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When one examines current national anthems and flags, one finds a great deal of variety. What explains this variation? Possible factors include a nation's world-system position and its degree of modernization. Specifically, I analyze the ways in which world-system position and modernization affect the design or configuration—the syntactic structure—of the symbols national leaders adopt to convey their nation's identity. Findings reveal a link between a nation's world-system position and the structure of its symbols. Leaders of core nations adopt more basic anthems and flags than their semiperiphery and periphery counterparts. However, modernization has no such influence.

It is believed that when exposed to the national anthem of their native country, people react with feelings of pride and patriotism and that the anthem has the power to unite people around similar associations. We examined these beliefs empirically. In Experiment 1, Israelis of various ages and subcultures listened to their anthem and to three other songs, and wrote down associations that came to mind. It was found that the anthem evoked more national associations than any other song and that this was a shared tendency despite the subcultural divergences. In Experiment 2, a marginal group in Israeli society participated in a similar task and appeared to regard the anthem more negatively than mainstream Israelis. In Experiment 3, associations relating to the anthem were compared to those relating to other national symbols (the flag and an emblem). The flag, but not the emblem, evoked similar association patterns. Results are discussed in light of social identity theory.

A classic article which examined American civil religion and triggered an academic discussion about civil religion in multiple countries. This is a reprint version of the article that appeared first in Daedalus, volume 96 #1 (Winter 1967), pp. 1-21.

This introduction considers the significance of Michael Billig's (1995) Banal Nationalism to geographers, and how this fits into broader trends of nationalism research in the social sciences. Through an analysis of Web of Science citation trends for the book, we illustrate its spatial and temporal reach in terms of the countries where it has been cited and how its impact has developed since 1995. We also briefly examine how political geographers have engaged the concept of banal nationalism in their research, and what sort of questions it has raised for those conducting research on nationalist discourses and territorial identity narratives more broadly. Considering how political geographers might creatively advance this scholarship, we introduce the individual papers included in this special issue and conclude with a brief gesture to future directions for research beyond Banal Nationalism.

Chapters: What is American civil religion?; America: the name, the concept, and the word; Jamestown and its anniversaries; The Mayflower Compact ; Plymouth Rock, the Pilgrims, and the Indians; City on a hill: from Jesus to Winthrop, Kennedy, and Reagan; The Freedom Trail and Boston Common; The Liberty Bell, Independence Hall, and the slave quarters ; The flag; The Declaration of Independence; The Great Seal and the dollar bill; The Constitution; Washington, D.C.: the city, the Capitol, and the White House; The Star-Spangled Banner; The Washington Monument; The Battle Hymn of the Republic; Gettysburg and the Gettysburg Address; Lincoln's second inaugural address; Arlington National Cemetery; The Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island; America the Beautiful; The Lincoln Memorial; Mount Rushmore in the Black Hills; God Bless America ; This Land is Your Land; The four freedoms; Iwo Jima: the picture, the monuments, and the battle; Disney parks; The Kennedy inaugural; Kings' speeches: the Mall (1963) and Memphis (1968); Vietnam Veterans Memorial; Transforming the National Mall; Ground zero, martyrdom, and empire; Conflict, consensus, and the future

Michael Billig presents a major challenge to orthodox conceptions of nationalism. While traditional theorizing has focused on extreme expressions of nationalism thus making it an exotic and remote concern, Michael Billig turns his attention to the everyday, and so less visible, forms that are deeply ingrained in contemporary consciousness. Banal Nationalism asks why people do not forget their national identity. It contends that nationalism is constantly "flagged" in the media through routine symbols and habits of language. In a well-thought-out analysis, the author shows how assumptions of nationhood are regularly conveyed, often through small familiar turns of phrase, and how these reminders operate mindlessly beyond the level of conscious awareness, like the flag, which hangs unnoticed outside a public building. Banal Nationalism addresses these core features of nationalism while providing the reader with meaningful insights into their own nationality. Billig's elegantly written and broad-ranging book argues forcefully that nationalism continues to be a major ideological force in the contemporary world and will be essential reading for students and academics across the social sciences.

