Oral tradition, too, entangled national identity and religion.

The master of ceremonies was their Indian interpreter, Squanto, who hadhelped the English survive a difficult winter. Left out of this story is thedetail (not so minor) that Squanto only knew English because he had beenkidnapped and sold as a slave to an English ship’s captain.

Exceptionalism emerges from a host of earlier myths of redemption andgood intentions. Pilgrims, persecuted in the Old World, brave the Atlanticdreaming of finding religious freedom on America’s shores; wagon trains ofhopeful pioneer families head west to start a new life. Nowhere else, we aremeant to understand, was personal freedom so treasured as it was in theAmerican experience. The very act of migration claims to equalize thepeople involved, molding them into a homogeneous, effectively classlesssociety.

And so the great American saga,as taught, excludes the very pertinent fact that after the 1630s, less than halfcame to Massachusetts for religious reasons.

Beyond the web of stories the founding generation itself wove, ourmodern beliefs have most to do with the grand mythmakers of thenineteenth century. The inspired historians of that period were nearly allNew Englanders; they outpaced all others in shaping the historicalnarrative, so that the dominant story of origins worked in their favor. That ishow we got the primordial Puritan narrative of a sentimental communityand a commendable work ethic.

Lest the reader misconstrue the book’s purpose, I want to make the pointunambiguously: by reevaluating the American historical experience in classterms, I expose what is too often ignored about American identity. But I’mnot just pointing out what we’ve gotten wrong about the past; I also want tomake it possible to better appreciate the gnawing contradictions still presentin modern American society.

His best known publication is his essay "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," the ideas of which formed the frontier thesis. He argued that the moving western frontier exerted a strong influence on American democracy and the American character from the colonial era until 1890.

The danger is in conflating our Christian identity and our national identity. We can be Christian, we can also be American. But to assume that being American means being Christian and that being Christian means holding to a narrow view of what it means to be American is limiting to all of the above.

Well, since I learned that I was living illegally in the United States, I got discriminated for that. They would call me “illegal Mexican.” So I took that as a positive thing and said, "Yes, I am," and I felt like I needed to represent that not just for myself but for a whole generation because there's a lot of people just like me whose parents took them to the United States, and they struggled through the same thing. I felt that I needed to represent them. I didn't get the tattoos until I came back to Mexico. That's how it started. I do remember in high school, most of my friends that I hung out with were all Mexican, we were all born in Mexico. I guess that's how it started, just hanging out with friends and making jokes about it.

I don't want to say that I'm Mexican or American. I am both. I'm bi-cultural. I just don't like that. I don't like what they say. I'd rather we say, "Hey, we're human. You and I are human." Yes, later on we get that, later on they tell us, "Okay, you were born in Mexico so that makes you Mexican." But since we're born, we're born as human, not even as a woman or a man. We're born as a human. Yeah. I get asked that question a lot.

Here the diagnosis slips from requiring both being “less than 100% human” and “being 0% human” to only requiring the first criterion—being “less than 100% human.” The implications of this rhetorical slip are a vast shift in proportion, since it triples the number of furries who are potentially diagnosable as having species identity disorder (from 31 to 99 [or 46%] of the 214 furries who answered).