Nature's Metropolis

William Cronon, Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: WW Norton, 1991)

Here, Cronon looks at Chicago as both a product of and a shaper of the "first-nature" environment surrounding its metropolitan areas. This is the best possible example of how environmental history could integrate the urban and the rural and downplay the concept of "wilderness," a goal that everyone is always talking about. Cronon shows how Chicago used its position on Lake Michigan to attract railroads, which in turn attracted trade from the "great West"'s hinterlands, which in turn located Chicago as a gateway city: raw goods would enter the city and exit as value-added commodities, with Chicago performing the work of abstracting the commodity from its original context. Chicago was dependent on the strength and financial capital of New York and Philadelphia, which financed the railroads and established Chi-town as the broker of Midwestern ecological capital.

Commodities that Cronon looks at include wheat, lumber, and meat. In each case, Cronon argues, manufacturers in Chicago figured out how to use economies of scale to aggregate these goods into mass quantities and to abstract their value from their physical presence. This last happening worked especially well with wheat, which created the modern concept of the "exchange," at which people traded wheat without ever even seeing the wheat in question. (Here is where I figured out what a "futures market" is - it's more fascinating than one could ever imagine.)

Cronon writes that Chicago's effect upon the rural sites which came within its orbit was both positive for people's lives (easier selling of their goods; better access to cheaper things) and negative (they were at the mercy of distant forces for their livelihood; if they were merchants, they were undercut by cheaper Chicago prices). Cronon shows how certain small-potatoes merchants and farmers resisted the pressure of the giant Chicago firms through associations (sometimes more effective, other times less).

I've been waiting to read this one for a long time, and it was definitely un-disappointing. Cronon's ability to be both a good storyteller and a "man of infinite research" (as TR said about Henry Adams) is a thing to envy. His inclusion of financial records, technological analysis, and cultural productions (novels, esp. in the World's Fair chapter) makes this book a model of enviable American Studies practice.

Natural Visions

Finis Dunaway, Natural Visions: The Power of Images in American Environmental Reform (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005)

Dunaway's book looks at imagery of environmentalism in the twentieth century, examining how photographers and filmmakers participated in and were funded by organizations both governmental and non-governmental whose mandate was to foster environmental awareness. Dunaway moves from looking at a Progressive-era photographer, Herbert Gleason, who created romantic-sublime imagery of the West; to the New Deal-era documentaries of Robert Flaherty, who lamented the death of the farm family, and Pare Lorentz (whose "The Plow That Broke The Plains" provides this image of a baby with the implement in question, which Dunaway argues exemplifies Lorentz' belief that the early pioneers were like prodigal children who wrecked the land without thinking); to the Sierra Club coffee-table books by the likes of Eliot Porter, which were the brainchildren of David Brower, whose vision of a nature outside of technology and humanity directly contradicted the New Deal technophilic imagination.

Throughout, Dunaway argues that environmental reformers who used art in their appeals passed over Benjamin's anxieties about the efficacy of the mechanically reproduced work of art, choosing instead to believe that their art could create a new "ecological sublime" (shades of David Nye) which would "rejoin beauty and sublimity, turn the ordinary into the astonishing, find awe in the diminutive, seek wonder in the everyday" (212).

But my question is: does it work? Do people change their minds after seeing pictures of bugs or cows? Nye's argument was that the technological sublime operates in part by bringing people together to witness something that exemplified human progress. How could the ecological sublime take advantage of this same dynamic? Nye also argues that the technological sublime always trumps the ecological sublime - at least, the "bigger" ecological sublime, of Adams' Yosemite and the like.

Dunaway is a professor of history at Trent University in Ontario. I know he has an article in the recent American Quarterly about use of imagery in seventies environmentalism.

Crimes Against Nature

Karl Jacoby, Crimes Against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, and Thieves and the Hidden History of American Conservation (University of California Press, 2001)

Jacoby, who now teaches at Brown (and who got his PhD from Yale's history program), is working on a second book about cultural remembrance of violence against Native Americans since frontier times. He describes himself as interested in how "human and non-human actors" create history in mutuality.

