in
the british empire. to the extent that there existed a collective political identity
prior to 1776, most white settlers would have considered themselves britons.85
Having long considered themselves members of the british political and cultur-
al nation, following independence Americans had to define who they were. There
was no clear answer. Potential americans were divided by state, region, religion,
8. elías José Palti, “the Nation as a Problem: Historians and the ‘National Question’,” History
and Theory 0, no. 3 (2001), 32-36; anthony d. Smith, The Nation in History: Historiographical
Debates about Ethnicity and Nationalism (Hanover, NH: University Press of New england, 2000).
85. t. H. breen, “Ideology and Nationalism on the eve of the american revolution: revisions
once more in Need of revising,” Journal of American History 8, no. 1 (1997), 13-39. See also
brendan mcconville, The King’s Three Faces: The Rise and Fall of Royal America, 1688–1776
(chapel Hill: University of North carolina Press, 2007); armitage, Declaration of Independence;
Jack P. greene, Peripheries and Center: Constitutional Development in the Extended Polities of the
British Empire and the United States, 1607–1788 (athens: University of georgia Press, 1986).

JoHaNN N. Neem
6
ethnicity, and interest. Few in the new republic, other than those who had served
in congress or in the continental army, had any experience with the potential and
purported american nation; both the institutional and experiential base for ameri-
can nationhood was weak.86
It is no wonder that the newly independent states
could not agree on most policies. recognizing these limitations, delegates met in
Philadelphia in 1787 and proposed stronger ligaments to connect the various parts
of the Union. Nonetheless, when the Constitution was ratified the United States
remained, in John m. murrin’s words, “a roof without walls.”87
Using the insight of nationalism’s theorists, historians have explored how the
walls were built. the establishment of a new federal government was itself an
important catalyst for american identity because it created a national political
institution that touched the lives of all those living in the new United States.88
In
addition, federal support for a cheap postal service encouraged the circulation of
print, increasing interaction between various parts of the Union while generating
a national public sphere.89
National politics developed within this new national
public sphere. despite the Founders’ hope for civic unity, american leaders were
soon divided over the policies that the new government should pursue, resulting
in the formation of political parties. The first political parties were elite institu-
tions connecting political players across the Union into like-minded groups with a
national orientation. As party competition intensified in the early nineteenth cen-
tury, and as more white male americans gained the vote, political parties sought
the loyalties of ordinary people. as a result, parties served as one of the primary
institutional mechanisms through which both elite and ordinary americans ex-
perienced american nationhood. In parades, militias, and election-day beer and
circus, individuals were asked to connect their local lives to national affairs.90
to
86. See, among many good sources, david c. Hendrickson, Peace Pact: The Lost World of the
American Founding (lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003). Joseph J. ellis’s His Excellency:
George Washington (New york: Knopf, 200) gives us a sense of how Washington’s sacrifices in
the name of a nation that did not exist shaped his own commitment to strengthening the institutional
foundations of that nation as its first president.
87. John m. murrin, “a roof without Walls: the dilemma of american National Identity,” in
Beyond Confederation: Origins of the Constitution and American National Identity, ed. richard r.
beeman, Stephen botein, and edward c. carter (chapel Hill: University of North carolina, 1987),
333-38.
88. richard r. John, “governmental Institutions as agents of change: rethinking american
Political development in the early republic, 1787–1835,” Studies in American Political Development
11, no. 2 (1997): 37-380. See also theda Skocpol, Diminished Democracy: From Membership to
Management in American Civic Life (Norman: University of oklahoma, 2003).
89. richard r. John, Spreading the News: The American Postal Service from Franklin to Morse
(cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1995).
90. Johann N. Neem, “civil Society and american Nationalism, 1776–1865,” in Politics and
Partnerships: Voluntary Associations in America’s Political Past and Present, ed. elisabeth S.
clemens and douglas guthrie (chicago: University of chicago Press, forthcoming); Skocpol,
Diminished Democracy, 36-37; andrew W. robertson, “‘look on this Picture . . . and on this!’
Nationalism, localism, and Partisan Images of otherness in the United States, 1780–1820,” American
Historical Review 106, no. (2001), 1263-1280; Simon P. Newman, Parades and Politics of the
Street: Festive Culture in the Early American Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1997); david Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American
Nationalism, 1776–1820 (chapel Hill: University of North carolina Press, 1997); Joel H. Silbey,
“‘the Salt of the Nation’: Political Parties in antebellum america,” in The Partisan Imperative: The
Dynamics of American Politics before the Civil War (New york: oxford University Press, 1985),

