What It Means to Be American?: Creating American National Identity
| Thesis title in Czech: | Co znamená být Američanem?: Zrod americké národní identity |
|---|---|
| Thesis title in English: | What It Means to Be American?: Creating American National Identity |
| Key words: | národní identita|americká národní identita|vlastenectví|válka o nezávislost|éra první republiky|historie USA|Afroameričané|původní obyvatelstvo |
| English key words: | national identity|American national identity|nationalism|War of Independence|American history|African Americans|indigenous peoples|era of the early republic |
| Academic year of topic announcement: | 2020/2021 |
| Thesis type: | diploma thesis |
| Thesis language: | angličtina |
| Department: | Department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures (21-UALK) |
| Supervisor: | David Lee Robbins, Ph.D. |
| Author: | hidden - assigned and confirmed by the Study Dept. |
| Date of registration: | 05.11.2020 |
| Date of assignment: | 05.11.2020 |
| Administrator's approval: | not processed yet |
| Confirmed by Study dept. on: | 10.12.2020 |
| Date and time of defence: | 09.09.2021 00:00 |
| Date of electronic submission: | 13.08.2021 |
| Date of proceeded defence: | 09.09.2021 |
| Submitted/finalized: | committed by student and finalized |
| Opponents: | doc. Erik Sherman Roraback, D.Phil. |
| Guidelines |
| The term national identity in regards of the U.S. and the American nation has always been regarded as peculiar because of its difficulty of definition. Nation and national identity on its own are viewed as contradictory concepts that do not conform to a single model or principle. The highly multicultural and multiethnic character of the U.S. society and the differences in the establishment of the American nation as opposed to for example the European nations are the main reasons why assigning a national identity in the U.S. becomes a problem. Features like common history, language, myths, and culture of people of the same origin are the defining features of a nation in most of the European countries. In the U.S., however, the features constituting a nation and national identity are based on both spiritual and political principle that arises from the notion of “one people” and the highest principle according to which “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights,”[1]found in the American Declaration of Independence. Therefore, the notion of national identity in the U.S. seems to be more connected to the authority of the government than to its history or its common myths. There were many attempts to define what it means to be American, ranging from the concept of the melting pot, first used in the 18th century, which defines the American nation as a nation where elements of the various cultures come together to form a homogenous society with a common culture, to the concept of multiculturalism described through the metaphor of the salad bowl, where the cultures are brought together but each of the individual traditions of the diverse cultures are retained. To fully understand American national identity, it is needed to realize how it was constructed. The era of the American revolution and the first republic offer major clues into how American national identity came to be and how it developed. The aim of this MA thesis is to analyze the perception of American national identity in the time of its emergence, and identify its main features and values that define what it meant to be American. The thesis will begin with defining general key terms like nation and nationality with the help of theoretical works by Benedict Anderson and his book Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism and Eric J. Hobsbawm’s Nations and Nationalism Since 1780. Then the thesis will focus on discussing the concepts of national identity in the U.S., and America’s own perception of national identity at the time of the establishment of the U.S. The text will introduce relevant historical context of the American revolution and the first republic, supported by Gordon S. Wood’s The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1786 and Joseph J. Ellis’s American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic. To portray the thinking of ordinary Americans and their understanding of the growing nationalism the thesis will analyze texts dealing with social and cultural changes, and daily lives of Americans, such as; Sarah M. S. Pearsall’s Atlantic Families: Lives and Letters in the Later Eighteenth Century, Konstantin Dierks’s In My Power: Letter Writing and Communications in Early America, Claude S. Fischer’s Made in America: A Social History of American Culture and Character and Jack P. Green’s Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies. The text will also draw on the ideas which appear in works by influential writers of the 19th century, who wrote on the topic of the American nation, like Ralph Waldo Emerson in his Essays, or Alexis de Tocqueville and his extensive account of the U.S. in Democracy in America. To discuss the concepts of what it means to be American, nationalism and American identity, the thesis will utilize works such as J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer, Arthur Kaledin's Tocqueville and His America: A Darker Horizon, Natsu Taylor Saito’s Meeting the Enemy: American Exceptionalism and International Law. The thesis will conclude with a discussion on how these socio-political and historical changes influenced the subsequent development of the U.S. and its perception of national identity. [1]Thomas Jefferson, “The Declaration of the United States,” archive.org, |
