A Nation without Borders

Steven Hahn begins and ends his impressive survey of nineteenth-century American history in an unexpected place. The borderlands between Mexico and the United States might seem an unlikely location for a sprawling examination of the evolution of the United States from the 1830s to the 1910s, but that is the entire point of A Nation without Borders. Hahn argues that empire, often under the guise of republican government, was the driving force behind American nationalism, in which “the new American nation reconfigured the character of its empire, first in the South and the trans-Mississippi West before reaching overseas” (p. 2). The border with Mexico, in this calculation, is a prime location to start and end, first with the conflicts among Americans, Mexicans, and the Comanche during the 1830s, and then concluding with the militarized borderlands during the early years of the Mexican Revolution. Conflict is the key here, as Hahn depicts an aggressive American nationalism determined to exert control over its own contested territory and beyond. Describing the muscle and bone of these imperial ambitions forms the crux of this book and, for Hahn, the driving force behind the formation of the American nation-state

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