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Dissertation Information for Edward Tatsuya Hashima

NAME:
- Edward Tatsuya Hashima

DEGREE:
- Ph.D.

DISCIPLINE:
- History

SCHOOL:
- University of California, Los Angeles (USA) (1997)

ADVISORS:
- Eric H. Monkkonen

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
- Joyce Oldham Appleby
- Michael Salman
- J. Nicholas Entrikin

MPACT Status: Fully Complete

Title: "To win a glorious national inheritance": Local history, nationalism, and the formation of identity in New York State, 1820-1860

Abstract: Recent scholarship on nationalism examines the imaginative rendering of nations and the identities held by their citizens as cultural constructs. Historians, sociologists, and political scientists have addressed both the historicity and modernity of the concepts of nation, nationalism, and identity, and have constructed two basic models. One model situates the development of nationalism in the transformations of the marketplace from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Another view describes how the cultural structures necessary to the formation of modern nations exist in pre-national ethnic communities.

Within the scope of these theories of the history and cultural function of nationalism, this dissertation asks how communities with strong local identities began to meld themselves into a singular national culture. This study argues that the elements of American nationalism began to coalesce in a specific literary genre--the published histories of counties and towns between the years of 1820 and 1860. I analyze this literature with an approach that relies on a variety of historical, literary, and social science models including theories of nationalism, literary history and historiography as literature, studies on memory and identity, and historical and theoretical geography.

The sociologist Anthony Smith defined nationalism as a movement for the attainment and maintenance of autonomy, cohesion, and individuality for a social group, where some of the members of the group believe in the existence of an actual or potential nation. The dissertation examines the historical quality of that movement and suggests that historiography contributed to the construction of identity and social community in the nation. To extend its influence over its citizens, the nation must have in place a procedure for socializing its members as "nationals" and "citizens," a system of values, symbols, and traditions to promote social bonds, and a means of defining and locating individual selves through the prism of collective personality and culture. In historiography, these functions of nationalism contribute to a narrative of the past that emphasizes common territoriality, heritage, and community. Nineteenth-century local history is a valuable example of this cultural and historical narrative of nationalism.

MPACT Scores for Edward Tatsuya Hashima

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TA = 0
calculated 2008-10-14 18:03:36

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Students under Edward Tatsuya Hashima

ADVISEES:
- None

COMMITTEESHIPS:
- None