| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 96.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 96.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Creating an American Identity: New England, 1789–1825. By Stephanie Kermes. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. xii, 291 pp. $84.95, ISBN 978-0-230-60526-8.)

In this well-written, solidly researched book, Stephanie Kermes demonstrates the many ways that early national New Englanders imagined the larger nation in their own image. Viewing themselves as the embodiment of America's national identity, New England's leaders produced and marketed a culture celebrating their region's republican simplicity, educational attainment, economic prosperity, religious commitment, and social order. Kermes associates the production of those ideas with the New England elite, but she provides evidence that such ideas filtered down to the popular level where they appeared as images on pitchers, plates, gloves, and coverlets. Paintings in the picturesque style, as well as histories and travelogues, presented New England as a place where an orderly, but not over-refined society had emerged out of the struggle with the "wilderness." She argues that such images of an idealized, republican New England became the basis of a regional consensus and were successfully deployed by groups as diverse as Democratic Republicans on the Maine frontier and ministers of the Massachusetts Standing Order.

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