Like so many cultural traditions in the U.S., the folk song “Yankee Doodle” is a foreign import. It was adapted from an English folk tune in the French and Indian Wars (1754–63), when the English troops invented the new text to mock their colonial opponents. A little later, in the Revolutionary War, the colonists found this image endearing; they simply sang it back to the British in a cheeky affirmation of their own provincialism.

Today, most Americans know several stanzas of “Yankee Doodle” by heart, but many wonder about the meaning of the famed “macaroni” in the first stanza (neither the name of the pony nor a reference to Italian pasta). The “Macaronis” were a fashionable group of young men in London at the time of the Revolutionary War who dressed extravagantly and questioned sexual norms (McNeil 1999). “Yankee Doodle” therefore tells two stories: the story of the provincial ignoramus awkwardly imitating London fashions, and the story of the smart colonial who mocks the effeminate urban dandies, invents his own rugged masculinity, and simply goes ahead. The clash between the backwoods colonialist and the self-reliant settler circumscribes the Yankee’s ambiguity in the U.S. cultural imaginary.

The Yankee is the oldest rendition of American individualism, pragmatism, and desire for independence, the first embodiment of national fantasy in the white settler nation. Yet, this vernacular and street-smart character is hardly hero material. He causes discomfort in the popular imagination and has long been overlooked in cultural and literary history and in American Studies. Yankee Yarns examines the Yankee's ambiguities in U.S. literature, drama, and visual culture in the nineteenth century.