Something Borrowed

Chapter 2 will examine the origins of the American national identity. Two seminal texts, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States, provided residents of the original thirteen American colonies with the language that would enable them to think of themselves as a new nation with strong positive features that distinguished them from Great Britain, their former mother country. This chapter will focus on tracing the links that bind these two texts to the British cultural legacy, while also demonstrating the ways in which it deviates from it. A comparison of the Declaration with the political song “The Rebels,” which angrily rejects the claims of the patriots, will foreground the significance of this cultural shift in the newly forged national identity.