Antiques.

 
When will they speak, or stir? They wait for you 
To recollect that, while it lived, the past 
Was a rushed present, fretful and unsure. 
Richard Wilbur, "This Pleasing Anxious Being," 
Mayflies: New Poems and Translations, 2000 

As the American colonies were the first to rebel against a European mother country, so the American states were the first to bring forth a new nation. It was so new that it lacked a history, which statesmen and philosophers all declared was vital to a nation. The very core of Edmund Burke's philosophy was that a nation is a partnership of past, present, and future: "People will not look forward to posterity who never look backward to their ancestors."

How does a nation without a past acquire one? This embarrassing question came up early, for Americans have always been somewhat uncomfortable about being historical nouveaux riches. Nathaniel Hawthorne asked how one could expect to make literature in "a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight, as is happily the case with my dear native land."

The key to instant history was to "dwell on the details of our little all of historic life, and venerate every trivial fact about our first settlers and colonial governors and revolutionary heroes," as the New York diarist George Templeton Strong put it. Nothing in the history of American nationalism is more impressive than the speed with which Americans provided themselves with a usable past. Uncle Sam was just as good as John Bull. The bald eagle was a fine substitute for the British lion, and furthermore was more at home here than the lion was in England. The Declaration of Independence was easier to understand than the Magna Carta and parts could be memorized and recited, unlike the Magna Carta. There may not have been real antiquities, but we did have Plymouth Rock, Independence Hall, Bunker Hill, and Mount Vernon.