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The first chapter begins by examining the issue of nations and nationalisms. It considers the symbolic and narrative nature of nationalism and looks at the quasi‐theological currents that lie at the heart of national constructions. This leads to a discussion of present‐day instances of Christian nationalism, most notably as found in current American religious and political culture. The chapter then considers specific examples of where Kierkegaard's philosophy has already either been used to support nationalist ideologies, or in opposition to them with special attention paid to the work of Schmitt, Dooley and Westphal. Since no Kierkegaardian critique of religious nationalism has yet been extensively elucidated, it is hoped that, by considering Kierkegaard's political import together with his Christian concerns and intended Christian audience, an additional element and strength of his social critique will become more fully apparent.

This chapter introduces the panorama of nation-building amidst a time when America was facing a civil war of independence. Lincoln believed that the Union of 1787 had created a nation that was constantly being threatened by the existence of slavery. Many contemplated that the Union was not a nation in an organic sense and was formed only to achieve nationhood and not a nation, while others opined that the Civil War was a struggle to create a nation and not save a failed Union. However, the expanding industrial North as against the rural agriculture South and the secession of the South in 1860 only suggest an incomplete character of American nationalism.

This book is about literary practice in a historical mode. It does not set forth a new theory of American literary nationalism; it does not “locate” race and nation or offer any other all-encompassing explanatory paradigm; it does not argue for unbroken connections between the works and periods that are examined in its four main chapters or “episodes.” The book attempts to complicate our understanding of American literary nationalism by emphasizing the conflicted, multiracial, and contingent dimensions of its various articulations. In addition, it attempts to understand selected works in relation to debates of their contemporary moment in ways that can help to complicate thinking about race and nation in our own moment.

This chapter focuses on assimilability, which was the talked-about word of the new immigration policy established in the 1920s. It demonstrates that throughout the 19th century and into the opening decades of the 20th the experience of segregation and discrimination made some African Americans conceive of a life beyond the United States. Immigration of Chinese laborers had been restricted since the 1870s. The Chinese exclusion policy exhibits how group-based discrimination could be implemented and shows how this shaped the values carried by the United States in its overseas adventures. Congress broadened the restrictions on Chinese laborers to those in Hawaii and the Philippines. A system of national origin categorization is also discussed. The definition of membership enshrined in immigration law would haunt American nationalism abroad as well as at home for a long time.

This chapter examines the role of civil society in fostering American nationalism. Nationalism, according to Charles Taylor, is vital to modern liberal democracies. 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 her immediate goals, she must consider herself part of an “ongoing collective agency.” 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. Similarly, Craig Calhoun argues that democratic politics “requires thinking of ‘the people’ as active and coherent, and oneself as both a member and an agent.”

This chapter looks at the contours of Irish American racial discourse between the arrival of the first Young Irelanders in the late 1840s to the United States and the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861. It challenges the truism that the Irish, in assimilating themselves in American society, had cut ties with their homeland and adopted a white identity, thus ceasing to be “Green.” As a matter of fact, American Anglo-Saxonism constituted a greater threat to these migrants than any alleged lack of whiteness. Rather than seek to become Saxon, however, Irish immigrants expanded the boundaries of American citizenship by depicting themselves as members of what one exile termed a proud and noble “world-wide race” of Celts.

This chapter sets the stage for time and American national identity by investigating the relationship between time and space through a reconfiguration of the classic problem of republic and empire. The idea that Americans looked to the possibility of unlimited westward expansion as a salve for the problem of imperial corruption has long been one of American studies' most cherished theses. The chapter traces the temporal dimension of American nationalism through a variety of different areas of cultural production, including journalism, political theory, narratives in prose and verse, painting, and education reform. Focusing in depth upon any one of these areas would be a valuable scholarly endeavor, but the purpose of the present study is different.

