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In the 1950s and 1960s, the modern Japanese state employed overseas cultural promotion as a way to maximise its interests and image not only in international contexts but also at home. By juxtaposing the Takarazuka Revue’s performances in the United States and Japan during the postwar period, this paper argues that the overseas promotion of this Japanese theatre troupe both depended upon and reinforced the Japanese populace’s nationalistic pride in its culture. The paper also addresses the ways in which the Japanese government used Takarazuka’s theatrical presentations as a means of pursuing its domestic and diplomatic agendas: improving Japan’s international position by proposing shared aspects of popular culture with the US and increasing its sense of nationalism by propagating cultural pride. In doing so, the paper explicates the ways in which Japanese popular cultural considerations interfaced with political concerns in the shaping of postwar Japan’s national identity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An understanding of Woodrow Wilson's Presbyterian faith as being a foundational influence to him is crucial to making sense of his ideas and policy decisions during his presidency. Presbyterianism influenced basic thought patterns in Wilson, such as a comfort with contradictions, serious attention to the meaning and power of words, and a view that political organizations were means and not ends. These religiously-shaped patterns can be seen throughout Wilson's engagement with China, Mexico, and most famously, the negotiations at Versailles as epitomized in Wilson's Fourteen Points. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Jimmy Carter was strongly influenced by his Christian faith, particularly in his promotion of peace and human rights. Carter, raised a Southern Baptist, became “born-again” in the late 1960s, and was publicly vocal about his faith. While Carter's political philosophy had many influences, Carter was always explicit about his faith's central role in determining his governing values. These values revealed themselves most clearly in Carter's foreign policy, where Carter emphasized promoting peace in the Middle East during the Camp David Accords, and human rights in his campaign to turn control of the Panama Canal over to the Panamanians. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The struggle to break away from the parent state and claim independence often results in political unrest, terrorist activities and even ethnic cleansing. Understanding the nature of the secessionist movement does not only preserve national unity, but can also avoid conflict and violence, and maintain peace. Irredentist and secessionist advocators generally defend themselves in terms of common blood, race or culture. None of them regards the issue from the human agency theory, namely Weber-Thomas-Berger's social construction theory. This paper uses phenomenological analysis to explain the origin of national identity and hence the emergence of a nation. It argues that social construction of national reality originates from everyday life experience taken for granted during socialization. Individuals make sense of the external world. Experiences taken for granted become the actor's stock of knowledge. A common scheme of knowledge shared by the community serves to differentiate in-group (nationals) and out-group (foreigners). Collective consciousness thus defines national identity and hence a nation. Unless people (both in-group and out-group) interact with and learn from each other, different stocks of knowledge taken for granted will create political conflict. This theory is applied to the Taiwan Strait conflict. People in Taiwan are searching for national identity, manifested in the processes of Sinicization and Taiwanization. The struggle between Chinese and Taiwanese consciousness is the underlying cause of conflict within Taiwan and across the Taiwan Strait. The growing tendency of Taiwanization and diminution of Sinicization in Taiwan render the Cross-Strait relation vulnerable. The paper concludes that Cross-Strait exchanges and communication provide opportunities for people to understand each other and re-define their national identity, hence resulting in a peaceful political resolution between Taiwan and mainland China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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During the Republican Party's national convention in 1992, Pat Buchanan claimed that a 'culture war' was raging in the United States. While Buchanan described this 'war' as a 'struggle for the soul of America,' we use the culture-war concept to refer to the efforts of various conservative political and social actors trying to protect US traditional values and to 'exorcise' the liberal and secular 'demons' of the United States. Accordingly, this paper focuses on one of these actors: the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank located in Washington, DC. Performing a postructuralist discursive analysis of various 'texts' produced by three scholars from the Heritage about marriage, family values, and sexuality, the paper shows how these scholars strategically rely on certain words and expressions in their research in order to reach two political goals: (1) marginalize liberal views on the issues just mentioned; and (2) discipline Americans by leading them to embrace a traditional/conservative interpretation of US national identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an attempt to meet the goal of internationalizing the curriculum and equipping students for the twenty-first century and beyond, schools have engaged themselves in a myriad of study abroad programs. These programs, in keeping with many of these schools' missions, are intended to encircle students with a more critical global awareness. While study abroad programs are promoted as self-identity discovery tools, through which students can construct new national identities that transcend national borders, this paper, based on interviews conducted with College of Charleston students who studied in Cuba during spring 2007 and 2009 semesters, explores the relationship between the study abroad experience and identity formation. We argue that these encounters not only allow students to interrogate what it