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This Saturday, the United States turns 250, and despite everything, we’re all going to try our best to have fun at the birthday party. But the occasion raises the question: Is 250 really all that “old” for a country anyway? After all, we’re on a planet where the city of Rome has been continually inhabited for 2,700 years, and the University of Bologna has been matriculating students for 938. San Marino, a tiny republic surrounded on all sides by Italy, still uses governing documents that date back to the 1600s. Is our celebration of a measly 250 years of continuous operation another example of American puffery? Or can we light a sparkler and genuinely enjoy a rare moment of earned self-congratulation this weekend?

I asked a few experts in the history of nationalism to pronounce on America’s relative longevity, and discovered that the answer to this question is surprisingly complicated. What is a country? What is a nation? Are those two things different? Turns out the answer is: They could be. “It all resides in the definition. If a ‘nation’ is ‘people who live under a political system and feel like they are part of a system,’ there are far older places—China, parts of India, Britain and France,” said........

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