What is the difference of rip van winkle and the legend of sleepy hollow?

Both stories pose the question of the American identity and what it is to be a true American; however, each plot takes on a totally different approach to doing this. While â??The Legend of Sleepy Hollowâ?? pursues the complexity of religious ideologies in early colonial America, â??Rip Van Winkleâ?? uses a hyperbole of a man who sleeps as British and awakens after the American Revolution as an American. Although he is in the exact same place at the time he wakes as he was at the time he fell asleep, his nationality had changed. Washington cleverly pursues the philosophical question of what it is that makes us what we truly are.