Provincial versus Cosmopolitan.

Before the Revolutionary era, men and women living in the British Colonies did not think of themselves as "Americans" but rather as British citizens and colonists. They imagined that they were ambassadors of culture, bringing European civilization to the wilderness of the new world. In Verses on the Prospect of Planting Arts and Learning in America (1725), first printed in America in 1752 and reprinted dozens of times in the third-quarter of the eighteenth-century, the English bishop George Berkeley described an ideal of translatio, the transmission of the highest expressions of human development—arts, letters, music, and all those forms of culture—which testified to the moral superiority of Anglo-European character and society to all other peoples. History showed that the great achievements of ancient Greece and Rome had eventually given way to barbarism and ignorance, but perhaps in these colonies to the West this cycle of...