Time for a Nation

John O'Sullivan, editor of the Democratic Review, is perhaps best known for coining the term "manifest destiny" in 1845 to justify the territorial expansion of the United States. As Thomas Allen observes in this provocative book, subsequent generations of historians, while hardly accepting or applauding this march westward, have nonetheless "interpreted the development of the American nation in the nineteenth century in terms of expansion through space" (p. 18). And yet, none other than O'Sullivan himself composed an essay that offers a glimpse of an alternative means of conceiving of national development. In "The Great Nation of Futurity," written in 1839, O'Sullivan predicted that "the expansive future is our arena, and for our history. We are entering on its untrodden space" (p. 17). This little-known text is just one of many that Allen musters in the service of an ambitious agenda: to examine what he describes at one point as the "nationalistic aspects of time" (p. 11).

In so doing, Allen does not simply argue against generations of scholars who have made spatial expansion a defining element of national identity. This alone is a provocative argument, but Allen also challenges theorists of nationalism like Benedict Anderson, who have argued that the modern nation state required the adoption of a homogenous "clock time," which "created a shared 'simultaneity' of experience that linked individuals together in an 'imagined community' moving together through time" (p. 6). Though he shares Anderson's interest in the role of clocks and other devices played in forging a national identity, Allen promises that the "homogeneity" of "modern national time begins to shatter into myriad fragments of heterogeneous, local, and transient temporal cultures" on close inspection. Yet here, too, Allen's work defies easy characterization. He does not belong to the ranks of the "New Americanists," who have scrutinized the ways that individuals and groups resist and subvert attempts to impose a common, national sense of time. Rather, he argues that "heterogeneous temporalities are not marginal or resistant to the nation, nor do they represent forms of collective affiliation that will emerge after the demise of the nation. Rather, they are themselves the threads out of which the fabric of national belonging has long been woven" (p. 11). E pluribus unum indeed.

Allen ranges far and wide in developing these arguments. The opening chapter—arguably the strongest—advances the argument that time, just as much as space, was central to national identity in the opening decades of the nineteenth century. Allen has his work cut out for him: as he rightly observes, historians from Frederick Jackson Turner to Henry Nash Smith to more recent generations of revisionist scholars have made land—"whether viewed as integral or crisscrossed by borders, vacant or inhabited"—as the focus of their inquiries into the nature of American national development (p. 18). Allen instead makes the case that a close examination of nationalist rhetoric from the early republic reveals a competing strain of thought, one that interpreted the United States "as a republic whose real territory [was] more temporal than spatial" (p. 18).

It is fitting, then, that one of the central figures whose words Allen sifts is none other than Thomas Jefferson, the man generally held up as the chief exponent of the idea that national identity would rest on spatial expansion. Jefferson, the conventional interpretation argues, saw the nation expanding in space as a means of escaping the corruption and decline that befell all republics from Rome onward. By contrast, Allen demonstrates that Jefferson in fact celebrated the forward march of time. "I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past," wrote Jefferson to John Adams in 1816 (p. 58). Jefferson, Allen convincingly argues, was not in favor of westward expansion as a means of keeping the republic arrested in some virtuous, edenic state. Rather, "Jefferson's ideal republic would occupy only as much space as...