Many Identities, One Nation: The Revolution and Its Legacy in the Mid-Atlantic (review)

In Many Identities, One Nation, Riordan seeks to connect political history and social history in order to explore the diverse effects of the American Revolution on a local and national level by examining changes in group (and some individual) identities in three Delaware river towns between the 1760s and the 1820s. Riordan applies local-history methods to analyze changes in Quaker Burlington, New Jersey, in New Castle, Delaware (heavily populated with African Americans), and in Easton, Pennsylvania, where Pennsylvania Germans struggled for power. Riordan brings a complex analysis of architecture, religion, electoral politics, demographic change, and reform movements to bear on post-Revolutionary change in a pluralistic society, where religious, racial, and ethnic categories became increasingly important.

The book’s seven chapters proceed chronologically as they juxtapose discussion of each locality against national political and social changes. The first two chapters, which establish local context for the towns, discuss how the American Revolution worked as the engine of social and political change in each of them. The third chapter examines the interaction of local political conflicts with national politics in the early republic, arguing that shifts in personal identity were connected with changes in partisanship. The fourth and fifth chapters focus on crosscurrents in Protestant religion as the reforming impulse grew at the turn of the nineteenth century. The final two chapters examine the impact of Jacksonian democracy on lived experience and continuing demographic change in the Delaware River valley.

Riordan’s addition of careful, local evidence to the scholarship on the growth of national identity and post-Revolutionary society is welcome. The towns that he chose prove excellent case studies about local variation in national trends. Riordan is particularly successful at integrating political and religious history. He illuminates the texture of social change for many African Americans, German Lutherans, and Quakers in a way that an analysis of national politics alone could never duplicate. Anyone interested in the mechanisms of social and political change—the ways in which personal relationships interact with deeply held beliefs, ethnic traditions, and national trends—could benefit from a careful reading of Riordan’s book.

Although the picture of change is clear, Riordan never offers a convincing framework to integrate the concept of identity—one of his major concerns. He applies his several definitions of identity inconsistently across the chapters. He mixes constructionist definitions with structuralist concepts, while also employing the anachronistic term “Revolutionary identity politics” to describe ethnic conflict throughout the book. Sometimes Riordan effectively relates events to changes in identity (when discussing Fries’ Rebellion or the appeal of evangelicalism), but other times he fails to demonstrate how change was internalized as a matter of identity (when he relates demographic changes in New Castle’s black community).

Ultimately, Riordan’s book stands as a good combination of political and social history, but his bid to expand the definition of identity in the early republic is less convincing.