mere awareness of the many shared attitudes and beliefs towards things like family, customs, societal and gender roles, etc. The awareness allows one to have a "collective identity" which allows them to be knowledgeable of not only where they are but how those places and people around them are so significant in that they ultimately make the collective, a nation. In short, national consciousness can be defined as a specific core of attitudes that provide habitual modes for regarding life's phenomena. National identities in Europe and the Americas developed along with the idea of political sovereignty invested in the people of the state. In Eastern Europe, it was also often linked to ethnicity and culture. Nationalism requires first a national consciousness, the awareness of national communality of a group of people, or nation. An awakening of national consciousness is frequently ascribed to national heroes and is associated with national symbols. National identity can be thought of as a collective product. Through socialization, a system of beliefs, values, assumptions, and expectations are transmitted to group members. The collective elements of national identity may include national symbols, traditions, and memories of national experiences and achievements. These collective elements are rooted in the nation's history. Depending on how much the individual is exposed to the socialization of this system, people incorporate national identity into their personal identity to different degrees and in different ways, and the collective elements of national identity may become important parts of an individual's definition of the self and how they view the world and their own place in it. Perspectives Benedict Anderson Nations, to Benedict Anderson, are imagined. The idea of the "imagined community" is that a nation is socially constructed, and the nation is made up of individuals who see themselves as part of a particular group. Anderson referred to nations as "imagined communities". He thought that nations, or imagined communities, were delimited because of their boundaries as far as who is in and who is out. Anderson believed that the nation operates through exclusion. Though, nations exclude those who are outside of it but also their members who are not immediately considered in the collective idea of their national identity. Anderson thought that nations were delimited and also were: Limited: Because of the mental boundaries, or concepts, we set pertaining to others are by culture, ethnicity, etc. We do not imagine everyone in one society or