Growing up in the Shenandoah valley of Virginia, I absorbed a view of America forged by the Revolutionary War.  Since moving west I’ve come to consider that to be more a definition of what the United States is ‘not’.  What the United States ‘is’ was only later forged by the Civil War. Walter McDougall’s book ‘The Throes of Democracy: The American Civil War Era, 1829-1877‘ gives an interesting account of this period, which seems very contemporary.