{1} See Garry Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992).

{2} Daniel Bell, "The End of American Exceptionalism," in Daniel Bell, The Winding Passage (1980; New York: Harper Torchbook, 1981).

{3} For example, the abolitionist movement evolved side-by-side with the earliest campaigns for women's suffrage and women's rights; until the end of the Civil War these two movements acted in concert and nourished one another.

{4} Seymour Martin Lipset, The First New Nation: The United States in Historical and Cultural Perspective (1960; revised ed., New York: W.W. Norton, 1980).

{5} E.g., Michael Kammen, A Machine That Would Go of Itself: The Constitution in American Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986); Richard B. Bernstein with Kym S. Rice, Are We to Be a Nation? The Making of the Constitution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987); Richard B. Bernstein (with Jerome Agel), Amending America: If We Love the Constitution So Much, Why Do We Keep Trying to Change It? (New York: Times Books, 1993).

{6} If we lump together political ideas, models, and practices as political culture, and in turn deem political culture a subset of culture, then this stage of American cultural history began, with respect to political culture, in the late eighteenth century.

{7} Note that television is culturally influential in two ways -- as a new technology of communication and as perhaps the single most successful medium of popular culture in human history.

{8} The U.S.S.R., the Warsaw Pact nations, China, Cuba, and the Asian Communist nations of North Korea and North Vietnam.

{9} Following the chronological essays is a detailed bibliographical essay; the works listed there have been chosen with an eye to accessibility, scholarly authority, and availability.