Pious Ambitions: Sally Merriam Wait's Mission South, 1813–1831 by Mary Tribble (review)

Fashion Nation makes a timely and significant contribution to understanding the history of ethnicity and national identity in the American context. Most importantly, this book challenges us to think about national style in flexible and multidimensional ways. Tomc shows that discourses of ethnicity can simultaneously operate as a means of constructing and signaling shared identity and as a way of foiling identification. On the one hand, this book optimistically describes the US national type as a gaudy, flag-bedecked “Uncle Sam” who evades repressive taxonomies and hierarchies. On the other hand, Fashion Nation more pessimistically contends that Uncle Sam thrives because of his dazzling surfaces that command attention and deceive.