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In many respects, the concept of the “nation” played an extremely important role in nineteenth-century Europe and the Americas. Emerging from the American and French revolutions as well as the intellectual romanticism of the late eighteenth century, nationalist movements encouraged an individual’s loyalty to the nation rather than to the political state. What was the nation? In the late eighteenth century, the German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder characterized the nation as an entity having its own cultural spirit, or Volksgeist. Simply put, it was a community of people who shared one or more of the following elements: language, history, culture, religion, and politics. In most cases, nineteenth-century nationalist movements were also closely connected to middle-class liberalism.