In the age of "Make America Great Again" and "Build that wall," there have been many voices contributing to the discussion of what it means to be American. The process for becoming a U.S. citizen provides an interesting checkpoint for exploring messages regarding Americanism. Building on previous scholarship on the U.S. citizenship exam and the materials produced by the federal government, this study examined the multimodal portrayals of American identity in two widely used citizenship-preparation textbooks, "Voices of Freedom" (Bliss, 2010/2017) and "Citizenship: Passing the Test: Civics & Literacy" (Weintraub, 2009/2017). Grounded in the understanding of Americanism as a social identity (Tajfel, 1978), I conducted a multimodal critical content and discourse analysis of the books, combining elements of multimodal analysis (Jancsary et al., 2014) and van Dijk's sociocognitive approach (1993). In order to focus the analysis on social identity specifically and provide continuity with past Americanism scholarship, a social identity analytic framework (Abdelal et al., 2006) was used to develop the coding system. The findings revealed strong ethnocultural and civic republican themes in the books, which aligned with previous scholarship. With their focus on political figures, the textbooks portrayed a phenotypically diverse and yet monocultural American people whose values are tied to and built upon the legacy of White males with political and financial power. The result is an image of American identity that culturally and socially reproduces existing hierarchies and inequity (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977). Although the two authors' approaches resulted in similar themes in many respects due to their purpose in preparing aspiring citizens for the 100 Questions on the civics exam, there were also striking differences, illustrating the significant role curriculum writers play in reinforcing or challenging the messages of the citizenship exam. By building a more robust understanding of the construction of American national identity, this study aimed to offer implications for the citizenship exam, citizenship-preparation programs, and curriculum. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]