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September 2015 Vol. 53 No. 1

The United States secured independence in the Revolutionary War, but an American identity would form more gradually, amid clashing visions of the nation’s mission.  In a provocative study, Haselby (visiting faculty, Columbia) locates the seeds of American nationalism in the rift that formed between two principal antagonists: on one side, the heirs of New England Puritanism (the Connecticut Wits and the sons of Harvard and Yale who founded the national mission movement) and on the other, upstart frontier revivalists (mainly the Methodists).  This dichotomy provides a useful analytical tool, but Haselby’s framework is a little too neat.  He overstates the New Englanders’ national influence, and the Methodists, who rejected worldly affairs, seem unlikely candidates to have spearheaded a cohesive political identity.  Meanwhile, Haselby downplays other voices that might have complicated his interpretation, and his choice of Andrew Jackson (a secular nationalist, not a religious one) as the culminating political symbol of frontier revivalism raises more questions than it answers about what sort of nationalism emerged from the tensions he identifies.  Haselby isolates important spiritual and secular threads in nationalist discourse but might have done more to show how those threads interwove.

--S. M. Balik, Metropolitan State University of Denver

Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, faculty.