With the close of the American Revolution came an outpouring of histories in the new American nation. The first American writer to produce such a work was Jeremy Belknap, who published the first volume of his History of New-Hampshire in 1784. Belknap's contemporaries followed suit with histories of their own states, including Samuel Williams's The Natural and Civil History of Vermont (1794) and Hugh Williamson's The History of North Carolina (1812). These historians wrote partly out of a natural desire to explain the origins of their new nation. For historians such as Belknap and Williamson, this enterprise was more than a matter of disinterested intellectual inquiry. Recognizing that the bonds uniting their diverse and contentious compatriots were still fragile, they also sought to instill a more secure sense of national identity. Although these historians focused on their individual states, they emphasized the qualities...