The Rise of National History

In the wake of the American and French Revolutions, the word “nationalism” entered the English language. Its first usage came in 1798, the year Jeremy Belknap died, and over the course of the next several decades, whether people had a word for it or not, the spirit of nationalism gained considerable strength. In 1837, one year before A Model of Christian Charity was first published, Ralph Waldo Emerson took the lectern at Harvard and called for the cultural independence of the United States. “Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close,”