In the words of Arthur Mann, late eighteenth-century Americans could not claim “an ancestral land, a long history, an old folklore, a common church, or the same progenitors” (quoted in Jon Gjerde, ed., Major Problems in American Immigration History, 1st ed., 92). In the early years of the republic, different people had very different ideas about what it meant to be an American.
How did these ethnically diverse Americans forge a national identity in the late eighteenth century?
How did the Constitution and Naturalization Act of 1790 legally define who was included in citizenship and set the stage for U.S. race/ethnic relations in the nineteenth century?
Be sure to answer the questions completely and support your argument with evidence from both Daniels (book) and Gjerde (posted under this module). In addition to the primary source documents collected in Gjerde, the Kettner and Mann essays in chapter 3 are especially relevant to this discussion. Good luck!
