American History, Condensed: A Q&A with Historian Susan-Mary Grant

Scholars often juxtapose “civic” with “ethnic” nationalism, the latter being a national identity based on consanguinity—in short, the idea of blood as the sole route to belonging—and the former based on shared civic values, culturally and politically defined. For America, Abraham Lincoln summed it up best in the course of his famous debates with Stephen A. Douglass in 1858, when he reflected on the importance of the 4th of July to Americans whose ancestors had won independence, and noted that many Americans had no “connection with those days by blood.”