Opis
The United States of America (US) is a state that does not have a traditional nation. Composed
primarily of hundreds of years of immigration, it is a quintessential multinational
state. Nationalism as an ideology, however, has been popular throughout its history and
with nationalism comes the use of myth to construct the idea of a country’s nation. One
competing version of that American nation relies in part on the appropriation of an early
foreign policy document, the famous 1776 Declaration of Independence. The myths
surrounding the document have built for two hundred years within American culture,
ignoring the historical context and original meaning of the text itself. This cultural construction
has helped build a creedal version of nationalism, a nationalism based around
joint connection of a people to a set of principles rather than a common ethnic heritage,
which has competed with a more traditional ethno-cultural based nationalism throughout
American political development.
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