I am a cultural and comparative-historical sociologist utilizing qualitative methods to study nationalism and representation in post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan and the United States. Using ethnographic, archival, and interview data, I ask how and when particular visions of history are deployed and contested in the public sphere. In Kyrgyzstan, these questions concern cultural nation-building and national attachments in the post-Soviet period; in the US, they concern changes in public symbols as the history of the nation is continuously renegotiated.