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By the late nineteenth century, ideas of “American” and “Australian” nationality were “acquir[ing] their taken-for-granted status” for important groups in each country. The centennials they celebrated in 1876 and 1888 were often treated as significant and exciting crystallizations of existing national identity and experience. As an Australian journalist reflected about the ceremonial opening of “Centennial Hall” in Sydney, “the outward and visible sign arouses thought and ofttimes something more…it shows the place we have come in the march of our progress; it recalls the past; it suggests the future.” Many people in both countries took part in exhibitions, parades, ceremonies, and banquets for the centennials; they made speeches, wrote poems, gave sermons, built halls, published magazines, sent letters, and counted products to the greater glory of their nations. In some groups, people worked so intensively on making the celebrations that they may well have been as burnt out as the Connecticut woman who wrote to fellow organizers in 1875: “every one admits that commemorations have their uses; this will, it is hoped, be true of us, though we be done to death by over-commemorating.” She was unusual, though, in publicly admitting limit to the excitement of the celebration. How had people in these new nations come to this point? And how are we to interpret the beliefs about nationality they expressed? Many people in each country were claiming shared identities which had hardly existed a century earlier. And in these settler countries, the changes which transformed new mixes of land, peoples, and political arrangements into “new nations” had been slow, subtle, and diffuse in their origins. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Long before most people took their nationalities for granted, Elbridge Gerry, a delegate to the American constitutional convention in Philadelphia, was puzzled about what it could mean to be American. “We were neither the same Nation nor different Nations,” he said of Virginia, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and the other former colonies. What could it mean to be “American,” he seemed to be asking, when all the states appeared quite different? A century later, at their own convention, Australians had a nationality problem too: trying to work out their links to Britain, some wondered whether they might be “a nation within a nation,” or “part of a nation.” Americans and Australians faced questions about their national identities which have been encountered, in one way or another, by people around the globe. They wondered what they all shared; and they wondered how to draw the boundaries between themselves and others. There were many possible responses to these questions; what answers did they find, and why did they choose them? This book addresses the question of how two similar sets of people with many similar experiences formed and reformed their different national identities. Comparing major celebrations of national identity in the United States and Australia – the centennial of the American Revolution in 1876 with the Australian centennial of settlement in 1888, and the American bicentennial commemoration in 1976 with the Australian bicentenary in 1988 – I ask how different national identities developed and why each nation came to mean what it did. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We have explored some of the many paths Americans and Australians have taken through the forest of symbols which they might have used to represent their nations. What does the aerial view look like? Where did they take the same paths, where did they diverge, and why? The four events I have examined here were frameworks for expressions of national identity which were culturally dense and intended to be inclusive. They provide, in cross-sections, a broad overview of what Australians and Americans have been able to claim, with most plausibility, to share. With this sort of comparison we can move beyond the simple claim that nations are culturally constructed imagined communities to ask systematic and specific questions about exactly how they are imagined and constructed. And whereas historians have certainly told us a great deal about particular nationalist themes – about how Americans have thought of their political values, or Australians of their land, for instance – and about developments in the intervening century, looking at national identity in these events means that we can assess the comparative salience of different themes in different times and places. The approach here casts a new light on persistence, loss, and innovation in national representations. In all four events, there were two core ways that meanings and values associated with the United States and Australia could make sense as expressions of national identity. Whatever the particular symbols invoked, they expressed either world position or internal integration or both. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When the United States celebrated the bicentennial of the Declaration of Independence in 1976, and Australia commemorated the bicentenary of its European settlement in 1988, ritual and symbol were mobilized once again to characterize the imagined community of the “nation.” Many of the challenges to national integration which had once worried centennial organizers had been overcome. Regional political differences and geographic dispersion were no longer critical problems for claims about shared national identity. National political institutions, national markets, and international position were all better established than they had been in the centennials, in both countries. There had been significant growth in the capacity of the American state in the intervening century, as well as expansion and consolidation of the national economy, and the acquisition of a central geopolitical role. In Australia, formal federation had created the Australian state, an industrialized national economy had grown, and links with Britain had been attenuated by other geopolitical alliances and somewhat more diverse immigration. Further, patriots in both countries could draw on defining moments and formative experiences unknown in the centennials, like Gallipoli in Australia or the Cold War in the United States. But to organizers of the bicentennials, their tasks did not seem any simpler. In 1876, many Americans had hoped that the centennial would bring “the revival of a just and noble national pride.” By 1976, that revival seemed necessary again. “Amid the dissension that sometimes amounts to hate in our country today,” Americans were warned as their “Bicentennial Era” was launched on television in 1971, “it behooves us to remind ourselves that we are a united nation.” Centennial organizers might have said much the same thing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the United States in 1876, memories of the Civil War were still raw. In Australia in 1888, the six British colonies on the continent were not yet federated in a national government. In both countries, too, sheer size gave region and locality far more significance than they have today. Yet despite seemingly insuperable political, geographic, and social boundaries, many “Americans” and “Australians” organized and took part in big national centennial celebrations. Many Americans did mark, with elaborate ritual and weighty language, the hundred years since their Declaration of Independence. Many Australians celebrated in even more florid language the passing of a hundred years since the British founding of the first penal colony on the continent. What did nationality mean to people involved in these events? How did their symbols and visions of the nation make sense to them? Organizers, participants, and critics made implicit and explicit claims about what they shared and where they stood in the world. In both countries, claims to nationhood could often transcend –if not deny — political division and international insignificance. Glorified visions of nationhood were often allowed full rein: people in each country were said to share astounding progress, incredible political freedom, and fantastic prosperity. Those who spoke for the nation claimed an honorable place in a world of nation-states. Australians were able to imagine that Our nation's star Shines clear afar And all the world now hails its ray! And many Americans were comforted by the thought of Our country by the world received As high in rank, as proud in station, The equal of the oldest nation. “Our country by the world received” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]