The American Revolution, the War of 1812, and the smaller conflicts in between helped to define who Americans became. They pursued Indian lands and freedom from impressment and British trade restrictions. These wars altered political boundaries, brought social hierarchies into sharp relief, and disoriented people’s sense of identity. Their wartime experiences shaped fighting men as well as civilians. New scholarship on war and society during the Revolutionary Era takes the actions of marginalized groups seriously, attempting to understand the experiences and allegiances of women, Black people, and Indigenous people as well as internal conflicts among whites. Recent work also explores the harshness of wartime conduct, from destruction of homes to the treatment of prisoners and civilians. These wars transformed society by forcing questions of national inclusion, cultural interaction, and racial exclusion; gendered violence and gendered upheavals; the ennobling and degradation of rank-and-file soldiers, deserters, and prisoners of war. Unmistakably an era of brutality, dispossession, and enslavement, these wars etched enduring patterns for the future of the United States.

In Re-forging America (1927), Lothrop Stoddard (1883–1950) provides a compelling narrative of the American nation. Stoddard uses language and rhetorical techniques to convince the reader that the story he tells is true because it is based on historical facts and common sense, and because he is a patriot who is deeply concerned about the future of the country he loves. However, if we carefully examine how Stoddard constructs his arguments by analyzing the content of his discourse and the rhetorical devices he employs, we find that he has a particular goal in mind in writing his book, mainly, to characterize an American identity that is inextricably tied to a particular and exclusive ethnic/cultural identity: Anglo-Saxonism. Yet, stark differences existed among the thirteen original colonies in terms of economic interests, social customs, ethnicity, cultural norms, religious affiliations, languages spoken, and class stratification that rendered the colonial world a disparate patchwork of largely unconnected entities. Despite these differences, in the colonial era and well into the nineteenth century, America was widely understood to be a nation founded, ruled, and owned by white, Northwestern European–origin, mostly Christian (if only in name) men. There was little public pushback against this account.

The roots of American narcissism can be traced back to its beginnings. European whites fled to North America to escape repression. Once settled, they assumed a posture of superiority toward Native Americans, black slaves, Chinese immigrants, and others. After the Civil War, American narcissism expressed itself differently through the forced assimilation of Native tribes and the influence of white supremacists, robber barons, eugenics, and Donald Trump’s MAGA movement. Despite advances in civil rights, the United States in the twenty-first century evidences a great deal of support for a narcissistic posture.

On May 18, 1918, fourteen thousand high school students from St. Louis, Missouri, public schools, accompanied by fourteen drum corps and seven professional bands, paraded through the city’s Forest Park. Each school marched behind the US flag and its banners. Boys were dressed like soldiers and girls like nurses, in white uniforms bearing a tiny red cross. Battalions of young drummers, followed by legions of adult nurses, closed the parade. As the young people passed by, spectators applauded the inspiring sight. They could feel their hearts burn with new patriotism and new reverence. As the parade ended at Art Hill, eight thousand children in red caps and capes stood at attention on the slope, saluted the onlookers, and began to form a living cross. Below them, the remaining six thousand young people fell into place to form the word Red Cross. For the occasion – the Inaugural Junior Red Cross Parade – the youth had been rallied to demonstrate their patriotism and participation in the war effort. One journalist noted that “the present generation of children are learning that Service means sympathy as well as sacrifice, a desire and willingness to help others as well as a feeling that it is one’s duty and obligation to do so.”

A national conference on Americanization in April 1918 evidenced how social and political concerns mattered in wartime. Many regarded the global war as an unhoped-for opportunity to patch up the American nation and bring together the various ethnic groups living in the United States. Across the United States, ethnic enclaves existed and hyphenated Americans oscillated between pledging allegiance to the Stars and Stripes and being loyal to their homelands. Assimilationists seized the opportunity to foster American ideals in children. They consistently rallied politicians in their crusade against the hyphen and eventually defeated progressive integrationalists.

From August 1914 to April 1917, although the United States remained officially neutral, private individuals engaged American children in the war effort. At the local and state levels, initiatives mushroomed to capture children’s energy. Educationalists feared that explicit talk of war and propaganda in all forms would spoil children’s innocence. This is why they decided to engage children in civic leagues while others sought to mobilize children in the war effort. Although the leaders of these initiatives differed on how best to foster patriotism in the nation’s youth, the consensus was that American children needed to be engaged in civic and patriotic activities and be aware of their responsibilities as future adults.

The beginnings of American English come from the way that Europeans settled in North America. The circumstances of early immigration were different from the circumstances of life in the Old Country, and the interactions of speakers in the new setting shaped local habits. Crèvecoeur reports a typical experience of an immigrant coming to America. Early formation of American English does follow Schneider’s model for colonial Englishes, if we understand it from the point of view of complex systems.

As the war ended, politicians and educationalists saw the American Junior Red Cross as a means to promote American ideals abroad. Consequently, the American Junior Red Cross shifted its focus on a new form of Americanization, using children as part of a cultural diplomacy that positioned the United States as the global Good Samaritan. Children reached out around the globe, waged war against diseases, dedicated much of their spare time to rescue foreign "brothers" and "sisters," and sponsored children overseas.

Across the nation, children were urged to become “soldiers of the soil,” members of the United States School Garden Army, an initiative created in February 1918 by the US Bureau of Education to promote local gardening. Federal authorities urged local communities to feed themselves while the United States fed the Allies and other nations dependent on the US food supply. The more food civilians grew, the better the United States could feed the world. Children thus became part of a large pool of unpaid labor, serving the interests of both politicians and educationalists: as youth helped to increase food production, they learned skills and habits of self-reliance. Through the United States School Garden Army, children hooverized and learned to change their diet and eat with moderation. Gardening taught them the meaning of sacrifice.

