Nineteenth-century American Culture Research Articles

The Insistence of the Indian: Race and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century American Culture by Susan Scheckel

BOOK REVIEWS 431 terms by continual use rather than by formal definitions, forcing readers to come to understand them intuitively rather than logically. But both books are valuable contributions to the growing body of western American lit­ erature. Contentious, tricky, and contradictory, they will delight and madden you by turn, and, always, they will make you think. The Insistence of the Indian: Race and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century American Culture. By Susan Scheckel. P rinceton, N .J.: P rinceton U n iversity Press, 1998. 197 pages, $49.95/$l-6.95. Reviewed by Su san B ern ardin U niversity o f M innesota, Morris A recent addition to studies ofnational fonnation through the lenses ofU.S. popularculture, The Insistence oftheIndianfocuses on the post-Revolutionary era, “when attempts to articulate a coherent narrative of national identity and to define the status and rights of Indians within the United States intersected to create a pattern that reveals much about the forces driving both projects” (3-4). Drawing on theorists of nationhood and literature such as Homi Bhabha, Eric Sundquist, and Benedict Anderson, Scheckel argues that “the par­ ticular moral and political problems posed by American Indians during the first half of the nineteenth century participated, at a fundamental level, in the pro­ ject of U.S. national identity formation and its ultimate ambivalence” (154). Framing her study with Ernst Renan’s formulation of how a nation’s originary acts of violence must be both forgotten and selectively recalled, Scheckel con­ siders the ways in which U.S. cultural documents imaginatively “manage” the nation’s originary (and ongoing) violence against American Indians. In counter­ point to Cheryl Walker’s Indian Nation (1997), which considers treatment of U.S. nation formation in early Native American literary texts, Scheckel’s work delineates the “insistent and destabilizing presence of ‘the Indian’ in nineteenth-century popular culture—novels, melodramas, captivity nanatives, autobiographies, tour guides—in order to show that even when Indians were marginalized . . . they continued, through their very exclusion, to frame the meaning of the nation” (151). By pairing the development of national Indian policy with the develop­ ment ofliterary nationalism in the early 1800s, Scheckel shows how both legal and literary discourse involved self-conscious efforts to resolve the fissures within America’s story of itself. Like Forrest Robinson’s In Bad Faith (1986) and other pivotal works in western American literary studies, Scheckel simi­ larly views popular culture as a site for both raising and evading crucial and unresolved contradictions between the nation’s founding narrative and its practices, such as the forced removal of Indians in the 1830s. Individual chap­ ters in Scheckel’s work forward her argument by providing wonderfully delin­ eated readings of a variety of “texts”—ranging from James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers and Pocahontas dramas to Mary Jemison’s “as-told-to” captivity 4 3 2 WAL 3 5 .4 WINTER 2 0 01 narrative, Black Hawk’s “autobiography,” and guidebooks and artwork in the U.S. Capitol. In her strongest chapters, Scheckel reveals not only the inter­ play of popular and official rhetoric about Indians, but the interplay of gender and race in the construction of national identity. For example, she offers a mas­ terful reading ofhow guidebooks, produced for the U.S. Capitol visitor between the 18.30s and 1860s, enlisted citizens in a larger drama of U.S. history through its representation of Capitol commemorative artworks of American Indians which “made the political exclusion of Indians seem natural and necessary” (129). In this nuanced analysis, Scheckel links (although does not fully tease out) the “gendered construction of citizenry” enacted in this artwork with the construction of maternal and sexualized roles for Euro-American and Native American women in the other national origin stories covered in the book (139). When the West was East, U.S. legal and cultural texts staged efforts to pin down shifting and unstable boundaries of national identity. Though focused on the early nation, The Insistence of the Indian directs us toward the continued persistence of the “Indian” in U.S. popular culture and policy debates, thus underscoring how American Indians still “frame the meaning of the nation” (151). As such...

