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  • Choice, Loyalty, and Safety in the Construction of a Distinctly American Imagined Nationalism
  • Jennifer Rose Mercieca (bio)
The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence. By T. H. Breen. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004; pp 400. $30.00.
Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse. By Richard R. John. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996; pp 369. $65.00.
Peace Pact: The Lost World of the American Founding. By David C. Hendrickson. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003; pp 402. $29.95.
Patriot Fires: Forging a New American Nationalism in the Civil War North. By Melinda Lawson. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002; pp 280. $19.95.

Nations, writes Benedict Anderson, are imagined political communities. Such communities are "both inherently limited and sovereign." That is, nations are finite in territory, based on Enlightenment notions of freedom, and "conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship." 1 According to Anderson, these "imagined communities" historically arose after a succession of events: the Protestant Reformation, which allowed various peoples and languages to become more autonomous; the rise of capitalism, which allowed information and peoples to move about more rapidly; the rise of printing and literacy, which allowed people who understood vernacular languages to imagine themselves as part of a [End Page 279] larger reading audience; and finally, the invention of written constitutions, which codified the idea of a permanent nation of laws. His argument has been of particular interest to scholars of rhetoric and public affairs because he places communication processes and technologies at the center of these historic moments of nation forming. 2 However, as Anderson himself has observed, his thesis fails to explain how the 13 American colonies came to imagine that they might form a nation. After all, by 1776 each of Anderson's four steps—save the last one—had already occurred. "Here then is the riddle," writes Anderson, "why was it precisely creole communities that developed so early conceptions of their nation-ness—well before most of Europe?" 3 His book thus raises an intriguing question for scholars of American nationalism: if American colonials mostly spoke the same language, had fairly autonomous local governments, and used English in both official and vernacular printed material, then what might have united these autonomous empires to trust each other enough to commit treason, to conduct war, and to imagine nationhood? 4

Four recent books have attempted to solve the riddles of American nationalism by examining how people, communities, and governments imagined and negotiated their ways into the American nation. Each of the authors reviewed here argues that American nation building can best be understood as a process, although each focuses on a different one: consumer culture, communication technology, peace treaties, and patriotic culture. In addition, each book finds the imagination of nationalism to have occurred at different levels of political organization: average people, social clubs, local communities, and state governments. As we begin our discussion of imagining American nationalism, it is necessary to recognize at the outset that such imagination was the result of complex interactions between disparate people, political structures, and processes. My discussion of these recent books on the American imagined community will proceed chronologically and attempt to knit the various threads of argument offered by each scholar into a coherent narrative that describes how these authors view the unique circumstances of America's nationalism.

Northwestern University history professor T. H. Breen's The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence argues that the rise of consumer culture after 1740 provided the context for Americans to organize boycotts of British goods as a means of protest. Such boycotts allowed Americans to voice their frustrations with empire, "provided a remarkably visible and effective test of allegiance," and thus demonstrated to colonials in different regions that united action with strangers was possible. 5 Colorado College political science professor David C. Hendrickson rearticulates ratification as a peace pact between suspicious empires and argues that "the sense of common nationality was more a consequence of mutual entanglement and exiguous [End Page 280] necessity than a sense of common peoplehood." 6 University of Illinois-Chicago history professor Richard R. John's Spreading the News: The American Postal...

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