THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA

The myths that made America are popular and powerful narratives of US-American national beginnings which have turned out to be anchors and key references in discourses of Americanness.

These myths include the myth of Columbus and the 'discovery' of America, the Pocahontas myth, the myth of the Promised Land, the myth of the Founding Fathers, the myth of the melting pot, the myth of the American West, and the myth of the self-made man.

The United States as an "imagined community" is constructed and affirmed by way of this repertoire of a foundational mythology. This "imagined communal mythology" provides national narratives of individual and collective heroism and excellence (when referring to historical individuals and groups, such as Columbus, Pocahontas, the Pilgrims and Puritans, and the Founding Fathers) as well as narratives of collective belonging and progress (when referring to abstract concepts such as the melting pot, the West, and the self-made man). Taken together, they make up a powerful set of self-representations that an American collectivity has claimed and at times appropriated from an early, prenational utopian imaginary of the Americas and that it has converted into powerful ways of talking about itself as a "consciously constructed new world utopia"