Self-Evident Walls: Reckoning with Recent Histories of Race and Nation
To borrow one of the most powerful conceits of the Declaration of Independence, these studies have taught us that what turned out to be most self-evident to the vast majority of white men who would ultimately form the citizenry of the United States was that achieving life, liberty, and the pursuit o...
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| Published in: | Journal of the early Republic 2021-04, Vol.41 (1), p.1-38 |
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| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | eng |
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| Online Access: | Get full text |
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| Summary: | To borrow one of the most powerful conceits of the Declaration of Independence, these studies have taught us that what turned out to be most self-evident to the vast majority of white men who would ultimately form the citizenry of the United States was that achieving life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness would be restricted to themselves.2 Indeed, until relatively recently, the most influential scholarship of the Revolutionary and early national periods has for the most part taken the framers of the founding documents of the U.S. at their word-about what they wanted to believe and project to the world about their national project. By the same token, U.S. nationalism could be no less zealous, violent, and exclusive than many of its notorious European counterparts, and at an earlier period at that.6 Though Ernst Renan and a few others were early forerunners, the formative scholarship of nationalism emerged during the 1940s and 1950s, as a combination of Cold War and post-World War II anxieties rippled through the Western world. [...]the only prominent comparative study of nationalism from this period to examine U.S. nationalism closely echoed postwar convictions, contending that the U.S. "nation was born so premature that for the next ninety years [after independence] it existed only as a potentiality. [...]while this polemical essay (also titled "A Roof without Walls") was part of Murrin's broad analytical framework of Anglicization-a corrective to the myth that protonational "American" identity stretched far back into the colonial period- it also captures well three common shortcomings to U.S. historiography as it applied to nationalism, before the revisionism of the 1990s.9 First, like many others, Murrin prioritized contemporary vocabulary. |
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| ISSN: | 0275-1275 1553-0620 1553-0620 |