mobilize voters, parties also relied on the press. as anderson argues, the press
provides an imagined space in which nationhood can be experienced. the partisan
press consistently reminded ordinary americans that national affairs mattered. It
cultivated and then reinforced both partisan and national identity.91
religious institutions in civil society were equally important to forging national
identity. ordinary men and women may have attended church for spiritual rea-
sons, but their local churches were part of national denominations that linked con-
gregants of a particular church into a larger national community of co-religionists.
many americans also participated in religious voluntary associations—mission-
ary and tract societies, temperance and anti-slavery associations—that were part
of national institutional networks. the american bible Society, for example, was
based in New york city, but its work was carried out largely by local auxiliaries
in towns across the nation. In annual reports and other publications, the american
bible Society forged an imagined community of citizens with common concerns.
Money flowed back and forth between center and periphery. Churches and reform
groups created a national religious public sphere joining americans across vast
spaces into shared faith and interest communities.92
expanding markets added yet another connecting tissue between individuals.
State, federal, and privately funded internal improvements provided the infra-
structure for a domestic market that encouraged americans from various parts
of the Union to meet each other and merge in the expanding West. the National
republican, Whig, and republican parties supported high tariffs not only to pro-
tect domestic markets but because they knew that shared economic interests could
foster national sentiment.93
responding to opponents of federally funded internal
improvements, South carolina Senator John c. calhoun noted that “whatever
impedes the intercourse of the extremes with . . . the centre of the republic, weak-
ens the Union.” He urged americans to “bind the republic together with a perfect
system of roads and canals.”9
50-68. For a discussion of how partisanship gave women a political—and american—identity, see
rosemarie Zagarri, Revolutionary Backlash: Women and Politics in the Early American Republic
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007).
91. anderson, Imagined Communities. See david Paul Nord, “Newspapers and american
Nationhood, 1776–1826,” in Three Hundred Years of the American Newspaper, ed. John b. Hench
(Worcester, ma: american antiquarian Society, 1991), 391-05; michael Warner, The Letters of
the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (cambridge, ma:
Harvard University Press, 1999).
92. Neem, “civil Society and american Nationalism”; mark a. Noll, America’s God: From
Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New york: oxford University Press, 2002), 19-202; c. c.
goen, Broken Churches, Broken Nation: Denominational Schisms and the Coming of the American
Civil War (macon, ga: mercer, 1985). the classic exploration of this question remains donald g.
mathews, “the Second great awakening as an organizing Process, 1780–1830: an Hypothesis,”
American Quarterly 21, no. 1 (1969), 23-3.
93. Stephen minicucci, “the ‘cement of Interest’: Interest-based models of Nation-building in
the early republic,” Social Science History 25, no. 2 (2001), 27-27; brian d. Schoen, The Fragile
Fabric of Union: Cotton, Federal Politics, and the Global Origins of the Civil War (baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2009); onuf and onuf, Nations, Markets, and War.
9. david m. Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861 (New york: Harper and row, 1976),
7-17; John l. larson, Internal Improvement: National Public Works and the Promise of Popular
Government in the Early United States (chapel Hill: University of North carolina Press, 2001);
minicucci, “‘cement of Interest’,” 26-267.

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