Self-Evident Walls: Reckoning with Recent Histories of Race and Nation

Examining both older and recent scholarship of race and nation in early American history and beyond, this article reckons with myriad blind spots and with more recent attempts to alleviate them. Employing both chronological accounts of the early United States and a comparative lens, it argues that the increasingly converging histories of race and nation suggest that the United States should be considered a paradigmatic case of racial nationalism. Indeed, it was nationalism itself that led Americans, both citizens and historians--since the creation of the republic and in many ways until this day--to believe that the United States, as a nation, stood for the words of the Declaration of Independence "that all men are created equal." Recent research, however, reveals that in fact what was perhaps most "self-evident" about the early United States was that these words would prove true only for white men.