LEN TRAVERS is associate professor of history at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth. He is the author of Celebrating the Fourth: Independence Day and the Rites of Nationalism in the Early Republic (1997) and "The Paradox of 'Nationalist' Festivals: The Case of Palmetto Day in Antebellum Charleston," in William Pencak, et al, eds., Riot and Revelry in Early America.