What History and Literature Reveal about American Nationalism [Embracing Transformation]

Between 1820 and 1850, the U.S. contended with a set of urgent problems: how to reconcile the ideal of liberty with the reality of racial slavery; how to square Christian belief with the removal of Native tribes from homelands coveted by white people; how to interpret the principle of “equality” vis a vis women, free people of color, and Catholic immigrants; how to invent a national identity and a robust nationalism in the face of conflict, demographic diversity, and geographical immensity. Underlying these conundrums—as we see in the literature of the era—was an unresolved contradiction about citizenship: were you an “American” because you pledged allegiance to the nation and its laws or because your ancestry connected you to the first colonists, those in the vanguard of “Anglo-Saxon Civilization?” And complicating it all was the righteous (but possibly self-serving) belief that God had destined Americans to be a new “Chosen People” and America to be a “city on a hill,” a nation exempted from the historical inevitability of rise and fall.

The author of "Strange Nation" and the Boyd Professor of English at Louisiana State University, Dr. J. Gerald Kennedy has a Ph.D. & Master’s from Duke University. He has published over 14 books on American Literature, short Fiction, literary nationalism and modernism and received countless awards and honors for his works on Edgar Allen Poe. He has been a Member of the Hemingway Society, President of the Poe Studies Association, and on various English advisory Boards. At Westminster, he is even better known as “Ben’s dad.”