The popularity of folklore in America stands in direct proportion to the popularity of nationalism in America. And the emphasis on nationalism in America is in proportion to the growth of American influence across the world. Thus, if we are to observe American folklore in the twentieth century, we will do well to establish the relationships between folklore, nationalism and imperialism at the outset.

Historians have come to recognize two cardinal facts concerning nationalism and international influence. 1) Every age rewrites the events of its history in terms of what should have been, creating legends about itself that rationalize contemporary beliefs and excuse contemporary actions. What actually occurred in the past is seldom as important as what a given generation feels must have occurred. 2) As a country superimposes its cultural and political attitudes on others, it searches its heritage in hopes of justifying its aggressiveness. Its folklore and legend, usually disguised as history, are allowed to account for group actions, to provide a focal point for group loyalty, and to become a cohesive force for national identification.

One can apply these facts to Britain in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as she spread her dominion over palm and pine, and they can be applied again to the United States in more recent years. The popularity of local color literature before the Spanish-American War, the steady currency of the Lincoln myth, the increased emphasis on the frontier west in our mass media are cases in point. Nor is it an accident that baseball, growing into the national game in the last 75 years, has become a microcosm of American life, that learned societies such as the American Folklore Society and the American Historical Association were founded in the 1880's, or that courses in American literature, American civilization, American anything have swept our school and college curricula.