Sentimental Collaborations: Mourning and Middle-Class Identity in Nineteenth-Century America

Sentimental Collaborations: Mourning and Middle-Class Identity in Nineteenth-Century America. By Mary Louise Kete. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000. Pp. xx, 280. Appendices. Cloth, $49.95; paper, $17.95.) American literature specialist Mary Louise Kete presents an intriguing reevaluation of function of poetry and fiction in nineteenth-century American culture. Her book, which examines literary creations produced from War of 1812 end of Reconstruction, attempts connect and literary romanticism with consumerism by illustrating how fiction and verse (published or not) served as a gift-giving ritual. The sentimental collaborations exchanged by nineteenth-century Americans reflected a gift economy that established symbolic ties among separate persons (52). Kete thereby refutes Alexis de Tocqueville's well-known observation that each man is forever thrown back upon himself alone, and there is danger that he may be shut up in solitude of his own heart and instead argues that Americans were deeply social and very concerned about vulnerability of family and community cohesiveness. They expressed their anxieties through language of mourning and loss. Kete begins her discussion with private, unpublished of Vermont rural folk whom she discovered in Harriet Gould's keepsake album (included in appendix one), and then expands her thesis illustrate how their concerns were articulated by poets Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Lydia Sigourney as well as novelists Harriet Beecher Stowe, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and Mark Twain. Harriet Gould's book contained poetry and remembrances written by Gould's family and friends between late 1830s and early 1860s. Kete utilizes this source illustrate how ordinary people made sense of their lives and concludes that their writings complicate, in important ways, many of our common understandings about nineteenth-century American literary (16). Kete believes contents of Harriet Gould's album reflected a collaborative individualism (56-57) that was strongly influenced by sentiment and a romantic sensibility that more accurately explains emotional locus of pre-Civil War Americans. She questions previous assessments by Gordon Haight, who argued nineteenth century's culture of sentiment reflected country's bad taste, as well as Ann Douglas, whose Feminization of American Culture (1977) suggests sentimentality represented feminization of national character. She also questions assessments of culture of isolated that was supposedly taking shape in early nineteenth century and found its fullest articulation in Tocqueville's Democracy in America. Rather than collapsing into isolated egotism, or the degeneration of individual into an unstable and unsustainable unit of one, she asserts promise of sentiment enforce or coerce a joining of interests was one way of negotiating this threat (49, 54). Sentiment represented a form of mourning that broke down borders of death as well as physical separations caused by westward migration and thereby enabled its participants to establish connections through which one could understand and identify oneself' (32). The poems in Harriet Gould's keepsake book are not concerned with expressing or constituting an isolated, freestanding ego but a situated, dependent individual. …

Voices of the Nation: Women and Public Speech in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture

Introduction The Voice of the Nation: Gender, Speech, and Nineteenth-Century American life 1. Bawdy talk: The Politics of Women's Speech in Henry James's The Bostonians and Sarah J. Hale's The Lecturess 2. 'Foul Mouthed Women': Disembodiment and Public Discourse in Herman Melville's Pierre and E.D.E.N. Southworth's The Fatal Marriage 3. Incarnate Words: Nativism, Nationalism, and the Female Body in Maria Monk's Awful Disclosures 4. Partners in Speech: Reforming Labor, Class, and the Working Woman's Body in Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's The Silent Partner 5. 'Queer Trimmings': Dressing, Cross-Dressing, and Women's Suffrage in Lillie Deereux Blake's Fettered for Life 6. Southern Oratory and The Slavery Debate in Caroline Lee Hentz's Planter's Northern Bride and Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Conclusion 'Every Wrong that Needs a Voice': Women and Political Activism at the Turn into the Twentieth Century.

Nicola Diane Thompson, Victorian Women Writers and the Woman Question; Caroline Field Levander, Voices of the Nation: Women and Public Speech in Nineteenth Century American Culture

Nicola Diane Thompson, Victorian Women Writers and the Woman Question; Caroline Field Levander, Voices of the Nation: Women and Public Speech in Nineteenth Century American Culture

The Insistence of the Indian: Race and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century American Culture.

The Insistence of the Indian: Race and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century American Culture.

: Voices of the Nation: Women and Public Speech in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture . Caroline Field Levander.

: Voices of the Nation: Women and Public Speech in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture . Caroline Field Levander.

