ABSTRACT
For a hundred and fifty years the Anglo-Saxon inhabitants of British North America thought of themselves primarily as Englishmen living abroad. Between the "imperial" historians of the American colonies and the Revolutionary generation there is a hiatus, chronological as well as political or ideological. For post-Revolutionary historians the problem of the imperial relationship had been resolved, never to be reopened, and logic demanded a national perspective. In some respects American historians did not comprise a tidy group; in background, geography, occupation and political persuasion they were as diverse as the nation itself. The concern for governmental authority was mirrored by historians, who reflected a commonly held view of American society that transcended party and sectional disagreements. American historians worked from the assumption that the United States could only be welded into a nation by the articulation of a cohesive national heritage.
