Antiques.

Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature, 1836

The American Revolution gave rise to major symbols that this country celebrated conscientiously thereafter. National loyalty passed from the king of England, now a source of evil, to the new "king," George Washington, the source of good. By the 1820s the Declaration of Independence took on the aura of a sacred document, and July 4, Independence Day, came to be widely celebrated. The fact that both Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died on July 4, 1826, lent an almost mythic quality to the date.

The rising patriotic tide of the 1820s was augmented by the formation of an association in Charlestown, Massachusetts, to erect a granite memorial to the Revolutionary battle of Bunker Hill. Daniel Webster gave an oration at the groundbreaking in 1825 and another at the dedication of the monument in 1843. The First event attracted more than two hundred veterans of the Revolution, and the second a crowd of one hundred thousand.

In 1876, after four wars and a succession of economic and political crises, the United States reached its centennial. A loose collection of states had been fused into a union, and a simple agrarian society had become a complex industrial one. The Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia drew President Ulysses Grant, escorted by four thousand military men, and it attracted one of every five Americans during its duration from May 10 until November 10.

The central feature of the celebration was not historical or patriotic but industrial. Machinery Hall was the most spectacular attraction, with its centerpiece, the Corliss steam engine, which was connected by pulleys, shafts, wheels, and belts to thirteen acres of motionless machinery. William Dean Howells called the engine "an athlete of steel and iron with not a superfluous ounce of metal on it." Only one man was needed to operate the source of power for eight thousand other machines. It was American material progress that merited the loyalty and respect of the citizenry.

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