A Doubtful Freedom

That the United States has been a "nation" since its founding--struggling through slavery, civil conflict, labor strife, economic depressions, and deep ethnic and racial divisions but still surviving as a single polity and people--has long been an article of faith in triumphal versions of our history. "We the People" have often needed a sense of our long continuity if we wished to hold ourselves together. A story, true and false, imagined or otherwise, with remembrance and a good deal of forgetting is perhaps the only thing that can unify a nation.