means to 'be American' beyond the emotional, physical, and intellectual bounds of the United States, but also how their previous conceptions of self and nation can strengthen, not contradict, a global context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whiteness is often detached from the notion of diaspora in the recent flurry of interest in the phenomenon, yet it is a key feature of some of the largest and oldest displacements. This paper explores the specific contexts of white racial belonging and status over two centuries in two main destinations of the Irish diaspora, the USA and Britain. Its major contribution is a tracing of the untold story of ‘How the Irish became white in Britain’ to parallel and contrast with the much more fully developed narrative in the USA. It argues that, contrary to popular belief, the racialisation of the Irish in England did not fade away at the end of the nineteenth century but became transmuted in new forms which have continued to place the ‘white’ Irish outside the boundaries of the English nation. These have been strangely ignored by social scientists, who conflate Irishness and working-class identities in England without acknowledging the distinctive contribution of Irish backgrounds to constructions of class difference. Gender locates Irish women and men differently in relation to these class positions, for example allowing mothers to be blamed for the perpetuation of the underclass. Class and gender are also largely unrecognised dimensions of Irish ethnicity in the USA, where the presence of ‘poor white’ neighbourhoods continues to challenge the iconic story of Irish upward mobility. Irishness thus remains central to the construction of mainstream ‘white’ identities in both the USA and Britain into the twenty-first century. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The launching of a Spanish version of The Star Spangled Banner, called Nuestro Himno, sparked a controversy that the media embraced. This paper analyzes the discourse in print news coverage of that event in the United States. Through this discourse, we discern U.S. ideologies about language and immigration and explore the moral panic that media coverage captured and reproduced. We propose a sixth characteristic of moral panics: polarized dichotomy. Nuestro Himno provided an open forum for the current debate about making English the official language of The United States, often referred to as the English-only movement. This investigation is situated in the context of the national debate on immigration reform. We find that both detractors and proponents of the Nuestro Himno accept an assimilation model for immigrants to the United States. For many, the English language stands as a symbol of unity, patriotism, willingness to assimilate, and national identity, in short, as a central feature of being "American." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how US TV news on abortion-related protest forecloses possibilities for democracy and political action. Representing abortion-related activism as a battle, news segments portray activists, correspondents, and viewers as villains, witnesses, and victims in a tale of a nation decimated by civil war. While activists describe their work militaristically, the news's war is not the war that activists describe. News discourse represents activists as threatening the American family/community/nation. Applying Hannah Arendt's and Mary Douglas's work shows how the news eclipses public spheres by mapping a pollution narrative onto those who threaten myths of national homogeneity and proper citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As of 2018, there were more than 44.7 million immigrants residing, both lawfully and unlawfully, in the United States [Batalova, J., Blizzard, B., & Bolter, J. (2020, February 14). Frequently requested statistics on immigrants and immigration in the United States. Migration Policy Institute. ]. Understanding the attitudes of U.S. citizens towards immigrants is necessary because of the impact that attitudes can have on policy development and the subsequent national treatment of immigrants based on those policies. This article utilizes a framework of national identity which suggests that this construct is comprised of three separate elements: nativism, emotionality, and behavior. Using U.S. citizen response data from three waves of the National Identity module of the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) from 1995, 2003, and 2013, multivariate linear regressions were used to explore the relationship between this framework and attitudes towards immigrants. Findings indicated that there were statistically significant relationships between respondents' perceptions of national identity and attitudes towards immigrants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dwight Eisenhower demonstrated little interest in religion before and after his presidency. During his presidency, however, religion and religious symbols played an increasingly important role in the US public sphere, especially with regards to the fight against Communism. Three cases in particular—Iran, Guatemala, and Vietnam—show how religion became a tool in the formation and implementation of US foreign policy under Eisenhower's presidency. In each of these cases, religion was used to help establish regimes that quickly became ruthless and dictatorial. This historical experience should stand as a warning to Americans to be cautious and critical about the use of religion to achieve political or strategic objectives. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The principles to which Washington adhered throughout his presidency consistently focused on a definition of American national interest and identity, which Washington articulated in his public addresses and pragmatic actions. Washington promoted a national morality based on private morality and religion, and he believed strongly that God's Providence had made the founding of the new republic possible. This essential vision was an important factor shaping his recommendations in the 1783 “Circular Address to the Governors of the Thirteen States,” which argued for a deeply moral character of the American republic, and undergirded Washington's “Proclamation of Neutrality” in 1793. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The goal of this paper is to analyze the origins and the evolution of America's religious foundational myths, and their role in the inception of the idea of "exceptionalism", the main determinant of US political identity as expressed in foreign policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is the first comprehensive biography based on unique archival sources about Gregory Ignatius Zhatkovych, a Pittsburgh-based lawyer, who in 1918–1919 was instrumental in the creation of Czechoslovakia and the inclusion of its far eastern region, Subcarpathian Rus'/Ruthenia, into the new country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Extending research on US ideological identity as a social identity, this study employs a social representations approach to capture identity meaning as a form of national attachment. Across two studies (n = 723), we demonstrate that two novel organizing principles of US ideological identity—national reverence (veneration of the nation in the abstract, its symbols, sacred texts, and founding fathers) and individual support (a focus on the progress of individuals and the change required to bring about equality)—significantly predicted ideological self‐categorization, 2016 presidential voting, and affective political polarization over and above right‐wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation. The results suggest an integration of national and conservative identities that places US national identity in opposition to liberal identity and to progress and equality, pointing to the divisive employment of national identity in the current political environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores differences among African Americans, Latinos, and whites regarding which attributes are most important to being truly American and how these competing conceptions relate to an individual's level of racial animus toward African Americans. Using nationally representative survey data, we first find that Americans of different races vary across six different components of national identity and do so in ways consistent with theorizing on symbolic racism and inter-group conflict. Specifically, Americans place more importance on those components shared with indivduals of the same race. We then analyze how these differing beliefs about national identity influence racial animus. Here, we find robust evidence that individuals who prioritize the ascriptive, exclusive elements of national identity are more racist, while individuals who embrace its most inclusive element are less so. Finally, we reveal that the relationship between conceptions of national identity and racism is moderated substantially by race, and this robust relationship for whites and Latinos is virtually identical. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how American girls and young women in the early republic formed a new sense of a "corporeal" national identity while touring areas of the Hudson River valley and the Great Lakes. Based on a reading of the travel writings of fifteen white, middle and upper-middle class, American girls and young women travelling between 1802 and 1835, it demonstrates first that during the tours within the United States the girls underwent a multisensory familiarisation with the landscape, which both bolstered their confidence and concretised much of their theoretical knowledge gained during their studies. Second, when touring the Canadian shores of the Great Lakes their focus was on constructing both its landscape and its people as "other". The article closes with a consideration of how these young women's travel writings may offer a new perspective for the study of a gendered national identity formation in the early United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

U.S. national identity is rooted in a particular claim to the future. U.S. Cold War policy appropriated the future for the nation's security needs. particular discursive techniques underlying Modernization Theory's projection of the future. This paper examines how a particular conception of American national identity, America as the "great nation of futurity," was rhetorically deployed within an instance of post-World War II foreign policy discourse. I analyze projections of the future embedded within and disseminated through "modernization theory" and the rhetorical functions those projections served within the discourse. Modernization theory was a social scientific theory which provided a blueprint for restructuring post-colonial societies. I argue that the U.S.'s self-proclaimed identity as the nation of the future was an important aspect of modernization theory discourse and that this identity was used rhetorically to legitimate the nation's efforts to shape the future of postcolonial societies. Working within a Critical Discourse Analysis framework, I focus on two prominent modernization theory texts, Millikan & Rostow's A Proposal and Lerner's The Passing of Traditional Society. I analyze the discursive means through which the future of the newly decolonized societies was aligned with U.S. foreign policy interests and how an historically specific vision of the future was transformed into a universal, inevitable future. My analysis examines the space-times embedded in the texts, the relations and contrasts created between them, and how these contrasts served to legitimate, and, ultimately, universalize a projection of the future grounded in American interests, history, and identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What does it mean to be 'American'? Drawing on in-depth interviews with 76 undergraduates attending elite universities and 72 teenaged citizen children of immigrants living in mostly lowincome households, we identify understudied economic narratives of Americanness: as future-oriented economic opportunities for elite undergraduates or stratified notions of current economic condition among immigrant-origin teens. We also find, depending on social location, that economic notions of Americanness overlap with other boundaries: whiteness for some immigrant-origin youth, and civic membership for elite undergraduates. Elite students place themselves at the centre of Americanness; immigrant-origin youth, even though they are U.S. citizens, sometimes place themselves outside these symbolic boundaries. Still, youth in more disadvantaged social locations sometimes appropriate markers of Americanness in strategies of what we call 'defensive inclusion', employing symbolic boundaries of hard work, multiculturalism and birthplace to contest perceived social boundaries of race and class that might exclude them from the core of 'Americanness'. Our findings suggest that researchers should include measures of economic national identity in future survey-based work and examine discursive practices of defensive inclusion in fieldwork. