Book Reviews 147 Public Memory," Quarterly Journal of Speech 81 (1995): 237-65; and Greg Dickinson, "Memories for Sale: Nostalgia and the Construction of Identity in Old Pasadena," Quarterly Journal of Speech 83 (1997): 1-27; Bryan Hubbard and Marouf Hasian, "Atomic Memories of the Enola Gay. Strategies of Remembrance at the National Air and Space Museum," Rhetoric & Public Affairs 1 (1998): 36385 ; Bryan C. Taylor, "Bodies of August: Photographic Realism and Controversy at the National Air and Space Museum," Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 (1998): 331-61; and Barbie Zelizer, "Reading the Past Against the Grain: The Shape of Memory Studies," Critical Studies in Mass Communication 12 (1995): 214-39. Celebrating the Fourth: Independence Day and the Rites of Nationalism in the Early Republic. By Len Travers. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997; pp. χ + 278. $29.95. On Independence Day 1997, several enthusiastic residents of a small New Hampshire town engaged in a boisterous celebration of the national holiday by ringing the local church bells at midnight. The local police called them drunk and disorderly, and arrested them for disturbing the peace. The residents claimed they were merely continuing a long tradition of commemorating national independence , and were entitled to celebrate the Fourth with exuberance. No doubt there were many other residents of that town who felt the way Leverett Saltonstall did about the celebration of Independence Day 1816 in Boston: "Why did they not stop jingling the bells on Saty?" he asked. "I could never see the necessity of disturbing all sober people to celebrate the independence of the nation" (202). What we learn from Len Travers's book is that such conflicts over the meaning of the holiday, and the forms of its celebration, have existed since the earliest efforts to commemorate the Fourth of July. Travers undertakes a study of how Americans in three cities—Boston, Philadelphia, and Charleston—marked the Fourth of July, from 1777 to the American Jubilee of 1826. He concludes that while initially, "the observance of Independence Day had to a significant degree succeeded in fostering national consciousness" and in "extending the 'community of allegiance' beyond state and regional boundaries," political tensions in later decades ensured that "the Fourth of July became instead a vigorous patriotic festival, in which Federalists and Republicans interpreted and reinterpreted America's past and tried to shape its future." Celebrating the Fourth, then, is about how "Americans quickly learned the power of Independence Day to communicate and to shape public opinion" (22627 ). Travers aims "not simply to trace the history of a holiday, but to understand the role of Independence Day in the formation and communication of national identity and national consciousness in the early republic" (4). In undertaking this study, the author draws mostly upon newspaper accounts of official holiday proceedings, and is especially sensitive to the ritual elements of commemoration and celebration. 148 Rhetoric & Public Affairs In the course of his study Travers examines how celebrations of the Fourth of July intersect with a range of social and political circumstances. The book is arranged chronologically, and covers successive periods of political uncertainty, confidence, dispute, and reconciliation. With each chapter, Travers investigates how the changing political context shapes the celebration of Independence Day, and how the holiday itself is exploited to fashion political statements fit to address disputes and anxieties of the moment. In the course of his study, Travers reviews the intersection of Fourth of July celebrations with issues such as slavery, working class politics, and the emancipation of women. Mostly, however, the book is about how the variety of Independence Day celebrations contributed to the maintenance of a national mythology, a fiction of national unity, and the construction of a national identity. In this sense, then, the book is a study in early ritual expressions of American nationalism. For scholars in rhetoric and public affairs, the book will be valuable for the detail it provides about the varieties of commemorative experience in the early republic. The author reviews a range of epideictic expression from the study of the traditional Fourth of July oration, to the analysis of the political dimensions of parade organization , to an entertaining look at the creative activity of toast drinking...