“Our age is involved in irony because so many dreams of our nation have been so cruelly refuted by history,” wrote the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr in 1952. At that time, just seven years after the end of World War II, he and others were asking about the character of the nation that had risen to worldwide leadership. Niebuhr believed that nations were made of their histories, contrived or factual, and that “every nation has its own form of spiritual pride…. Our version is that our nation turned its back upon the vices of Europe and made a new beginning.” Yet, he noted, “we are mystified by the endless complexities of human motives and the varied compounds of ethnic loyalties, cultural traditions, social hopes, envies and fears…which lie at the foundation of their political cohesion.” A total war among nations had made the idea of a nation more pertinent than ever.
Many scholars no longer concentrate on such sweeping issues about nations or national identity.1 Recent research has tended instead to approach the nation from this or that particular angle: gender and sexuality, colonialism, indigeneity, capitalism, incarceration, the environment, and, with renewed vigor, the long struggles over race and ethnicity. These subjects—many of them now under attack by Trumpist censors—have greatly enriched our understanding of the United States. But is there not still reason to study how Americans, from within their infinite chorus of difference and pluralism, have understood their nation as a whole? If historians don’t, advocates of “patriotic” history will do that work for us.2
Two distinguished American historians, Edward Ayers and Richard Slotkin, have written quite different books that bring the nation back into full focus. In American Visions, Ayers, one of our greatest scholars of the South and the Civil War, argues that to understand this nation readers must search for its roots in the period from 1800 to 1860, a time of enormous growth, expansion, and conquest alongside a surging slave society that put the entire country in peril. In A Great Disorder, Slotkin, our most prolific scholar of national myth, examines the concepts that, he contends, Americans have, knowingly or not, used to understand themselves and act in the world, often violently. Both books were written before the 2024 election, yet they have much to tell us about our current crisis of severe polarization as well as the assaults on the historical professions and cultural institutions by the Trump administration.