| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Cecilia Elizabeth O'Leary. To Die For: The Paradox of American Patriotism. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1999. Pp. xiii. 365. $29.95.

In recent years, historians have lavished increasing attention on the origins and nature of American nationalism and "public memory," wringing the paradigms of "imagined communities" and "invented traditions" for all they are worth. In Cecilia Elizabeth O'Leary's cleverly titled new book, students of the genre will find much that is familiar: ambiguous identities, contested symbols, exclusionary rituals, public and private spheres. Refreshingly different, however, is the historical setting. Whereas a flurry of new literature focuses on the pre-Civil War republic, O'Leary's study begins on the near side of that historical watershed and continues through World War I. O'Leary detects a persistent paradox in American patriotism: it is steeped in a perpetual tension between often nebulous "political ideals" and "everyday practices," between "ideologies of social equality and individual liberty" (p. 4). This unresolved anxiety frustrates unassimilated peoples struggling for acceptance as "Americans," especially as they discover that even their willingness "to die for" their country does not necessarily bring them the full benefits of citizenship. . . .

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