This essay is a contextual analysis of the History of New Hampshire (1784-1792) by Jeremy Belknap, founder of the Massachusetts Historical Society. I argue that Belknap’s ambition to practice scientific history and his profound knowledge of New England historical works since the founding of the region contributed to his creation of a narrative of American national formation inscribed in the longue durée of English colonization on the eastern seaboard. Belknap anchored American national formation firmly within the experience of colonization as the repeated, violent, and heroic appropriation and transformation of indigenous land into corporate entities of white property-holders and their families. His narrative effectively dispossessed England of its imperial claim and shifted the historical focus prevalent in his time away from the imperial relation and onto the specific, and in his mind, unique, story of the formation of white, self-governing and autonomous settler societies that he believed were the real locus of American identity.