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Immigration has dramatically changed the face of the nation in the last thirty years, yet it is unclear how children currently define “Americanness” in light of these demographic and cultural shifts. This research explores how elementary students define what it means to be American in the context of immigration-driven diversity. Based on a survey of fourth and fifth graders in an elementary school located in a high-immigrant community, the author shows that despite the diversity of the school and local surroundings, and the multicultural ideology espoused by school staff, students predominately defined “American” in ethnocultural terms – specifically, as white, US-born, and English-speaking. At the same time, a small group of students challenged this narrative and defined Americans in pluralist terms. This study suggests that schools aiming to create inclusive learning communities in an increasingly diverse nation may need more direct approaches to teaching a culturally pluralist model of America. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Despite the relevance of nationalism for politics and intergroup relations, sociologists have devoted surprisingly little attention to the phenomenon in the United States, and historians and political psychologists who do study the United States have limited their focus to specific forms of nationalist sentiment: ethnocultural or civic nationalism, patriotism, or national pride. This article innovates, first, by examining an unusually broad set of measures (from the 2004 GSS) tapping national identification, ethnocultural and civic criteria for national membership, domain-specific national pride, and invidious comparisons to other nations, thus providing a fuller depiction of Americans’ national self-understanding. Second, we use latent class analysis to explore heterogeneity, partitioning the sample into classes characterized by distinctive patterns of attitudes. Conventional distinctions between ethnocultural and civic nationalism describe just about half of the U.S. population and do not account for the unexpectedly low levels of national pride found among respondents who hold restrictive definitions of American nationhood. A subset of primarily younger and well-educated Americans lacks any strong form of patriotic sentiment; a larger class, primarily older and less well educated, embraces every form of nationalist sentiment. Controlling for sociodemographic characteristics and partisan identification, these classes vary significantly in attitudes toward ethnic minorities, immigration, and national sovereignty. Finally, using comparable data from 1996 and 2012, we find structural continuity and distributional change in national sentiments over a period marked by terrorist attacks, war, economic crisis, and political contention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increasingly, social movement organisations (SMOs) within the immigrant rights movement mobilise online. Although this seems an unlikely tactic for a movement whose constituents are often on the wrong side of the digital divide, the increasingly frequent use of various communications technologies works to enable communication with other activists and raise awareness among the general public. Utilising a cultural sociological perspective, this article examines the ways in which the immigrant rights movement uses various symbols to perform national identity online. The goal is to put meaning and the process of meaning making squarely at the centre of analytical attention. Building on the multiple traditions perspective on American national identity, the article explores how several national-level SMOs engage symbols to perform immigrants’ belonging to the USA. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Using data from 41 in-depth interviews with undocumented young adults, we examine how they define what it means to be an American and explore whether and to what extent they identify as ‘Americans’. Framing our analysis in theories of personal and cultural trauma, we illustrate how undocumented youth experience double-consciousness that compounds their approach to national identities. Respondents express ambivalence towards adopting an American identity, recognising their commitment to American cultural values, yet continuously feeling repelled by laws that position them as outsiders to US polity. In spite of this, undocumented youth contest their liminal status by working towards full participation in civil society. Their activities, actions, and levels of civic participation demonstrate that even though they are barred from US citizenship, they work towards embodying what they believe a true American should be. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study draws on the “cascading activation” model of press-state relations to explore U.S. political and news discourse surrounding the 1968 My Lai Massacre. We systematically analyze White House, military, congressional, and news communications and draw upon scholarship in social psychology to assess why the press might challenge certain frames in response to My Lai but indiscriminately echo others. In particular, within these communications, we examine how serious and widespread the actions at My Lai were conveyed to be, how the circumstances were portrayed, how the actors involved in the incident were characterized, and the extent to which America’s core values were questioned. Our findings suggest that the Nixon administration employed frames designed to downplay the severity of the My Lai incident, highlight extenuating circumstances faced by those directly involved, denigrate the alleged low-level perpetrators, and bolster the national identity. These frames were then largely echoed in the press, despite consistent and forceful challenges by congressional Democrats. These findings, we argue, align with the cascading activation model, and we build on it by highlighting the underlying importance of “cultural resonance” in the framing process. We reflect on the theoretical and practical implications of these patterns and, in doing so, engage the broader scholarly debate over the process through which U.S. news coverage aligns with the communications of government officials, particularly in moments of national dissonance. