Over the hot, noisy Fourth of July weekend a seventeen-year-old youth, seeking independence from his unethical parents, allies himself with the town oddball, a tough politician enjoying temporary oblivion, to stop a gang of young thugs from carrying out a holdup.

Arguing that American colonists who declared their independence in 1776 remained tied to England by both habit and inclination, Jennifer Clark traces the new Americans' struggle to come to terms with their loss of identity as British, and particularly English, citizens. Americans' attempts to negotiate the new Anglo-American relationship are revealed in letters, newspaper accounts, travel reports, essays, song lyrics, short stories and novels, which Clark suggests show them repositioning themselves in a transatlantic context newly defined by political revolution. Chapters examine political writing as a means for Americans to explore the Anglo-American relationship, the appropriation of John Bull by American writers, the challenge the War of 1812 posed to the reconstructed Anglo-American relationship, the Paper War between American and English authors that began around the time of the War of 1812, accounts by Americans lured to England as a place of poetry, story and history, and the work of American writers who dissected the Anglo-American relationship in their fiction. Carefully contextualised historically, Clark's persuasive study shows that any attempt to examine what it meant to be American in the New Nation, and immediately beyond, must be situated within the context of the Anglo-American relationship.

After the War of 1812 the United States remained a cultural and economic satellite of the world’s most powerful empire. Though political independence had been won, John Bull intruded upon virtually every aspect of public life, from politics to economic development to literature to the performing arts. Many Americans resented their subordinate role in the transatlantic equation and, as earnest republicans, felt compelled to sever the ties that still connected the two nations. At the same time, the pull of Britain’s centripetal orbit remained strong, so that Americans also harbored an unseemly, almost desperate need for validation from the nation that had given rise to their republic. The tensions inherent in this paradoxical relationship are the focus of Unfinished Revolution. Conflicted and complex, American attitudes toward Great Britain provided a framework through which citizens of the republic developed a clearer sense of their national identity. Moreover, an examination of the transatlantic relationship from an American perspective suggests that the United States may have had more in common with traditional developing nations than we have generally recognized. Writing from the vantage point of America’s unrivaled global dominance, historians have tended to see in the young nation the superpower it would become. Haynes here argues that, for all its vaunted claims of distinctiveness and the soaring rhetoric of "manifest destiny," the young republic exhibited a set of anxieties not uncommon among nation-states that have emerged from long periods of colonial rule.