The early American republic remained embedded in the structures of the British Empire long after the achievement of its political independence in 1783. The nationalism of “postcolonial America,” as recent scholarship has called it, owed much to the on-going struggle to consolidate independence from an increasingly powerful and global British Empire. The best means of loosening Britain’s economic grip over the new republic triggered great social and political conflict. Furthermore, Britain intensified the sectional conflict over slavery that would lead to civil war, both by increasing Southern insecurity through its anti-slavery position and by offering a market and potential alternative political alliance to the cotton producing states of the Deep South. Yet, paradoxically, Britain’s persistent influence and its global pre-eminence played an important role in the consolidation and expansion of the United States.

This chapter identifies the first fully articulated vision of American nationalism as that of a small literary movement in 1760s New England, the Connecticut Wits. By looking at the social themes of their writings, mostly poetry, produced over decades, the chapter outlines the distinguishing features of the nation they envisioned. It shows that this pioneering version of American nationalism met its demise, in party politics, with the Hartford Convention of 1814–1815, and then turned its considerable resources and creativity to domestic and foreign missions, among other activities.

This chapter reveals the fault lines of black diaspora theory by examining how black settlers from the United States were suspended in a social subjectivity that resisted being consolidated as specifically American or Liberian. Drawing on Phyllis Wheatley and Ouladah Equiano alongside the nineteenth-century archive of letters authored by Liberia's earliest black American settlers, the chapter identifies resonances of two conventional positions on settlement. First is the allure of diaspora's racial romanticism, and the other is the imperialistic impulses of an American nationalism. The chapter's consideration of the letters' language, however, settles for neither of the two. Instead, it exposes the conditionality and “equivocal agency” of Liberian settler-subjects as they speculated on the meanings and improvised on the practices of freedom.

This chapter focuses on the life of Wolfe Tone, with particular attention to his role in the formation of the Society of United Irishmen, his political exile in the United States, his efforts to bring Revolutionary France into a partnership with the United Irishmen, and his death in the wake of the unsuccessful 1798 Irish rebellion, which is described in detail. Tone’s experience of exile deepened his sense of his own Irish identity while sharpening his republican ideals in the tumult of American politics, thus prefiguring the experience of later generations of Irish nationalists in America. The evolution of his social thought from 1789 to 1998 also prefigures the fault lines of race, class, and gender that would mark later Irish American nationalism and this is examined as well.

This chapter examines the image and reception of Abraham Lincoln in the American South. It analyzes the concept of a “Southerner” and describes how Southerners have used, appropriated, hated, loved, and remembered Lincoln. It discusses the history of Lincoln-hating and its many forms and the role of Lincoln in black sacred American nationalism. This chapter also highlights Southern African Americans' appropriation of Lincoln to their ends of freedom, safety, and political and civil rights in an increasingly hostile South.

This conclusion traces how early American political music was used throughout the nineteenth century. While political music in the early nation was often ephemeral, some of it proved surprisingly durable. Not only were songs from the early national period still performed, printed, and compiled in the following decades, but their melodies were used to carry new lyrics responding to later political developments. At times, early American political music was adapted and repurposed for sectional and election purposes. Focusing on the example of Joseph Hopkinson’s “Hail Columbia,” this conclusion highlights how political music created in the early American republic was circulated in song collections, performed on varied occasions, and used to create new music through the end of the nineteenth century.

This chapter explores how Brian McLaren attracts many followers by challenging evangelicalism. McLaren is a pastor, best-selling author, ministry consultant, and influential leader in a rapidly growing evangelical movement called the emerging church. McLaren engages in progressive dialogues on the global economy, the growing economic divide between the rich and the poor, and the mounting danger of violence from both terrorists and antiterrorists. His writings attract many who criticize and critique evangelicals' partiality with American nationalism and neoconservative politics. By offering a relational and organic model of spiritual community that emphasizes friendship, fosters dialogue, and makes no claim to having a monopoly on truth, McLaren constructs an archetype for a new kind of evangelicalism that addresses the alienation, isolation, and rampant individualism of our society.