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Honor endorsement might predict an intertwining of personal and national identities that facilitates taking country-level threats personally. If true, this could help explain why honor endorsement predicts support for defensive reactions to national provocations. In a sample of US college students (Study 1) and adults (Study 2), a latent honor variable predicted (1) personalizing national threats, and (2) defensive responses to illegal immigration and terrorism. The first of these associations was mediated by respondents' identification with the nation, and the second was mediated sequentially by national identification and the resultant tendency to personalize national threats. Together, these results highlight a mechanism by which the honor–national-defensiveness association emerges and opens the door for further research on honor and group-level processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 2000, the American suburb has emerged as a principal destination for new immigrants to the United States, both documented and undocumented. Whereas some suburban communities have responded to perceived undocumented immigrants with hostility in the form of exclusionary local immigration policies, others have introduced policies designed to welcome immigrants independent of federal legal status. In this article, I employ a qualitative comparative case study analysis of four local immigration policies in the Chicago and Washington DC metropolitan areas to explain how suburbs justify their policy positions. I find that these suburban communities relied on conceptions of American identity and the 'American Dream' in support of their policies, but leveraged these tropes in vastly different ways depending on the broader strategic purposes of the policies. These divergent suburban immigration policies both challenge traditional notions of suburban political and cultural homogeneity and reveal how such heterogeneity has produced a distinct unevenness in contemporary local policy responses to undocumented immigration within metropolitan regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lawrence J. Vale tells us that “grand symbolic state buildings need to be understood in terms of the political and cultural contexts that helped to bring them into being,”1and that these buildings can help us understand our national identity. But all buildings are part of a broader political and cultural context. Even unimpressive state-funded buildings express meaning about the politics, power, and priorities of a nation. Because these buildings are not purposefully symbolic, their symbolism has the potential to provide a less contrived—though perhaps less appealing—portrayal of the nation in which they are built. Public housing provides an example of this idea. Public housing in the United States is latent with negative meanings that are reinforced and perpetuated by its architecture, siting, and design. This article examines three historical and iconic public housing communities and analyzes the meanings of these spaces through Goodman's four frames of reference—denotation, exemplification, metaphorical expression, and mediated reference—to determine what these spaces, as architecture, say about the American national identity and our relationship with public housing. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

American exceptionalism – the constitutive myth of American national identity – has been disseminated through literature, film, and foreign policy. This article analyzes another site: online comments in response to the New York Times coverage of the 2009 Fort Hood shooting. It is a site in which citizens participate in myth-making and maintenance. This article makes two broad claims. First, that readers’ comments in response to the Fort Hood shootings constitute messages about American national identity, particularly American exceptionalism vis-a-vis the military – the military-idea, the symbol of a unified, coherent force is central to the myth of American exceptionalism. Second, events considered to be failures of the military threaten the coherence of American exceptionalism (by fracturing the military-idea). The Fort Hood incident was considered such a failure and one readers identified as part of a larger problematic involving the US’s post-9/11 ‘war on terror’. In this mediated activity, readers put various discourses (e.g. Islamophobia, mental illness) into service to account for the military’s failure and thus maintain the myth of American exceptionalism. Ultimately, these communications constitute an attempt to avoid the divisive consequences of ‘another Vietnam’, to which the US’s post-9/11 military operations are increasingly compared. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Cinco de Mayo, celebrated by Mexican Americans as well as Americans of other ethnicities, provides an opportunity to examine the influence of ethnic festivals on broader US identity. Given the recent controversy over the immigration bill, State Bill 1070, passed in Arizona in 2010, the themes presented in newspaper articles concerning the celebration of the holiday in Phoenix, Arizona (2006-11) and the public response to these articles are examined. This examination reveals the intense contestation associated with the presentation of symbols and themes of national identity during periods of political controversy. It also illustrates that ordinary people have strong, long-standing opinions about the future of the nation and national identity and will express their opinions when an outlet is provided to them [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