Medical experts and epidemiologists knew the importance of hygiene on the home front. They convinced local, state, and federal authorities that the war on disease had to be fought. Consequently, the Modern Health Crusade, which originated in Detroit, became a nationwide movement in 1915. Federal authorities realized that a high infant mortality rate threatened the fabric of American society in the long run. Additionally, in order to build a strong and healthy army (and nation), bodies had to be physically fit. Children began to matter to the military and the nation writ large. As hygiene became a national concern, between 1914 and 1918, both medical and military authorities promoted hygienic standards to lift the nation.

In organizing a juvenile division of the American Red Cross – the so-called American Junior Red Cross – in September 1917, Woodrow Wilson attempted to mobilize the nation’s twenty-two million schoolchildren. Consequently, the American Junior Red Cross became the first federal youth-focused organization to be specifically dedicated to mobilizing American youth in wartime. In designing this first national youth-focused organization, Wilson impeded radical interventionists and quelled educationalists’ concerns. While directing children’s energy to altruistic humanitarian tasks, the organization opened schools to federal oversight of efforts to instill loyalty and deter dissent. Federal authorities attempted to control teachers and relied upon the educational structures to instill loyalty in the future generations of Americanyouth.

The twenty-six grievances in the Declaration of Independence targeted two distinct categories of British policies: reforms and punishments. Parliamentary reforms like taxing the colonies to help pay for the 10,000 troops left in America at the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763 (mostly as a human wall protecting colonists from Native Americans – and vice versa) angered free colonists, but not sufficiently to make them want out of the British Empire. Free Americans did, however, protest Parliament’s reforms, for example, by tarring and feathering Customs officials who cracked down on molasses smugglers, burning stamped paper, and throwing 340 chests of tea – taxed by Parliament and carried to American ports by the East India Company – into Boston Harbor. To punish the colonists for these protests, Parliament revoked Massachusetts’ charter, sent troops to reoccupy Boston, and more. Ultimately royal officials in the colonies even forged informal alliances with black Americans previously enslaved by George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and other Founders. It was these British punishments, not Parliament’s original reforms, that pushed free colonists over the edge into independence.

Chapter 2 describes the original concepts and related research of the author Brave Heart and Indigenous colleagues. The new operationalization of historical trauma described in the Introduction is applied to this context, for example when it comes to discrimination, intergenerational transmission, and social pathologies. The chapter provides empirical material on, among others, the immediate consequences that fully or partially substantiate the assumptions, including assumed mediating factors of historical trauma effects such as traditional values or cultural identity. The chapter concludes by reviewing the first available studies on healing, involving an adjunct program to group therapy with traditional Indigenous content, as well as empowerment through entrepreneurship programs tailored to youth. The conclusion of the chapter is that not all the possibilities of a broader conceptualization of historical trauma in this area have been realized.

The treatment of North American Indigenous nations as domestic rather than foreign nations is deeply woven into the political-legal fabric of the United States. Even before the United States could exert any real authority in vast regions of Native North America, US officials fancifully defined the independent Indigenous nations whose territories they sought to expropriate as falling under the preeminent sovereignty of the United States. The customary exclusion of US–Indigenous relations from the history of American foreign relations reflected and reinforced this imperial project. Of course, Indigenous nations were, and are, sovereign peoples. This chapter provides a roadmap for those endeavoring to narrate histories that more accurately reflect the nation-to-nation dynamics of US–Indigenous relations. Drawing on the work of Native American and borderlands historians, along with those of Native American and Indigenous Studies scholars more broadly, it offers guidance on how to engage with frameworks such as settler colonialism and methodologies such as ethnohistory to contribute to building a critical and ethical body of work that explicitly frames US–Indigenous relations as international rather than domestic history.

The American Revolution transformed Indigenous American nations. But their history throughout the colonial period was one of great change and rupture well before 1776. Colonization introduced disease, new material goods, economic transformations, and countless new ideas to the Indigenous people of North America over the course of generations. In this context, Indigenous communities changed, adapted, and above all survived through many challenges and opportunities. By the mid eighteenth century, several Indigenous groups were building power and stability in the midst of change, even as others struggled, migrated, and consolidated. In the 1750s, imperial conflicts between France and Great Britain altered the political context in which several groups had built influence and authority. In the aftermath of the Seven Years’ War, Eastern Indians faced the British empire without a counterbalancing French colonial government. This severe change constrained Indigenous options and strategy on the eve of Revolution.

This chapter examines the profound influence of settler colonialism in mid eighteenth-century North America, a period marked by the American Revolution and the birth of a new nation. Unlike other forms of colonialism, settler colonialism aimed at the deliberate erasure of Indigenous histories and cultures, seeking to establish a permanent non-Indigenous society on Indigenous lands. This process, driven by land hunger, religious fervor, and European imperial competition, has left deep legacies of dispossession, violence, and socioeconomic disparities. The American Revolution is analyzed as a “settler uprising” — a dual resistance against British policies and a pivotal moment in settler colonialism. The role of settler colonialism and its global implications are critical to comprehending the Revolution and its enduring effects.

What did it mean to have a national economy? The American Revolution provided the political space and the ideological impetus for institutional changes that over time fundamentally altered American economies. As policymakers developed ad hoc solutions to individual and governmental debt woes, they prompted resistance and counterresistance, and eventually created a national economy. This chapter begins with the economic possibilities and constraints created by the new Constitution in 1788 and what these meant for slavery, productivity, invention, and the development of capitalism. It explores how the expansion of land, slavery, and goods shaped the development of an integrated national economy, while also creating variation in how and for whom economic opportunities and limitations applied. Finally, because the national economy worked differently depending on where one lived, and whether one was male or female, Black, white, or brown, this chapter uses the lives of several individuals to understand its different aspects.