In one of Common Sense's most ringing phrases, Thomas Paine declared it "absurd" for "a continent to be perpetually governed by an island." Such powerful words, coupled with powerful ideas, helped spur the United States to independence. In The Nation's Nature, James D. Drake examines how a relatively small number of inhabitants of the Americas, huddled along North America's east coast, came to mentally appropriate the entire continent and to think of their nation as America. Drake demonstrates how British North American colonists' participation in scientific debates and imperial contests shaped their notions of global geography. These ideas, in turn, solidified American nationalism, spurred a revolution, and shaped the ratification of the Constitution. Winner of the Walker Cowen Memorial Prize for an outstanding work of scholarship in eighteenth–century studies
"Geographers have begun to ask whether continents are any longer a viable category of analysis, while the new field of global history has challenged the idea that the story of this nation can be contained between the seas. In this moment of geographic turbulence, we are suddenly liberated from the tyranny of continental presumptions and encouraged to reimagine ourselves in a less landlocked manner
John R. Gillis
"In The Nation's Nature, James Drake untangles the critical and complex process by which free Americans imagined the United States stretching from sea to sea long before it actually did. He makes a convincing case that this continental vision was critical to the Americans' success at breaking up the British Empire in 1776 and launching their own eleven years later. Along the way, he proves that it
Woody Holton, University of Richmond, author of Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Co
