The display of a “family crest” to signal family identity is prevalent in the contemporary United States. However, during the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century, many American commentators perceived the widespread use of heraldry by the high bourgeoisie as at best a mark of social pretension and at worst a symptom of an un-American predilection for aristocracy. Over the course of a century, heraldic entrepreneurs sought to broaden the market for family crests, and in doing so Americanized heraldic practice. The early projects of Albert Welles, Frank Allaben and Frances M. Smith linked heraldry with new approaches to genealogical research and encouraged its use by a broad cross section of American society. In the late twentieth century, entrepreneur Gary Halbert sold millions of heraldic mementos that epitomized the modern commodification of history and identity. The result of a century of marketing is an American heraldry that is both more accessible than its European antecedents and less closely tied to verifiable genealogical relationships.

Emerson's essay on “Gifts” perceptively highlights the ambivalence felt in gift-giving or receiving, an ambivalence which lies at the heart of Saul Bellow's most recent novel, Humboldt's Gift. The importance of literal gift-giving has been insufficiently recognised as a factor which governs the action of the novel, our understanding of which is enhanced by an examination and application of the sociological analysis of gift-exchange.

Gift-exchange has been most extensively studied in relation to the North-West Coast American Indians, notably the Kwakiutl, in whose culture the “potlatch” is a central activity. The term “potlatch” is applied to a variety of gift-giving ceremonies, involving both the giving away of quantities of possessions and their wilful destruction. The whole of a man's worldly goods may be dispersed or destroyed in this fashion, in an attempt to maintain status. To eclipse a rival chief, for example, a man may destroy all his own accumulated wealth. While in theory the “gift” is spontaneous and disinterested, in practice it is based on political or economic self-interest.The gift of property implies an obligation in the recipient which, if not fulfilled, results in his loss of face.