This book traces how early Americans imagined what a 'nation' meant during the first fifty years of the country's existence.

Benjamin E. Park currently serves as an assistant professor of history at Sam Houston State University, Texas. He received graduate degrees in religion, politics, and history from the Universities of Edinburgh and Cambridge. He has received fellowships from the Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston University's American Political History Institute, and the University of Missouri's Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy. His publications have appeared in Journal of the Early Republic, Early American Studies, Journal of American Studies, and American Nineteenth Century History.

Introduction; Part I. Imagining Union: 1. Imagining nationalism in an age of statehood; 2. Local preachers, Thanksgiving sermons, and New England's national covenant; Part II. Imagining Disunion: 3. (Re)constructing state, nation, and empire in the Second War with Great Britain; 4. Liberty, slavery, and the rise of sectionalism; 5. The nullification crisis and the fracturing of national interests; Epilogue: the boundaries of America's nationalist imagination.