A bold new vision of how the United States shed its colonial identity
and became a distinctive nation
The transformation of British America, a cluster of colonies along the
Atlantic, into American America, a nation-state, was not the sudden
event of legend. The process extended well beyond the American
Revolution--even beyond the War of 1812 the "Second American
Revolution." Indeed, the making of the American nation was only realized
well into the nineteenth century.
In telling this story, Thomas Bender's British America, American
America offers a brisk, novel, and highly readable account of social,
political, and cultural developments from the years of settlement to the
emergence of a continental nation. A pioneer in the growing field of
transnational history, he integrates the most recent scholarship into
the American story and stresses the interconnections, commonalities, and
differences among British and French colonies in the Americas.
Bender stresses that the nineteenth-century nation-state was defined by
two elements: a political system based on popular sovereignty, and a
distinctive national culture. The United States was a forerunner of
popular sovereignty, but it took longer to establish a recognized
culture. With the paintings of the Hudson River School and the emergence
of a distinctive literary language in the masterpieces of Herman
Melville and Walt Whitman this goal was realized.
