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  • The American Scholar

    E Pluribus Unum?

    Jun 01, 2021 4 minutes
    JENNIFER RATNER-ROSENHAGEN

    AMERICAN REPUBLICS: A Continental History of the United States, 1783–1850

    BY ALAN TAYLOR

    Norton, 554 pp., $35

    “BEFORE THE WAR, it was said ‘the United States are,’ ” noted the late novelist and Civil War historian Shelby Foote. “Grammatically, it was spoken that way and thought of as a collection of independent states. And after the war, it was always ‘the United States is.’ … And that sums up what the war accomplished. It made us an ‘is.’ ” This would be a remarkable testament to the reconciliation that followed the Civil War if only it were true. Foote, conceptualizations of the United States in the singular and the plural were in wide circulation during the early republic, and though the singular would eventually become conventional, it was a slow and uneven process—and one that stretched long past the 1860s.

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