Review: Voices of the Nation: Women and Public Speech in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture, by Caroline Field Levander

Review: <i>Voices of the Nation: Women and Public Speech in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture</i>, by Caroline Field Levander

Emily Dickinson's Manuscript Body: History/Textuality/Gender

Emily Dickinson’s Manuscript Body: History / Textuality / Gender Shira Wolosky (bio) It is difficult not to find admirable the new Franklin edition of Poems of Emily Dickinson. Its scholarship is meticulous, painstaking, thorough, devoted, exhaustive, and persevering. It assembles what can be assembled to date regarding variant versions, manuscript papers, writing implements, word, line and page design, chronology and fascicle groupings, and the epistolary and publication histories of Dickinson’s poetry. Especially exciting is the drama of Dickinson at work, as traced in the “Introduction.” This gives a vivid and focussed sense of Dickinson in the processes of composition. The track of her worksheets, intermediate drafts, and copies sent, retained, revised, and recorded tells an implicit story of her growing and changing senses of herself as poet. 1 Her utter seriousness and devotion to craft come forcefully to view. Yet this edition is as significant in what it does not accomplish as in what it does. The book highlights, but does not and cannot settle, what has become an increasing conundrum of Dickinson studies: the question of what a Dickinson poem even is. What constitutes the Dickinson text as an object of study? Beyond this, and, to me, more pressing still, the new edition — its formats and investments — poses questions regarding the contexts for reading Dickinson: the ways of situating her; the relationships of Dickinson poems to each other and to the discourses, norms, and events that surround her — including women’s culture and nineteenth-century American culture generally; the directions her work may be felt to point toward and the issues it is felt to raise; the interpretive frameworks for construing her very language. Franklin’s edition underscores how manuscript work may suggest approaches to these questions but does not in itself constitute answers. Franklin’s edition provides an invaluable tool for Dickinson scholars, with its careful descriptions of manuscript features, its new assessments of epistolary records and chronologies, its attention to the varied forms in which [End Page 87] Dickinson’s writing took shape as drafts, letters, fair copies, fascicles, and sets. Yet the new Franklin edition does not accomplish a dramatic revolution in our image of the Dickinson text. Franklin’s new Dickinson poems, as Cristanne Miller observes, look (un)startlingly like Thomas Johnson’s old ones. There are, to be sure, important differences between the two. Most striking are the changes in the sequence and numbering of the poems. Some texts are thoroughly reedited. Poems are added, recombined, redivided, excluded. There are new assessments of dates of composition, and the overall count of poems is altered. Still, Franklin does not recast the fundamental sense or appearance of Dickinson’s texts. Word variants are set at the foot of the poem, line and page-breaks are indicated through editorial notation, stanza norms are kept. The introduction of italicized “titles” in some sense brings Dickinson still closer to a traditional format, and still farther from her own practices. This new edition, that is, lacks the dramatic impact of the earlier Franklin Manuscript Books, with its facsimiles of Dickinson’s own writing, organized according to her fascicles and sets. In holograph, the variants appear in all their gripping unfinish. The lines break as Dickinson has them do, running off or away with the paper. The changes in handwriting size and style are there to behold. Certainly the limitations of print-format intrude here. But other manuscript-printings — say, Valerie Eliot’s facsimile edition of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land — succeed in presenting the crossings-out, overwritings, marginalia, annotations, and markings directly onto the printed page. 2 Here, the distance between the description and the visual object is very great. One must reconstruct the manuscript-image out of the written instructions. The excitement of imagining Dickinson imagining variants and feeling their jostling for poetic space must take place in the reader’s mind, rather than being witnessed on the page, as was the case in the Johnson edition as well. Neither does Franklin’s newly proposed re-ordering of poems finally settle questions of chronology, nor of how much one is able to make use of them in interpretation. Franklin himself is careful to explain that a poem...

The insistence of the Indian: race and nationalism in nineteenth-century American culture

Exploring literary, political and legal sources, the author argues that the Indian question was intertwined with the ways in which 19th-century Americans viewed their nation's past and envisioned its destiny. The book shows how the Indians provided a crucial site of reflection upon national identity, and yet, by being denied the natural rights upon which the constitutional principles of the United States rested, they also challenged American convictions of moral ascendancy and national legitimacy. It is from this gap between principles and practice, according to the author, that the nation emerged.

Pictorial desires and textual anxieties: Modes of ekphrastic discourse in nineteenth-century American culture

If confined to its common-sense definition as a verbal description of a visual work of art, ekphrasis tends to be conceived of merely as a mode of written or spoken discourse. However, if one looks beyond the strictures of literary genre or style, i.e. of the text as work, ekphrasis also denotes an activity, a production or an event: the translation of certain affective properties from one medium (broadly speaking, the ‘visual’) into another (the ‘verbal’, ditto). Moreover, in contrast with translations between one language and another, or one visual medium and another, ekphrasis aims to achieve the imitation or reconstruction of specific effects, to (re-)capture the affective properties characteristic of the visual artifice to enhance the meaning of the verbal text.

