ABSTRACT
During the past decade a great change has occurred in the way American historians see parades and other celebratory rituals. No longer do parades merely provide seductive introductory vignettes and grace the dust jackets of community studies: what had been a window is now at the center of the frame. Despite all the recent attention to public ritual and performance in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the role of celebratory activities in the revolutionary era – indeed, their crucial part in the invention of American nationhood – has been largely neglected. As they developed after 1776, these rites of celebration, publication, and republication resolved certain problems of the American revolutionary struggle. Celebrations and printed accounts of them embodied and mobilized a nationalist ideology, an ideology that made consensus the basis of patriotism. Controversies over what the English should celebrate and how they should celebrate it date back to the sixteenth century.
