The title 'The Unfinished Nation' is meant to suggest several things. It is a reminder of America's exceptional diversity of the degree to which, despite all the many efforts to build a single, uniform definition of the meaning of American nationhood, that meaning remains contested. It is a reference to the centrality of change in American history to the ways in which the nation has continually transformed itself and continues to do so in our own time. It is also a description of the writing of American history itself of the ways in which historians are engaged in a continuing, ever unfinished process of asking new questions"--