Creating a Deep Past for a New Nation

This chapter explores the ways in which Americans sought, created, and promoted a “deep national past,” or American antiquity, for the new republic. The first half of the chapter explores how the use of Columbian, biblical, and epic symbolism all contributed to Americans’ sense of a past deeper even than that of the colonial period. The second half of the chapter explores the nationalization of both natural history and the indigenous pasts of Native Americans and their expression in the nation’s first natural history museums. The creation of a deep past grounded both in myth and the land was—like the simultaneously reimagined colonial past—part of a broader attempt to establish cultural independence from Britain, in this case by fostering a sense of national origins that transcended British imperialism and the British past altogether.

The Expansion of Early National History Culture

This chapter examines the rapid growth in the presence and role of the past in the cultural production of the early republic. The first half of the chapter charts the vast increase in historical cultural production in a variety of print forms and literary genres. The second half of the chapter explores one of the processes behind this increase in production by uncovering an informal network—including historians, antiquarians, poets, essayists, painters, publishers, politicians, and others—that provided supportive relationships for those engaged in historical cultural production. Ultimately, that network, and the support it offered, provided the impetus and model for the institutionalization of history culture in this period through the establishment of the nation’s first historical societies and museums.

Epilogue

America’s pre-revolutionary past did not pass into obscurity after the Revolution. Rather, it became even more important, developing a significant salience and resonance in American culture long after independence and the war. As unique as their situation was in the decades after the war, Americans understood there were things to be learned from their shared colonial past. More importantly, they understood that their colonial past could actually aid in helping to shape their republican present. Not only did the colonial past matter but they went even further by creating a deep national past that was instructive as well as entertaining, running through the very first examples of American fiction, poetry, drama, and cultural institutions. As the beginnings of American nationalism developed in these decades, the collective memory of Americans was shaped by their construction of the colonial past. Long after the Revolution there remained deep, abiding cultural continuities between the colonial period and the early republic, of which the past was one. Close study of history culture and these historical memories of the pre-revolutionary past in particular reveal those continuities and show some of the ways in which they were negotiated. Such study offers new insights into how early national America ...