In seminar rooms in Vienna, we learned about the concept of nations as “imagined communities,” a theory developed by Benedict Anderson in the 1980s — a shared identity that allows millions of disparate people to feel connected despite not knowing each other personally. Creating those communities based on shared traditions and national myths — the basis for a nation — became increasingly possible during the Industrial Revolution and the advent of mass media. Political leaders, who saw the value a unified population could have for consolidating power, helped facilitate this process and brought about the proliferation of the modern nation-state.  Nowhere was that creation of a national myth and shared traditions and values more powerful than in the United States, where a population without a common history came together in the late 18th century under a new American identity to overthrow British rule and found their own country. Many of the Americans in the program, like me, hadn’t recognized the nationalistic purpose of many of the traditions we grew up with, from the pledge of allegiance to the ubiquity of American flags.  But nationalism, …