Parading Patriotism covers a critical fifty-year period in the nineteenth-century when the American nation was starting to expand and cities across the Midwest were experiencing rapid urbanization and industrialization. Historian Adam Criblez offers a unique and fascinating study of five midwestern citiesChicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, and Indianapolisand how celebrations of the Fourth of July in each of them formed a microcosm for the country as a whole in defining and establishing patriotic nationalism and new conceptions of what it was like to be an American.
Criblez exposes...