University of Montana, Maureen and Mike Mansfield Library
Abstract
The eighty-ninth anniversary of the declaration of American independence from Britain, on July 4, 1865, caught the nation at a critical time in its history. The great national crisis of civil war was over, but the nation had not yet re-united. The thesis argues that in the aftermath of the Civil War, American nationalism could not be reconstituted on neither an ethnic nor a civic model. Rather, on the eighty-ninth anniversary of Independence, the course of American Nationalism fell out along lines decreed by historical memory. The narrative construction of the past in the present constituted the only common thread on which to build a sense of national identity. In short, the thesis represents an in-depth study of national identity on the first anniversary of independence after the end of the Civil War