Teddy Roosevelt's picture is here as a reminder of the way that famous conservationists get all the credit for early 20th-c conservationism, while, as Jacoby claims, we forget to mention all of the people whose lives were altered for the worse by this new understanding of who should be in charge of the land. Jacoby describes conflicts between more elite conservationists and different brands of environmental transgressors, suddenly categorized as abusers by the new environmental order: hunters who persist in ranging over the Adirondack reserves of the wealthy New York set; poachers who kill Yellowstone bison (the Army was actually sent out to stop them!); and Havasupai Indians in the Southwest who continue to hunt in the new national forests which are established on the peripheries of their new, land-poor reservations.

Throughout, Jacoby contends with Roderick Nash's assessment that wilderness "appreciation" appeared first in the Eastern elite (2) and tries to reach an understanding of what he calls the "moral ecology" of the working-class residents of newly conserved lands.

Do Glaciers Listen?

Julie Cruikshank, Do Glaciers Listen? Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters, and Social Imagination (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2005)

Cruikshank, a professor of anthropology at the University of British Columbia, specializes in the ways in which different types of knowledge - scientific, "folk," native - struggle to establish themselves as legitimate; and works in the Yukon and also sometimes in Siberia.

This book is about the way that native Alaskans (Tlingit and Huna in the St. Elias Mountains area) look/ed at glaciers, and the difference between their conception of glacier "consciousness" and the scientific bent of Western explorers with whom they have come into contact. Following Harold Innis' ideas about the way that empire establishes itself by eliminating alternative forms of communication and knowledge; Bahktin's belief that storytelling and folk humor can equal resistance; and Benjamin's understanding of the tragedy of the loss of interactive storytelling, Cruikshank looks at stories told by Tlingit and Huna elders about the place of social glaciers in their cultural history, and compares these stories to white/"scientific" conceptions of the glacier as natural fact.

Glaciers, to the Yukon women Cruikshank interviews, are social beings, sensitive to being excluded or made fun of, and obedient to laws of their own (for example, they hate it when you cook with grease nearby them; glacier travel requires boiled food only). There is a reciprocal relationship between men and glaciers - a relationship not recognized by white men, or at least not by most white men - John Muir is cited as an example of an American who approaches sensitivity when it comes to interactions with the natural world, although his insensitivity to the native people who guided him through that world troubles that approbation a bit.

In a weird coincidence, a couple of days after reading this book I read this article in the New Yorker about a composer who makes music according to the rhythms of various instruments which measure activity of the earth. It would be interesting to know what the Native Alaskans might think about this...

Middle Ground

"The map...is the first attempt at delineating the country of the Great Lakes. Based wholly on Indian reports, the map accompanied a work by Samuel de Champlain, Les Voyages de la Nouvelle France, which was published in Paris in 1632." Caption from this site...

Title: The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991)

Author: Richard White, now holding an endowed professorship at Stanford. White is one of the major architects of the new environmental and Western histories (see also William Cronon, Patricia Limerick, Hal Rothman, Ramon Gutierrez). The Western approach embodied in his work re-visions the West as a land where various groups of people interacted, not simply the empty spot where Anglo-Americans exercised their growing dominance, as described in nineteenth-century historian Frederick Jackson Turner's "frontier thesis".

White is also author of The Roots of Dependency: Subsistence, Environment, and Social Change Among the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos (1983); "It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own": A History of the American West (1991), which I've never read but always wanted to, and which apparently never uses the word "frontier"; The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River (1996), which we read in a Landscape class and which is notably shorter than Middle Ground; and Remembering Ahanagran: A History of Stories (1998).

Tecumseh, portrait uncited anywhere I could find (but I included it because of the prominence of the medal on his chest and the epaulets of his uniform). White wrote in his intro that he initially intended to write a book about Tecumseh's story, but decided that the back-story of Indian interaction with Europeans in the area was all the more interesting.

