A revised, updated, and expanded version of Nationalism: Political Cultures in Europe and America, 1775–1865, this book offers a trenchant historical analysis of nationalism in the modern world. It focusses mostly on the United States, France, and Germany and would contribute to a variety of courses in American studies and US history.

Kramer contends that important continuities mark nationalism's complex history. Chapter 1 proposes that all nationalisms combine cultural and political ideas through the belief that individual welfare hinges on connections to a distinctive people and their homeland. As such, nationalism links and orders private and public identities while promising unity in the face of social fragmentation and transcendence in the face of death. Drawing on historians and theorists, Kramer underscores that symbols, myths, and selective narratives sustain faith in such promises. The next four chapters tackle specific commonalities prominent in nationalism's history. Chapter 2 surveys nationalism's evolving emphasis on “the people,” ranging from Rousseau to the American Revolution to British and German reactions to the French Revolution and Napoleonic invasions. Moving into the mid-nineteenth century, chapter 3 suggests that all nationalisms, even “civic” or “political” ones, concern themselves with the distinctiveness of their homelands, languages, and cultures. Chapter 4 considers nationalism's relationship with religion, maintaining that the former derived much of its early emotional power from Judeo-Christian themes, symbols, and rituals regarding unity, sacrifice, and mission. Chapter 5 ventures into the late nineteenth century by exploring how nationalism insinuated itself into and drew substance from other identities, especially those like gender, family, and race that were long deemed natural. The next three chapters develop these insights by looking at specific historical episodes. Chapter 6 examines the early United States, arguing that nationalism is not an exclusively European creation and that American nationalism is not qualitatively unique. Chapters 7 and 8, both new, carry Kramer's thesis through the twentieth century and are more global in scope, sweeping over both world wars, the rise of Nazism, decolonization movements, the European Union, and 9/11. These chapters allow Kramer to address the persistence of nineteenth-century continuities while identifying nationalism's post-World War II engagement with multiculturalism and internationalism as a major turning point in its history.

In addition to its clarity and incisiveness, this book should be lauded for its sustained analysis of nationalism as a concrete pattern of belief and action. Though hardly alone in this approach, Kramer's book offers a valuable qualification to the prevailing emphasis on nationalism's diversity and mutability. This is not to say, however, that it is convincing throughout. Some will find the book's chronology truncated, with the Enlightenment overshadowing the deepening sense of political, religious, and cultural distinctiveness in parts of Europe and the Americas in the centuries before the American and French Revolutions. Kramer acknowledges literature on this topic but never fully grapples with it. A related problem is the limited space devoted to Britain. This criticism may seem unfair since the volume covers so much ground and discusses Edmund Burke, Robert Knox, and a few others to boot. Britain, however, warrants more attention because, along with its influence on French and German nationalisms, British and English identities preceded and shaped what Kramer presents as nationalism's political starting point, the American Revolution. For example, the Declaration of Independence is best read, contrary to Kramer's interpretation (35–36), as an attempt by once-loyal colonists to shift their rhetoric away from the rights of Englishmen and towards universalism. A longer perspective could have also highlighted modern nationalism's inheritance of values and symbols from classical patriotism, and might have saved Kramer from problematically connecting nationalism's emphasis on martial sacrifice to Christian understandings of Jesus (100–1, 135, 145). The book's focus on a small but diverse cast of writers and politicians also poses a problem. Though essential, these sources cannot by themselves convey the processes of contestation and appropriation that, arguably, form two salient continuities in nationalism's cultural history. Chapter 6, for example, demonstrates that early US nationalists shared core ideas with nationalists elsewhere, but its sections on three leading northerners can hardly unpack how and why American identity took shape. This, in turn, points to a larger issue. While the promises of unity and transcendence help explain nationalism's influence, they do not clarify why nationalism and not some alternative ideology seduced the modern world. How, we should ask, do nationalism's emphases on homelands, cultural distinctiveness, and political autonomy account for the timing and extent of its appeal?