UCLA

My project examines the historical ideas of American identity that developed in early U.S. periodicals, the most popular form of print in the 18th- and 19th-century U.S. In periodicals, I show, American identity was often imagined as a category distinct from nationality or U.S. citizenship, and expressed a host of local and contingent meanings. I look beyond the book form to historicize U.S. writers’ ideas of the relationship between the American, the U.S. government, and the nation it purportedly represented.