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Time for a Nation

John O'Sullivan, editor of the Democratic Review, is perhaps best known for coining the term "manifest destiny" in 1845 to justify the territorial expansion of the United States. As Thomas Allen observes in this provocative book, subsequent generations of historians, while hardly accepting or applauding this march westward, have nonetheless "interpreted the development of the American nation in the nineteenth century in terms of expansion through space" (p. 18). And yet, none other than O'Sullivan himself composed an essay that offers a glimpse of an alternative means of conceiving of national development. In "The Great Nation of Futurity," written in 1839, O'Sullivan predicted that "the expansive future is our arena, and for our history. We are entering on its untrodden space" (p. 17). This little-known text is just one of many that Allen musters in the service of an ambitious agenda: to examine what he describes at one point as the "nationalistic aspects of time" (p. 11). In so doing, Allen does not simply argue against generations of scholars who have made spatial expansion a defining element of national identity. This alone is a provocative argument, but Allen also challenges theorists of nationalism like Benedict Anderson, who have argued that the modern nation state required the adoption of a homogenous "clock time," which "created a shared 'simultaneity' of experience that linked individuals together in an 'imagined community' moving together through time" (p. 6). Though he shares Anderson's interest in the role of clocks and other devices played in forging a national identity, Allen promises that the "homogeneity" of "modern national time begins to shatter into myriad fragments of heterogeneous, local, and transient temporal cultures" on close inspection. Yet here, too, Allen's work defies easy characterization. He does not belong to the ranks of the "New Americanists," who have scrutinized the ways that individuals and groups resist and subvert attempts to impose a common, national sense of time. Rather, he argues that "heterogeneous temporalities are not marginal or resistant to the nation, nor do they represent forms of collective affiliation