What is an American? asked St. John de Crevecoeur before the Revolution, and the question has been repeated by every generation from his time to ours. Poets and novelists, historians and statesmen have undertaken to answer it, but the varying national self-consciousness they have tried to capture always escapes final statement.
Men of Thomas Jefferson's day emphasized freedom and republicanism as the defining characteristics of American society; the definitions of later thinkers stressed the cosmopolitan blending of a hundred peoples into one, or mechanical ingenuity, or devotion to business enterprise.
But one of the most persistent generalizations concerning American life and character is the notion of that our society has been shaped by the pull of a vacant continent drawing population westward through the passes of the Alleghenies, across the Mississippi Valley, over the high plains and mountains of the Far West to the Pacific Coast. [Source]
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