Teach kids about these moments of our country's history while still talking about why they were not OK. She notes teaching about slavery and other pieces of America's history, like the Jim Crow laws, ensures the stories continue to get told. For 125 years, the Daughters of the American Revolution has carried the torch of patriotism.
There is a vital and living tension in the makeup of American patriotism, a tension between its universalizing ideals, with their rationalist and contractual tendencies, and its particularizing sentiments, with their emphasis upon memory, history, tradition, culture, and the land.
There were other publishers that channelled American pride and patriotism. In the twentieth century, strong variants of patriotism have been associated (rightly or wrongly) with the militaristic or bellicose stance of German national socialism and Italian fascism in the 1930s.
Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859) was the first to recognize this new form of patriotism, or at least to speak of it. In his Democracy in America (1835-1840), Tocqueville argued that this patriotism was more rational than the simple love of one's native land; this patriotism, he said, was born of enlightenment" and grows with the exercise of rights." Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865), in his 1852 eulogy on the American statesman Henry Clay (1777-1852), declared that Clay loved his country partly because it was his own country, but mostly because it was a free country; and he worked zealously for its advancement, prosperity and glory, because he saw in such the advancement, prosperity and glory of human liberty, human rights, and human nature" (Lincoln 1852 1989, p. 264).
It seems as though Americans do not remember that it was with patriotism that our forefathers, our grandfathers, our fathers, our brothers and our sons have fought for and given their lives for freedoms sake, to keep America free. One reason for its popularity is probably the preponderance of conceptions that see it as moderate, in contrast to nationalism.
However, I do not know if the state can for citizens assume the role or position of a nation as an abstract community of values with the ability to motivate them emotionally to act beyond the sphere of profit and material advantages. For real insight into this transformation, we must grasp mid-nineteenth century perspectives as we contemplate the participation of unionists, secessionists, African Americans, and women during the conflict.