Nation

Pictures of the Liberty Bell, the Statue of Liberty, a historic building, and a man on a tree swing

Nation: a stable, historically developed community of people with a territory, economic life, distinctive culture, and language in common. From Old French, nacion, from Latin, natus, to be born

Reference: Webster's New Universal Unabridged Dictionary.

In modern life when we use the term nation it usually involves politics or wars or trade disputes. Rarely do we think of it as a community or a culture, and even when we think of nations being born we summon up images of revolution and war.
Perhaps it's time to take a different view of things, and honor the cultures and communities of those nations which exist today. Maybe we even need to try to preserve them. Perhaps with the arrival of "the new world order", "the post-industrial age", "the global economy", "the information age", whatever you want to call it, we need to preserve what we can of the past, while looking forward to the birth of a new global economic life and culture.

The images that come to mind when you think of our nation may be different than those above, but they probably would fit right in with them. Whether it's our heritage, our liberty, our natural resources, monuments to the past, or hopes for the future, they are images we hold in common.

You can follow the links below to explore nations past and present:

History of the United States

The Center for American History at the University of Texas
A huge index to World and US historical resources at the University of Kansas
The Library of Congress
US History Archives at Mississippi State University
Online issues of Civil War era newspapers, from Staunton, VA and Chambersburg, PA (These are large image files, not text.)
Numerous history links, including geneologies

Origins of the Nation-State and World History Links

The Library of Congress' exhibit on the history of the Vatican. It skirts around some of the issues that deal with the end of the Roman Empire and the origins of the modern Nation-State. It raises some interesting, typically European, Christian ideas. It is a slow link, you may to look at a shorter text extract.
A huge index to World and US historical resources at the University of Kansas
There could be more links here, are there any you know of which deal with the rise of the modern nation state? The LOC Vatican exhibit mentions how new states and empires rose out of the ashes of the Roman Empire, but you could make an interesting project out of researching this topic further.

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