Inventing the American Tradition
by Jack David Eller,
Reaktion Books, 304pp, £25/$30
Where do traditions come from? Their origins are generally supposed to be lost in the mists of antiquity, but this is clearly not the case with America, a country less than 250 years old.
While the framers of the constitution were deliberately setting out new foundations, Americans soon discovered that they had to invent a set of traditions to bolster their national identity and pad out the values embodied in its Enlightenment constitution.
