I mean, before the Civil War, many Americans thought of themselves not as Americans, but as Virginians or New Yorkers or Pennsylvanians. I mean, our antebellum nation was usually called these United States, after it became the United States. So in the U.S., nationalism pulled a nation together, but often nationalism was a destabilizing force for multi-ethnic, land-based empires. This was especially the case in the Ottoman Empire, which started falling apart in the 19th century, as first the Greeks, then the Serbs, Romanians, and Bulgarians, all predominantly Christian people, began clamoring for, and in some cases winning, independence. Egypt is another good example of nationalism serving both to create a new state and to weaken an empire. Muhammad Ali, who was actually Albanian and spoke Turkish, not Egyptian Arabic, and his ruling family encouraged the Egyptian people to imagine themselves as a separate nationality. But okay, so nationalism was a global phenomenon in the 19th century, and we can't talk about it everywhere, so instead we're going to focus on one case study.