My short review: White dives into the complex, sometimes deeply confusing territory of the relationships between various Indian groups and the French, English, and American colonizers of the upper Midwest during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and emerges with a coherent narrative of the ways that cultural contact resulted in what he calls "the middle ground."

The book is not really assignable to undergrads, but (or maybe because) its underlying message is that stuff back then was more complex than we think it was. This complexity accounts for the occasional Biblically byzantine prose, describing the successions of various chiefs and French commanding officers. (I was only willing to forgive White the 525-page length of the book because he, quite endearingly, called Middle Ground "the Tristam Shandy of Indian history" in the foreword.) But all of this depth is definitely necessary, and definitely serves his point well: in a land of fragmented Indian groups, contacted by equally fragmented French traders, Jesuits, and travelers, people created a culture based on individual, face-to-face interactions, and it was a much more flexible and mutable one than has been described.

Particularly interesting examples of French and Indian contact/conflict come under the cultural situations of gift-giving, order-giving, murder, and sex. Gifts were used by Indian groups as ways to establish alliance; the French initially resented this, but eventually saw their efficacy; the British never wholeheartedly capitulated to what they saw as "begging Indians" and their empire suffered as a result. The maintenance of authority was understood differently by the Europeans and the Indians - Euros thought that because somebody was a chief, that meant that they could control all of their people, while Indian authority was much more conditional. French people in the country (the pays d'en haut) eventually learned this and worked around it, but their imperial commanders never seemed to understand; and the British saw the Indian lack of hierarchy as an emblem of their less-developed society. Murder was a situation which the Indians dealt with by "raising" or "covering" the dead (ie, giving the bereaved family a slave to replace the lost person, or goods to make up for his/her loss), while the Europeans believed in an eye for an eye. White describes how various instances of murder forced the French and Indians to create solutions which satisfied both sides of the equation, and how the British and American interactions were far less flexible. Finally, sex in the backcountry was an example of the literal "middle ground" - the birth of various metis (half-French, half-Indian) children served to help trade and establish ties between communities of the different nations.

All of this cultural exchange was possible and necessary because the French "needed" the Indians - or at least, they needed the Indians not to kill them, and to trap beaver for them, and not to betray them to the English during imperial wars. Once the British came into power, and once the Americans started colonizing the back-country, this "need" went away and "Indian-hating" became more common. Against this backdrop, the story told by Jill Lepore of the interactions between Indians and English in Massachusetts takes on added poignancy. (Or does it? The story White tells makes it pretty clear that the French weren't inherently more tender-hearted or kind, but simply in dire-r straits, which forced them to interact on a more human level with the Indians...if they had lived in tight quarters with Indians and needed land for domesticated animals and seen no need to patronize Indians to maintain trading relationships, as was the case in MA, they might not have been so open to relating in the way they did.)

"The Black Robe", 1991 movie about a Jesuit priest in the pays d'en haut - haven't seen it yet, but intend to. Check out the praise: "Packs twice the punch of Dances with Wolves."

Reviews of Others: Well, this book won the Francis Parkman Prize and was a Pulitzer nominee, so there's that. In the Journal of American History, Robert Berkhofer Jr (author of The White Man's Indian), wrote that the book was praiseworthy for its synthesis, but worried that White had tried too hard to maintain his narrative scenario by omitting mention of what happened after the end of the War of 1812 (how can this be a "middle ground" if it's constantly shifting westward because of the actions of faraway imperial nations?) Rebecca Kugel, in the American Indian Quarterly, said much more about the patriarchal family relationship between French and Algonquins than I did in the above review (and it's helpful for me to remember that the French saw this relationship as one of authority, while the Algonquins thought a "father" should provide for and mediate between his "children" - and trouble came about when the French violated this compact, which they might not have completely understood). Kugel thought that White might have shortchanged the British and American eras in comparison to the French (what did she want, the Gravity's Rainbow of Indian history?)

