Nelson is an English professor, and the work reflects this, although she has not limited herself to studying literature in any narrow sense. Rather, she has examined an impressively broad range of evidence covering literature, exploration and westward expansion, education, race, gynaecology, freemasonry, presidentialism and film. The bulk of the work begins and concludes with an exploration of Herman Melville’s short story, ‘Benito Cereno’, with an Afterword that examines the image of the American president and the implications of the national male ideal for American democracy. The material covered ranges from, among others, The Federalist Papers through Hector St John de Crévecoeur’s Letters of an American Farmer, Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, Benjamin Rush’s ‘Of the mode of education proper in a republic’, Nicholas Biddle’s The History of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, John Neal’s novel Logan to the scientific writings of Samuel George Morton and Charles Meigs all the way to two 1997 film releases, Air Force One and Contact.

In selecting the evidence, Nelson is attempting not only to show how pervasive the ideology of ‘national manhood’ was and is in American culture, but also the ways in which the fledgling market economy of the early nineteenth century and the rise of professional disciplines such as medical science drew on and supported it. She is interested in white manhood not in any specific sense but ‘in its broader symbolic attachment to national identity and civic organization’. In making white manhood the ‘marker for civic unity’, she argues, white, male Americans were able to downplay potentially disruptive differences in post-revolutionary American society. It proved ‘a useful category for inventing national unity’, Nelson suggests, ‘because it abstracted men’s interests out of local issues and identities in an appeal to a nationally shared “nature”’. There are echoes of Edmund Morgan’s thesis in American Slavery, American Freedom here, but National Manhood is chronologically and ideologically broader than studies which focus on race, or gender, or American national identity in its attempts to uncover (or ‘unpack’ – a favourite word in this text) the relationship between these. Nelson explores various permutations of the white male ideology she has identified: in the familial ideologies of the revolutionary era (colonial son versus monarchical father/tyrant); in the domestic application of fatherhood as guarantor of ‘familial/national sanctitude’ (‘fatherhood in its pure, pedagogical form is patriotism’); in the medical profession’s treatment of ‘the disorders of women’; and in the focus on the dead, or what Nelson terms ‘the melancholy of white manhood’ (‘an esprit de corpse’).

Nelson’s work is challenging. It is, in places, heavily theoretical, and firmly grounded in academic debates that may well be unfamiliar to many readers. It contains perhaps too many ideas for its own good, and is consequently unable to pursue all of these in as much detail as each merited. One of the questions it raises in this reviewer’s mind is the degree to which this ‘national manhood’ was really national in the period Nelson examines. She does not, except very briefly, touch on the troubling issue of the sectional divide(s) in America in this period. She does assert early in the work that the ideal individual man was expected to embody ‘self, family, market, and national interests in his own person’. The reality, however, fell rather short of this idea, but the work’s focus on a predominantly northern viewpoint tends to obscure this. This is not to suggest that all the evidence Nelson employs is northern in origin, but a specifically southern viewpoint only emerges in an all-too-brief discussion of Lydia Maria Child’s An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans, and specifically in the southern writer James Kirke Paulding’s reaction to Child’s arguments. There is a wealth of material deriving from the south in this period that not only reveals the limits of the national ideal as Nelson describes it but also supports many of her arguments, particularly those relating to its familial, racial and gender elements, about the construction of ‘national manhood’. However, in a study devoted to establishing fresh links across both time and space, Nelson has had, as she acknowledges, to be selective. If her study sometimes raises more questions than it answers, then so much the better for future work on this important, and complex, aspect of the construction of American national identity.