The Insistence of the Indian: Race and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century American Culture

The Insistence of the Indian: Race and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century American Culture

Voices of the nation: women and public speech in nineteenth-century American literature and culture

Voices of the nation: women and public speech in nineteenth-century American literature and culture

Monumental Anxieties: Homoerotic Desire and Feminine Influence in 19th Century U.S. Literature (review)

Reviewed by: Monumental Anxieties: Homoerotic Desire and Feminine Influence in 19th-Century U.S. Literature Stephanie Bower Scott S. Derrick. Monumental Anxieties: Homoerotic Desire and Feminine Influence in 19th-Century U.S. Literature. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1997. xii + 259 pp. The anxieties Scott Derrick examines are indeed monumental: nothing less than the Scylla and Charybdis of masculine development, the perilous rocks of femininity and homosexuality that men must negotiate in their path toward a fully realized manhood. Derrick participates in the growing scholarship on masculinity, joining critics such as Gail Bederman, Michael Kimmel, and David Leverenz, who render visible the processes by which masculine authority is created and affirmed. What differentiates Derrick from his predecessors—and makes his work an important contribution to this field—is his focus on the way manhood is defined within and against both homoeroticism and femininity, the mutually constituting components of masculinity. Drawing upon insights from queer theory and feminist scholarship, Derrick analyzes the act of literary composition as a process wherein male identity is consolidated, since for the six American writers he discusses, Hawthorne, Poe, James, Sinclair, Crane, and Fitzgerald, the task of “authorial self-making enacts a literary version of the general cultural narrative of masculine development.” Becoming a writer is thus analogous to becoming a man, and Derrick traces the twinned sets of identifications and disavowals these writers negotiate in their quest for narrative authority. For even as these writers benefit from the “cultural debt” they owe to women, enveloped as they are within the “feminization” of nineteenth-century American culture, they finally erase the traces of this female labor. Derrick argues that the path to manhood similarly necessitates homoerotic identifications that must be compulsively denied, unspeakable desires that expose the limits of narration before they are repressed. Some of this work has been done before: the acts of appropriation and denial that characterize Hawthorne’s and James’s relationships with their female contemporaries are by now a familiar story. Derrick is most insightful when he outlines the intersections between the dual narratives of feminization and homoeroticism in works by these two [End Page 991] writers, arguing that both Hawthorne and James consolidate literary authority through the production of a transcendent masculinity. In Derrick’s account, the authors construct narratives that ward off “feminine influence” within a set of masculine identifications, but in so doing unleash erotic energies that must themselves be contained through the reimposition of a normative heterosexuality. For example, Derrick formulates a “chiastic” relationship among four James novels to chart, on one hand, the complicated mechanisms by which female characters secure an idealized “masculine ease” against the “disintegrating power of economic and commercial life,” and are themselves secured, their deaths an effective means of stabilizing their contributions, and on the other hand, the disruptive, homosexual desires that lack “relatively accessible narrative forms” and consequently endanger James’s pursuit of professional success. Only by subordinating this wayward eroticism within a heterosexual narrative can James achieve the literary authority he so desires. But Derrick astutely argues that James exposes, or at least calls attention to, his own sleight of hand, so that the losses accompanying the consolidation of “masculine power” become visible even in the act of their erasure. If there is one weakness in Derrick’s argument, it is his tendency to privilege psychoanalytic accounts of masculine development over social and historical ones. Derrick’s first chapter locates his readings within nineteenth-century gender roles, but the breadth of his study—from the 1850s to the 1920s—demands closer attention to the shifts within cultural representations of masculinity. Absent is a more detailed account, one that would address particular inflections of race and class, so Derrick’s description of masculinity can appear ahistorical, sometimes glossing over the differences between, for instance, a Christopher Newman and a Jurgis Rudkus. Similarly, Derrick’s discussion of the anxiety about “feminine influence” relies too much upon an essentialized view of gender relations. Hawthorne and Sinclair may both measure their success against that of Harriet Beecher Stowe, but the “misogynistic fears of maternal women and their reproductive powers” that, in Derrick’s view, characterize The Jungle emerge within a discourse of evolutionary biology that...

