| Book Reviews | The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 132.2

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| Book Reviews | The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 132.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Reviews

Many Identities, One Nation: The Revolution and Its Legacy in the Mid-Atlantic. By Liam Riordan. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. 392 pp. Illustrations, appendix, notes, index, acknowledgements. $49.95.)

Liam Riordan's Many Identities, One Nation: The Revolution and Its Legacy in the Mid-Atlantic uses the method of the multiple-community study in order to explore the creation of American national identity and culture in the rural mid-Atlantic during the years surrounding the American Revolution. It is an intriguing idea. The greatest weakness of the community study has long been its tendency to highlight the particular over the general, which this book often does as well. Riordan's contribution is to ask whether the diversities that existed within those communities and the variations among them can illuminate the larger story of how at least some of the inhabitants of local places would come to adopt cosmopolitan cultural leanings, national political involvements, and, ultimately, American identities. His answer is that the shared experience of diversity, while varying from place to place, led to markedly different configurations of cultural divisions within those locales but did not prevent the eventual appearance in each of trends towards the cosmopolitan and the national.

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