South Korea- US relations were a success story of international cooperation during the Cold War on the basis of the robust bilateral alliance. In the post-Cold-War era, the security environment of the Korean Peninsula and the importance of the United States for South Korea's security are no different from that during the Cold War. However, unlike the past, South Korea has not complied with US leadership during the Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun administrations, but has adopted policy opposed to that of the United States. This study started with the question of what variables explain South Korean policy toward North Korea in the Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun administrations and why South Korea has not followed the US leadership since the Kim Dae-jung presidency, unlike in the past. In order to answer the above puzzle, this study tries to analyze the puzzling situation with the feature of constructivism, such as the change of national identity. From this study, I found that generational change in South Korea from the Korean War generation to the 386 and Internet generations played an important role in the change of South Korean national identity. Also, South Korean younger generations' voting behavior has affected South Korean engagement policy in the Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun administrations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies of national identity distinguish between ethnic and civic nations and have sought to identify these alternative conceptions of national identity in public opinion. The standard measurement technique is to assess the normative content of American national identity by asking survey respondents to rate the importance of particular traits for making someone a 'true' American. We argue that such measures are problematic, chiefly because of the impact of nonrandom measurement error. We explore the influence of using ranking measures instead of ratings, using a survey experiment conducted on a nationally representative sample of Americans in 2008. The ranking method is superior for distinguishing between ethnic and civic conceptions of nationhood and, therefore, for predicting preferences on issues such as immigration policy. We develop a new statistical method that effectively 'converts' ratings into scores that approximate rankings, resulting in the creation of more valid measures of both ethnic and civic national identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By focusing on the design and reception of successfully completed monuments, historians have overlooked the presence in nineteenth-century America of monuments that were left unfinished for decades, or even aborted altogether. This article recovers numerous such monuments, and shows how contemporaries seized on them not merely for their aesthetic value as homegrown ruins to be visited and sketched, but also for their rhetorical value as expressions of unfinished political and social struggles. In refashioning these incipient historical memorials as ironic anti-monuments to contemporary problems, diverse groups – radical workingmen and conservative Whigs, female activists and chauvinist newspapermen, patriotic Americans and critical Englishmen, proslavery southerners and abolitionist northerners – elaborated a broader discourse of unfinishedness. The fragments of these monuments could even figure the nation itself as a work-in-progress, contrary to current arguments about the construction of national identity through notions of organic wholeness. The article also questions scholars' assumption that monuments inevitably promote a culture of forgetting by projecting images of consensus and closure. In turning to the reception of monuments during their often-lengthy construction, we can perceive their more complex relationship to dominant ideologies and narratives of the nation-state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines Chinese nation building in the post-Cold War era from the perspective of foreign policy. It focuses on the role of Japan and the United States as significant 'Others' in Chinese leaders' construction of three major variants of Chinese national identity: as a victim (past), as a developing country (present) and as a great power (future). The article argues that Japan occupies a primary place in the enactment of the past aspect of Chinese identity, while the US plays a major role in its present and, especially, future aspects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abraham Lincoln's reverence for the Union and its preservation took on religious significance. Though Lincoln's personal religious convictions are difficult to discern, his presidency was marked by a sacralizing public rhetoric on national identity and the struggle against slavery. The mystical reverence Lincoln displayed for the Union, and the principles of equality on which it was founded, comprised a meaningful civil religion that finds its greatest resonance in the Civil War. The war had implications for foreign affairs, as Lincoln sought to prevent England and others from recognizing the Confederacy's legitimacy. Ultimately, Lincoln viewed preserving the Union as essential for the history of human freedom. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Thomas Jefferson, as author of the Declaration of Independence, emissary to France, Secretary of State, and President of the United States, was consistent in his view that US foreign relations must rest on moral values rooted in the country's civil religion. Though not sectarian or orthodox, Jefferson believed in God as creator, in humans as moral agents, and that Christ was the pinnacle of moral teachers. Jefferson's faith shaped his conception of American national identity and his regard for the rest of the world. These moral underpinnings are evident in Jefferson's actions (and professed rationales for those actions) in the Tripolitan War, the Louisiana Purchase, and the Embargo of 1807. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

As part of a larger project concerning the men's World Cup of soccer in American culture, I examine media coverage of a single player on the US national team: Georgia – born forward Clint Mathis. Texts constructed this player's persona through a discussion of his unique style and southern identity. I analyze the construction of American national and southern regional identity within this coverage underscoring how the formation took place on both an internal (national) and external (global) scale. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]