Yoonmee Chang is a Ph.D. candidate in the English Department at the University of Pennsylvania. Her dissertation focuses on class and labor issues in Asian American literature. In the following essay, she discusses Mark Twain's "The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg" as an exploration of nation formation and a critique of the attendant ills generated by a strong sense of "community."

America celebrated the 400th anniversary of its discovery in 1893 with the lavish Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The Exposition was part of a nascent tradition, starting with London's Crystal Palace in 1851, which grandly boasted its nation's culture, science and industry to itself and the world. Central to the exposition was the concept of the "nation," that there was a unified cultural, political and geographical entity to speak of. The idea of the "nation" is a powerful ideology, uniting diverse race and class groups along common, abstract goals...