Benjamin E. Park. American Nationalisms

Fifty-seven years ago in the pages of this journal, David M. Potter tried to clear up confusion by analyzing how sectionalism and nationalism could work together, for example in the coming of the Civil War (“The Historian’s Use of Nationalism and Vice Versa,” AHR 67, no. 4 [July 1962]: 924–950). In a 2001 article, Andrew W. Robertson posited a dialectic of partisan nationalisms with international reference points (“‘Look on This Picture . . . And on This!’: Nationalism, Localism, and Partisan Images of Otherness in the United States, 1787–1820,” AHR Forum, AHR 106, no. 4 [October 2001]: 1263–1280). With American Nationalisms: Imagining the Union in the Age of Revolutions, 1783–1833, Benjamin E. Park bids to join these sophisticated accounts. His title is not a typo. American nationalisms were not only “provincial,” they were “plural,” not to mention “imaginative, fraught, and local” (7, 68). Park underplays or ignores scholarship that has made similar arguments with different emphases. Protesting that there has not been enough attention to religion, he focuses on the most culturally and religiously distinctive midsized states—Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina—and finds their versions of nationalism to be strikingly different from one another. A lengthy first chapter focuses on 1787, when creative but inchoate attempts were made to imagine the relationship between nation and state. Drawing out this distinction, Park finds “fissures,” eliding the fact that commentary on regional differences by leaders in Congress and by other travelers is an often-remarked-upon phenomenon of the mid-1780s. Rather than rigorously investigate the constitutional ratification debates, the latter half of this chapter compares Benjamin Rush’s Pennsylvanian acceptance of diversity within unity with fellow federalist Noah Webster’s Yankee hopes for nation-building linguistic uniformity.

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