In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes

David Waldstreicher. In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776-1820. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1997.

Waldstreicher argues that 'nationalism' is more than a set of ideas, it is also a set of practices. The practice he is concerned with here are public celebrations of events and people during the Revolution and in the early Republic. These public events served to create and validate a sense of nationhood that seemed "discovered" rather than imposed or dictated. Celebrations helped create a collective "recognition" that events and institutions in fact represented what we might now call public opinion.

That is half of the argument; the other is that American nationalism was in many ways a product of print culture--these celebrations, parades, and orations existed in some ways in order to be reported in newspapers around the country. Americans in any one locale were implicitly taking part in in a national conversation.

During the Revolutionary era, Americans had a pre-existing Anglo-American tradition of public demonstrations and ritualized crowd and/or mob activity to draw on. Over the years, this tradition evolved as novel circumstances led to new conceptions of who "the people" were and what their relationship to each other and the newly-created nation would be.

Eventually, these forms of public celebration became a venue for partisan debate over the proper conception of the American nation and its people. This argument that Federalists and Jeffersonian Republicans were engaged in deliberate partisan politics through the medium of celebration and print reports of same puts the politics of the early Republic in a different light, particularly for the era just prior to the War of 1812 which traditional historical accounts often portray as being less passionate than the moments just before and after.

In the end, the language of nationalism and celebration would be put to use by partisans of different sections of the country, and in the last chapter of the book by African-Americans seeking to use the language of American nationalism to claim their own place within the nation. In the end, the language of nationalism and celebration has always been contested.