From the “Pursuit of Happiness” to the “American Dream”

This chapter will examine how six phrases that are intrinsically connected to the national narrative and that were pinpointed in previous chapters as common markers of the national identity occur in a wider selection of contexts derived from the Historical Corpus of American English (COHA). The corpus contains over 400 million words in more than 100,000 texts that date from the 1810s to the 2000s. The genres included range from newspapers and magazines to fiction and non-fiction. This corpus is an invaluable data source for analysis of American culture and society, which is especially relevant for the discussion given in this chapter. We aim to provide a comprehensive picture of the expressive potential of the American national identity narrative. The analysis of historical texts will show to what extent the country’s national identity has remained stable since its inception, and how it has adapted over time to the changing social environment.