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This is a cultural history of American federalism, which argues that nation-building cannot be understood apart from the process of industrialization and the making of the working class in the late-18th-century United States. The author examines the creations and performances of writers, collectors, engineers, inventors and illustrators who assembled an early national "world of things", at a time when American craftsmen were transformed into wage labourers and production was rationalized and mechanized. American federalism emerges as a culture of self-making in forms as various as street parades and natural history collections. Rigal demonstrates that federalism is not merely a political movement, but a phenomenon of culture.