| Race is a central motif in American history but is seldom acknowledged as such because whiteness remains normative in popular conceptions of national identity, This dissertation argues that as republican ideals faded in the nineteenth century, the native-born ('white') middle-class fashioned a national identity fused with racial beliefs to distinguish themselves not just from African-Americans but from southern and eastern European immigrants that they considered racially different as well. Nations, wrote Benedict Anderson, are 'imagined communities'; in the United States that national identity has always been seen through the prism of race. Slave emancipation, southern and eastern European immigration, and industrialization cast middle-class social reform and welfare movements---what Robert Wiebe called 'the search for order'---in racialized terms. Based upon a community study of Baltimore, this study demonstrates that schooling in the American past has been vastly underrated as a social and cultural process in which identities were formed and contested. Not every American grows up to join a labor union, raise a family, or vote, but nearly all of them go to school as children. Before the 1890s, schools before the 1890s, schools flew no American flag, children recited no 'Pledge of Allegience,' and pupils learned little about American history; yet in that decade schools were suddenly infused with the spirit of racial nationalism. While lessons in History, Geography, and Civics reinforced the supposed superiority of 'the American race,' vocational training prepared working-class children for factory employment. While clashes over race and ethnicity gave the schooling system its shape, the cultural imprint of whiteness and American nationalism were broader phenomena affecting the terms of public discourse throughout the twentieth century.*;A CD-ROM is included with dissertation. *Originally published in DAI Vol. 58, No. 12. Reprinted here with added notation. |
