Long before most people took their nationalities for granted, Elbridge Gerry, a delegate to the American constitutional convention in Philadelphia, was puzzled about what it could mean to be American. “We were neither the same Nation nor different Nations,” he said of Virginia, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and the other former colonies. What could it mean to be “American,” he seemed to be asking, when all the states appeared quite different? A century later, at their own convention, Australians had a nationality problem too: trying to work out their links to Britain, some wondered whether they might be “a nation within a nation,” or “part of a nation.” Americans and Australians faced questions about their national identities which have been encountered, in one way or another, by people around the globe. They wondered what they all shared; and they wondered how to draw the boundaries between themselves and others. There were many possible responses to these questions; what answers did they find, and why did they choose them?

This book addresses the question of how two similar sets of people with many similar experiences formed and reformed their different national identities. Comparing major celebrations of national identity in the United States and Australia – the centennial of the American Revolution in 1876 with the Australian centennial of settlement in 1888, and the American bicentennial commemoration in 1976 with the Australian bicentenary in 1988 – I ask how different national identities developed and why each nation came to mean what it did.