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I find that questions along the lines of "Is [X] an instance of [Y]?" are rarely helpful, and attempts to answer them pretty much always devolve into No True Scotsman'ing and other arbitrary redefinitions of [X] and [Y]. Usually there is some deeper question that better expresses what I really want to know, and I would be better served by finding a way to articulate it. This view of mine probably crystallized when I was reading a lot about the Byzantines online and waded through endless "But were they Romans or not??!!" threads. Who cares? Just admire the Hagia Sofia and stop looking for joints to cleave when reality hasn't provided you with any.
So if your question is "would a time traveller from the 18th century find the present an alien place?" the answer is self-evidently yes, even if we just gave them a stack of modern books to read by candlelight without exposing them to any advanced technology. If your follow-up question is "would such a person be so horrified by what they read that they would return to their timeline and immediately try to prevent us from coming into existence?" the answer is quite possibly still yes, but their pre-Reformation ancestors would have thought the same of them. If your question is "do we have a right to claim the name and symbols of our forefathers when they were so different from us?" I point you to China, which any Chinese person will be proud to tell you is 5000 years old, and that they are one and the same civilization as those illiterate, human-sacrificing, neolithic tribesmen of five millennia ago. Compared to that, 300 years is nothing.
As for I would divide things up, on a political basis there have been three Americas: the America of the Founders, ending with the Civil War; the America of Lincoln, after which I would place an interregnum between 1945 and 1965; and then the current America, which is in the process of being dismantled. On a cultural basis, there is a clear break in the mid-20th century, but I do not detect one in the 19th century, at least not in literature. From the point of view of the rest of the world, there is before 1945 and after. Draw enough of these lines and you will see that many of them overlap, and then you can choose to name the things on either side of them whatever you want. As for regional cultures, those were significant in earlier times, but are losing their strength in favor of a more general rural-urban divide.
The more American history I read, the more I think this is a misleading concept. The way I see it is that the Founding Fathers didn't found America - both in the sense that America already existed (founded by the Pilgrim Fathers et al.) and in the sense that the United States established in 1789 wasn't a nation-state.
The Founding Fathers were founding a sovereign state (in the technical international law sense of that term) that was itself a federation of sovereign States (in the sense of the States in 1789 being separate free self-governing political communities). They were building political institutions, and in order to do so they deliberately punted on three questions that go to the heart of "what is America as a country?" The first is the slavery question, which we all know about. As it turned out, America couldn't remain a country without resolving that question, and I don't think that would have surprised the founders. The second is the democracy question. The 1789 Constitution deliberately doesn't establish a right to vote - the founders were agnostic as to whether the republic they were establishing would be democratic or oligarchic. But by the Jackson administration the fact that America is a democracy is part of the national identity and rolling back universal white, male suffrage would be unthinkable. And the third was the religion question (both in the sense of "Is America a Christian nation or just a nation where the population happens to be majority-Christian?" and in the sense of "What does it mean to be a Christian country when you are committed to neutrality between mutually excommunicate Christian denominations?"), which America is still successfully punting on.
Semi-serious troll opinion - the United States of the 1789 Constitution was an artificial political entity with a similar nationhood deficit to the modern European Union. It became a country as a result of the Monroe and Jackson administrations.
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