2021/01/01 by Eran Zelnik · 1 citation
Social Sciences · Business, Management and Accounting · #American Constitutional Law and Politics #Race, History, and American Society #American History and Culture #Nationalism #Declaration of independence #Race (biology) #Scholarship #White (mutation) #Independence (probability theory) #Political science #Gender studies #Law #Sociology #Politics #History
paper · doi:10.1353/jer.2021.0000
openalex publication_date 2021/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
Examining both older and recent scholarship of race and nation in early American history and beyond, this article reckons with myriad blind spots and with more recent attempts to alleviate them. Employing both chronological accounts of the early United States and a comparative lens, it argues that the increasingly converging histories of race and nation suggest that the United States should be considered a paradigmatic case of racial nationalism. Indeed, it was nationalism itself that led Americans, both citizens and historians--since the creation of the republic and in many ways until this day--to believe that the United States, as a nation, stood for the words of the Declaration of Independence "that all men are created equal." Recent research, however, reveals that in fact what was perhaps most "self-evident" about the early United States was that these words would prove true only for white men.