Reinventing the Wheel of Early U.S. Nationalism

Like many studies of hoary, controversial, and yet difficult-to-define subjects, monographs on U.S. nationalism tend to scoff at, condescend to, or even ignore earlier approaches—even, perhaps especially, the ones most similar to their own. Wittingly or not, historians often echo the nationalists themselves in claiming to have begun the world anew and set themselves apart from Europe, from theory, and/or from their musty forebears of every mistaken ideological persuasion. Jasper Trautsch is no exception to this historiographical exceptionalism, though the results are, fortunately, better than usual. The title of his substantial monograph evokes Richard Van Alstyne’s brief synthesis Genesis of American Nationalism, which capped a number of mid-century works that stressed the diplomatic and imperial contexts of U.S. nation-formation.1 Unlike Van Alstyne or other works of his generation by Max Savelle or William Appleman Williams, however, Trautsch begins with the now-regnant wisdom that the American Revolution, the Confederation, and even the Constitution created not a nation but at most an alliance, a security state, a weak collection of republics.2 The notion of the post-French Revolution early republic as a distinct nation and nationalism-making era certainly will go down better than Trautsch’s backhanded compliment that the American Revolution had “after all” been built on universal rights, not nationalist claims, much less his claim that, after all, the new nation had “no shared history or unique culture” (10, xx).

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