| References |
| Bibliography Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 2006. Bacon, Jacqueline. Freedom’s Journal: The First African-American Newspaper. Plymouth: Lexington Books, 2007. Barlow, Joel. The Columbiad: A Poem. Philadelphia: C. & A. Conrad, 1807. Barlow, Joel. The Vision of Columbus: A Poem in Nine Books. Hartford: Hudson and Goodwin, 1787. Cooper, James Fenimore. Notions of the Americans: Picked Up by a Travelling Bachelor. New York: Stringer & Townsend, 1850. Cooper, James Fenimore. The American Democrat, or, Hints on the Social and Civic Relations of the United States of America. Cooperstown: H. & E. Phinney, 1838. Cooper, James Fenimore. The Pioneers, or, The Sources of the Susquehanna. Cambridge: The Riverside Press, 1880. Cullen, Jim. The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Davis, David Brion. The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution 1770-1823. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. de Crevecoeur, J. Hector St. John. Letters from an American Farmer. New York: Fox, Duffield & Company, 1904. Delbanco, Andrew. The Puritan Ordeal. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989. Dierks, Konstantin. In My Power: Letter Writing and Communications in Early America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009. Ellis, Joseph J. American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic. New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing, 2007. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Essays: First and Second Series. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1883. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Nature; Addresses, and Lectures. Boston: James Munroe & Company, 1849. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. The Conduct of Life. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1860. Ernest, John. A Nation Within a Nation: Organizing African-American Communities Before the Civil War. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2011. Fischer, Claude S. Made in America: A Social History of American Culture and Character. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Glaude, Eddie S. Jr. Exodus! Religion, Race, and Nation in Early Nineteenth-Century Black America. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000. Greene, Jack P. Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988. Hobsbawm, Eric J. and Terence Ranger. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Hobsbawm, Eric J. Nations and Nationalism Since 1780, Second Edition: Programme, Myths, Reality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Irving, Washington. The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. New York: A. L. Burt Company, 1820. Kaledin, Arthur. Tocqueville and His America: A Darker Horizon. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011. Kerber, Linda K. Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980. Madison, James, John Jay and Alexander Hamilton. The Federalist. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2001. Main, Jackson Turner. The Anti-federalists: Critics of the Constitution, 1781-1788. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961. Mays, Dorothy A. Women in Early America: Struggle, Survival and Freedom in a New World. Santa Barbara: ABC-Clio, 2004. McCartney, Paul T. Power and Progress: American National Identity, the War of 1898, and the Rise of American Imperialism. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006. Navarre Cleary, Michelle. “‘America Represented by a Woman’ – Negotiating Feminine and National Identity in Post-Revolutionary America.” Women’s Studies 28, no. 1 (January 1998): 59-78. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00497878.1998.9979244. Pearsall, Sarah M. S. Atlantic Families: Lives and Letters in the Later Eighteenth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Saito, Natsu Taylor. Meeting the Enemy: American Exceptionalism and International Law. New York: New York University Press, 2010. Smith, Anthony D. National Identity. London: Penguin Books, 1991. Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll. This Violent Empire: The Birth of an American National Identity. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010. Tocqueville, Alexis. Democracy in America. Translated by Henry Reeve. Pennsylvania State University: Electronic Classics Series, 2002. Wood, Gordon S. The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1786. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969. Wright, Donald R. African Americans in the Colonial Era: From African Origins through the American Revolution. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2017. Zagarri, Rosemarie. Revolutionary Backlash: Women and Politics in the Early American Republic. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. |