What is American identity? How people answer that question has implications for their views on policy and politics in the United States. The current era has seen the growth of explicit nationalism in American politics. In After Nationalism, Samuel Goldman examines whether the United States has ever had a stable vision of shared identity and purpose. Examining the country from its founding to the modern day, Goldman highlights recurring contestation over what it means to be an American and shows how the coercive Americanization efforts of prior eras are unlikely to pass muster in modern America.

Rejecting romantic notions of the past, Goldman urges a more pluralistic approach: “Rather than trying to restore an elusive consensus, I propose that we strengthen institutions of contestation.” Please join Goldman and Anatol Lieven, author of America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism, for a discussion of what America was, is, and should be.