States of Sympathy: Seduction and Democracy in the American Novel

States of Sympathy calls for a new approach to reading early American fiction and politics, one that recognizes sympathy as crucial to the construction of American identity: to read sympathetically becomes synonymous with reading like an American. Examining philosophical and political texts alongside literary ones, Elizabeth Barnes explores the extent to which sympathy and sentiment are increasingly employed to construct the notion of a politically affective state. Barnes demonstrates how the family comes to represent the ideal model for social and political affiliations. Familial feeling proves the foundations for sympathy and sympathy the foundation for democracy. In holding up the family as a model for sociopolitical union, however, sentimental rhetoric conflates the boundaries between familial and sociosexual ties, resulting in a confusion of familial and erotic attachment. The distinction between licit and illicit love - exemplified in numerous stories about incest and seduction - becomes a preoccupying theme in American literature. While such stories have often been read as a manifestation of anxieties about corruption in the young republic, Barnes provocatively argues that incest and seduction actually represent the logical outcome of nineteenth-century American culture's most deeply held values.

A Lydia Maria Child reader

From the 1820s to the 1870s, Lydia Maria Child was as familiar to the American public as her Thanksgiving song, Over the river and through the wood, / To grandfather's house we go, remains today. Hardly a sphere of nineteenth-century life can be found in which Child did not figure prominently as a pathbreaker. She crusaded against slavery and racism, combated religious bigotry, championed women's rights, publicized the plight of the urban poor, and campaigned for justice toward Native Americans. Showing an uncanny ability to pinpoint and respond to new cultural needs, Child pioneered almost every category of nineteenth-century American letters-historical fiction, the short story, children's literature, the domestic advice book, women's history, antislavery fiction, journalism, and the literature of aging. This rich collection is the first to represent the full range of Child's contributions as a literary innovator, social reformer, and progressive thinker over a career spanning six decades. It features stories, editorials, articles, and letters to politicians culled from rare newspapers and periodicals and never before published in book form; extracts from her trailblazing childrearing manual, history of women, and primer for the emancipated slaves; and a generous sampling of her best-known writings on slavery, the Indian question, poverty, and women's rights. Witty, incisive, and often daringly unconventional, Child's writings open a panoramic window on nineteenth-century American culture while addressing issues still relevant to our own time. In this anthology, the editor of Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl reemerges in her own right as one of the nation's greatest prophets.

"Littery Man": Mark Twain and Modern Authorship.

As Mark Twain, Samuel Clemens became one of America's first modern celebrities, successfully straddling the conflicts between culture and commerce. Twain manipulated the cultural outlets of his day, not only through publication of his diverse novels, but through newspapers, magazines, book reviews, advertising, and his popular performances and readings. In Littery Man, Richard Lowry examines a range of Twain's major works to show how the writer strove to establish his authority over the course of his career. For Lowry, Samuel Clemens's supreme fiction and most explicitly artful performance was Mark Twain, the fiction that authorized his fiction. Lowry reconstructs that performance as the moment at which the American Writer emerged as a profession. He gives attention to the historical and cultural context of the Gilded age, from Twain's influential contemporary William Dean Howells to the various genre books that Twain consistently mastered, e.g., travel guidebooks, manuals for boys, and autobiographies. The result is that Littery Man will appeal to both Twain scholars and to scholars and students of nineteenth century American literature and culture.

The Landscape of Belief: Encountering the Holy Land in Nineteenth-Century American Art and Culture

The Landscape of Belief: Encountering the Holy Land in Nineteenth-Century American Art and Culture

The Landscape of Belief: Encountering the Holy Land in Nineteenth-Century American Art and Culture

The Landscape of Belief: Encountering the Holy Land in Nineteenth-Century American Art and Culture