This dissertation engages America's illustrated sheet music through topical analyses of political and social ruptures from the Civil War to World War I. In so doing, it demonstrates that music illustrations fit into larger networks of American picture making, participating in the recording and redirecting of contemporary American anxieties. Chapter 1: Bloody Banner, Silent Drum: The Material Wounded on Civil War Sheet Music argues that violated flags and drums in music illustrations transcended their martial functionality to signify loss of innocence and life; in so doing, they took on their own subjectivity. Chapter 2: Banjos, Rifles, and Razors: Picturing American Blackness investigates the transition from black-face minstrel songs to the "coon song craze" of the 1880s and 1890s, arguing that the stock character's razor, a weapon frequently figured in the songs, was not only a symbol of violence but of white fears of black social mobility. Chapter 3: Hoopskirts and Handlebars: Gender Construction and Transgression in Victorian America offers two case studies, one of cross-dressing pictures after the Civil War, the other of gendered bicycle images, arguing that the American public between the war and the turn of the century enjoyed contemplating the flexibility of gender roles and boundaries. Chapter 4: "There Were Giants in the Earth": Monsters of the First World War argues that popular pictures of American giants and monstrous war machines engaged in symbolic battle with monstrous Huns, who symbolized German atrocity for a Euro-American public uncomfortable with the idea of war with European peoples. At the same time, giants represented the common belief of America's special role in international peace, as neutrality gave way to declared war. Sheet music illustration was a vibrant part of American visual culture. By assessing the layered meanings of these often ignored pictures, my dissertation seeks to recover and restore lost memories of America's usual but fraught visual romance with popular song.

This study traces the socio-historical developments and modifications of uses, customs, and rituals associated with the national banner of the United States of America from the first Flag Resolution of 1777 through the Second National Flag Conference of 1924. Commitment to the flag is something culturally determined; this study re-examines the history of the American flag in light of this theoretical foundation, and emphasizes contributions of various individuals, organizations, and institutions to the shifting uses of the banner by American society. Military and naval uses predominated in the eighteenth century, but as the nineteenth century continued the significance of the American flag grew in patriotic music, literature, artwork, rhetoric, and demonstrations. The firing on Ft. Sumter triggered a sudden elevation of the flag to most honored status in American civil religion. Following the Civil War, veterans' organizations, hereditary societies, and popular children's magazines all participated in a movement known as the cult of the flag, placing flags in public schools and instituting rituals such as "The Pledge of Allegiance." Flag desecration statutes sought to curb the exploitation of the American flag in the growing field of advertising in the early twentieth century. Following the First World War, the American Legion gathered representatives of influential patriotic and military organizations to officially establish a national code of flag etiquette.

Book version of Scot Guenter's PhD thesis.

Analyzes the result of a survey given to 200 college students to assess their knowledge of American flag history, their opinions on some controversial arguments over appropriate flag usage, and within the panoply of symbols that are used to evoke and represent America, how they might rank and group other symbols beyond the most obvious, the American flag.

In his provocative think piece, “Flagging Enthusiasm,” Tony Burton muses on the eternal questions of vexillology: what is a flag and what does it do? While not avoiding the simple answers, he unfurls the flag as a symbolic and material object, allowing it to reveal itself as a complicated, challenging, and controversial creature.

Many Lutheran churches in America place the United States and Christian flags in the sanctuary, very frequently on the chancel. This article focuses on the current use of the United States flag in the sanctuary and examines the history of how it came to be introduced. Contrary to myth, the flag did not enter primarily as a symbol of loyalty among German immigrants during the First World War, but rather came in unheralded alongside the service flag, and stayed there through the Second World War and beyond. Sometimes it accompanied church construction or renovation. Such flag use—an apparent contravention of the separation of church and state—is explored through the concept of banal nationalism. These flags are “unwaved”; they remain static in the sanctuaries of many Lutheran churches today, which creates a unique type of civil religion in America.

Discusses incentive flags that were used to promote industrial production and investment in the war effort in the United States during World War II.