American Nationalisms

What do we mean by nationalism? In American Nationalisms, Benjamin E. Park argues that the Revolution severed the one thing Americans had in common, that they were subjects of the British Crown. The lack of definition in American nationhood fostered grave anxieties for the country's future. To fill the gap and unify the citizenry, thinkers in the early republic cultivated particularist visions of American character and destiny and projected them onto the country as a whole. These notions were regionally grounded. Pennsylvanians conceptualized the United States as a pluralist democracy, Massachusettsans as a covenanted republic, and South Carolinians as a decentralized collectivity allowing space for slavery. There was, then, no single nationalism, but a panoply of “locally imagined nationalisms” whose incompatibilities eventually became “catalysts” for disunion and civil war (pp. 15, xi). The aim of this book is to elucidate them and trace out their consequences. Park devotes chapters to constitutionalist thought in Pennsylvania around the time of the Philadelphia convention, to New England Thanksgiving sermons in the Federalist era, to Massachusetts opponents of the War of 1812, to the rise of antislavery in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, and finally to the nullification controversy in South Carolina. These chapters largely rewalk familiar contemporary debates over federalism, religion and church and state, political economy, foreign policy, and slavery, recasting them as contentions over “nationalism” and endeavoring, not always convincingly, to set them as such within a broader Atlantic discursive context. This reframing casts a cloak of novelty over Park's exposition; but, beyond bringing to the fore some lesser known contributors to the conversation, it is uncertain how much here is really new

Constitutionalism · Context (archaeology · Democracy · Federalism · Federalist · Ideology · Manifest destiny · Nationalism · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · State (computer science · Vision · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Anthropology · History · Law