Acting Like Mark Twain: Performance in Nineteenth-Century American Culture

Acting Like Mark Twain: Performance in Nineteenth-Century American Culture Harold K. Bush Jr. (bio) Acting Naturally: Mark Twain in the Culture of Performance. By Randall Knoper. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. 240 pages. $35.00. Americans have long been trying to define both America and Mark Twain, often tackling both in the very same paragraph. 1 Regarding the latter, William Dean Howells was Twain’s foremost critical champion and, as we now know, a prophetic seer of Twain’s unique and lasting place in American literary history. Simply put, Howells likened Twain to Abraham Lincoln and labeled Twain’s style, “the American Western.” Similarly, Barrett Wendell noted that Mark Twain was “so characteristically American” and “thoroughly American,” and in 1915 Fred Lewis Pattee influenced scores of readers, including the young Ernest Hemingway, when he dubbed Twain the fountainhead of all later American literature. 2 And yet, among these early critics, Wendell’s analysis is notable for his not-so-subtle repugnance toward Twain’s stylistic achievements: “On the whole, however, we may say of our great confused West, that just as surely as New England has made its mark in the literary history of America, so as yet this West has not.” 3 In effect, the negative perspective toward Twain espoused by critics like Wendell corresponds, not surprisingly, to a view of cultural tradition privileging Boston’s genteel upper-crust. In contrast, positive views of Twain such as Howells’s emphasized his role as spokesperson for cultural and social phenomena related in one way or [End Page 429] another to the expansion of democracy, the rise of realism, and the championing of the common folk of America west of New England. Howells and Wendell, and later Van Wyck Brooks and Bernard DeVoto, disagreed vehemently about the achievement of Twain; still, these disparate critics tended to frame Twain as representative of the West and in turn of the aspirations of the entire nation. Vernon Louis Parrington exemplified the emergent tendency to view Twain as prophet of democratic egalitarianism and essentially as the incarnation of America itself: Here at last was an authentic American—a native writer thinking his own thoughts, using his own eyes, speaking his own dialect. . . . A strange and uncouth figure . . . yet the very embodiment of the turbulent frontier that had long been shaping a native psychology, and that now at last was turning eastward to Americanize the Atlantic seaboard . . . Twain was indubitably an embodiment of three centuries of American experience—frontier centuries, decentralized, leveling, individualistic . . . Mark Twain was the child of the frontier past. 4 Among other remarkable features of Parrington’s mythic concept, the most telling is perhaps his creation of a single American incarnation, one encompassing all things good and lovable about the democratic and individualistic West: the man, Mark Twain. Currently, Twain scholars would like to think that they are much more sophisticated and historicized in their approach to this one certifiably American literary icon. 5 Such scholars share several tendencies: Twain’s major and minor texts are often given equal weight; intensive scrutiny is brought to bear on Twain’s somewhat ephemeral writings (such as his lesser-known or even recently excavated journalism, speeches, and plays); and these writings are most commonly viewed primarily as instances of ideology and belief. Further, as Christopher P. Wilson has noted concerning the more general tendencies of “New Historicist” Americanist critics, recent Twain scholarship demonstrates an interest in the “temporality of rhetoric,” the historicity of a specific discursive context; they focus on the network of discourses and representations which inform or inhabit texts, or (to use the seminal term) are “inscribed” into them. Consequently, all dispense with a monologic text, positing instead either a plurality of texts, or a single text which speaks with a multitude of voices; these texts are not seen as emanating from individual geniuses or “subjects,” but as accumulative, intertextual, even collaborative productions. 6 [End Page 430] In this way, many of the most influential recent studies of Mark Twain are tantamount to close analyses of America’s cultural and social environment of which he was a chief exemplar. This observation is corroborated by Robert Sattlemeyer, who has noted in his annual...

The Landscape of Belief: Encountering the Holy Land in Nineteenth-Century American Art and Culture.

This book tells of the 19th-century American painters who, along with photographers, archaeologists, writers, evangelists, and tourists, flocked to the biblical Holy Land, a world of striking landscape vistas that reflected, in their eyes, a powerful image of the United States. Here they saw a metaphor for their country: a New World promised land, a divinely favoured Protestant nation created by and for a modern chosen people. Taking these biblical associations as a starting point, John Davis examines the ways in which 19th-century Americans looked to the actual landscape of the Holy Land as an extension of their national identity. Through close readings of panoramas, photographs, and conventional easel paintings, he shows how this sacred topography became a place to work out the competing ideological debates surrounding American exceptionalism, prophetic millennialism, anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish sentiment, and post-Darwinian science. Drawing on sermons, diaries, travel volumes, and novels, Davis explores the growth of a specific cultural market for landscape imagery of Ottoman Palestine and the manner in which easel painters responded to the popular demand for vernacular repr