The Nation's Nature: How Continental Presumptions Gave Rise to the United States of America

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notes abbreviations AHR American Historical Review DHFR Mary A. Giunta et al., eds., The Emerging Nation: A Documentary History of the Foreign Relations of the United States under the Articles of Confederation, 3 vols. (Washington, D.C.: National Historical Publications and Records Commission, 1996). DHRC John P. Kaminski and Gaspare J. Saladino, eds., The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution, 22 vols. (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1976–). JAH Journal of American History JCC Journals of the Continental Congress, 1774–1789, ed. Worthington C. Ford et al., 34 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1904–37). LDC Paul H. Smith, et al., eds., Letters of Delegates to Congress, 1774–1789, 25 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1976–2000). PBF Leonard W. Labaree et al., eds., The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, 37 vols. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1959–). PGWC W. W. Abbot et al., eds., The Papers of George Washington: Colonial Series, 6 vols. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1983–95). PGWCF W. W. Abbot et al., eds., The Papers of George Washington: Confederation Series, 6 vols. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992–97). PGWR W. W. Abbot et al., eds., The Papers of George Washington: Revolutionary War Series, 12 vols. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1985–). PTJ Julian P. Boyd et al., eds., The Papers of Thomas Je√erson, 26 vols. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1950–). WGW John C. Fitzpatrick, ed., The Writings of George Washington from the Original Manuscript Sources, 1745–1799, 39 vols. (Washington: U.S. Government Printing O≈ce, 1931–44). WMQ William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser. WTP Philip S. Foner, The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine, 2 vols. (New York: Citadel Press, 1945). introduction 1 Pauline Maier, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (New York: Knopf, 1997), ix–xv. 2 Thomas Paine, Common Sense [1776], in WTP, 1:24. 3 I borrow the phrase from David Lowenthal and Martyn J. Bowden, Geographies of 324 ) Notes to Pages 3–8 the Mind: Essays in Historical Geosophy in Honor of John Kirtland Wright (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976). 4 My phrasing here is influenced by Rogers Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 8. 5 On the imagination of islands, see John Gillis, Islands of the Mind: How the Human Imagination Created the Atlantic World (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). 6 Martin W. Lewis and Kären E. Wigen, The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 2. 7 Colin G. Calloway, The Scratch of a Pen: 1763 and the Transformation of North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 20; J. H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492–1830 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006), map 2; Richard D. Brown, Knowledge Is Power: The Di√usion of Information in Early America, 1700–1865 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 13; Richard R. John, Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 26; Trish Loughran, The Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age of U.S. Nation Building, 1770–1870 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). 8 Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain, and France, c. 1500–c. 1800 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995); Thomas Bender, A Nation among Nations: America’s Place in World History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006), 44, 309n115. 9 Samuel Sewall, Phaenomena quaedam Apocalyptica (Boston, 1697), 2. The Virginia quotation is from Albert Bushnell Hart, ed., American History Told by Contemporaries (New York, 1898), 243. 10 Wayne Bodle, ‘‘The Fabricated Region: On the Insu≈ciency of ‘Colonies’ for Understanding American Colonial History,’’ Early American Studies 1 (2003): 1– 27. 11 Michael Zuckerman, ‘‘Regionalism,’’ in A Companion to Colonial America, ed. Daniel Vickers (Malden, Mass: Blackwell, 2003), 311–33, quotation from 311. 12 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991), 6–7, 36–46, 63–64. On fragmentation , see Loughran, Republic in Print. The literature on nationalism is vast. Most works on early American nationalism focus on the period of the early republic. Among these, I have found David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1775–1820 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), most useful. Among works focusing on the...