Words: "phratry" ("any of various analogous clans or kinship divisions found in other societies; [esp. in Anthropol.] a descent group or kinship group in some tribal societies); "moiety" ("a half, one of two equal parts"); "stroud" ("a blanket manufactured for barter or sale in trading with the North American Indians" - White writes that the British, for a time, had a trade advantage over the French because of their superior supply of scarlet strouds).

Books to follow up on: Secondary: Greg Dening, Islands and Beaches: Discourse on a Silent Land, Marquesas, 1774-1880 (1980).

The End of Victory Culture

Roll the dice, lady. Roll the dice.

Title: The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation (New York: Basic Books, 1995)

Author: Tom Engelhardt, a former journalist and book editor, now working as a fellow for the Nation Institute and writing for/editing the alternative news site TomDispatch.com. One of the things he works on for Metropolitan Books is called The American Empire Project and looks really awesome.

Argument: The time between the Cold War and Vietnam marked the beginning of the end of American triumphalism, which was at a high point at the end of WWII, but marred by the existence of the bomb. Combining a bunch of different previous scholarship about American exceptionalism (see Nash Smith), Native Americans (see Slotkin), narratives of war and racism (see Dower, Drinnon), as well as his own childhood reflections, Engelhardt seeks to answer the question of how Americans lost their loving feeling toward their own country - and especially, how children who grew up during that 1950s got to the point where they began to question the country's mission. All of this questioning added up to what Engelhardt terms The End of Victory Culture. (Problem: Weren't there dissenters and disbelievers in American culture all along? Anti-imperialists and war protestors? Socialists? Communists? Yes, there were... Also, there's still a Victory Culture: just ask any random person on the street in Concord, New Hampshire.)

Chapter-by-chapter:
I. War Story
1. Triumphalist Despair: Basic argument laid out.

2. Story Time: Real-life war stories of America, whose parameters are determined by the victors (see Lepore). Native Americans as central to these stories, while the black story is elided (and haunting in its absence).

3. Ambush at Kamikaze Pass: War stories in the movies. Short history of the Western, pre-1960, and its similarities with the war movies of the 1940s. A bit about captivity narratives; a bit about the "victim complex" (we are always the transgressed upon, never the aggressor).

4. Premonitions: The Asian Death of Victory Culture: How Asia became "the frontier", and how Korea became a precursor of/warning of what was to come in Vietnam.

II. Containments (1945-1962)
1. War Games: How the 1950s mixed wartime with peacetime objectives (see May). Includes section on children's war games (81).

2. X Marks the Spot: Articulation of tensions between inclusionary and exclusionary tactics during the Cold War (how are we safe? by assimilating difference, or rejecting it altogether?)

3. The Enemy Disappears: The invisibility of Cold War adversaries; coverage of the HUAC hearings and blacklisting (emphasis on the performative nature thereof).

4. The Haunting of Childhood: Childhood, during the Cold War, was the "symbolic meeting place" for two fears: the fear of infection by the Other (see juvenile delinquents); and the propensity of the media to "concretize the fantasies of the young and the nightmarish fears of grown-ups into potent products" (137). "Twilight Zone" seen as example of how these secret fears/fantasies emerged in the public eye.

5. Entering the Twilight Zone: The atomic stalemate "reflected the limits of what the American story, American national identity, could withstand" (157): we couldn't picture ourselves killing so many people without "provocation". This meant that adversaries had to be more careful, talk about things more, and that "a certain amount of control over the American war story...was placed in enemy hands" (161). Interesting piece on the invention of the Peace Corps as JFK's plan to Americanize far places through youth (164).

III. The Era of Reversals (1962-1975):
1. The First Coming of GI Joe: Evolution of GI Joe figures seen as marker of how American ideas of heroism and enemy-ship evolved during this time.

2. The Invisible Government: JFK's assassination, and subsequent conspiracy theories, indicated that Americans could now conceive that their government would keep things from them purposefully.

3. Playing with Fire: The story of Morley Safer's atrocity reports from Cam Ne, and how the response to it (people thought he was a Communist plant, and hey, he was Canadian) indicated America's inability to accept the possible moral bankruptcy of their mission in Vietnam.

Morley Safer at Cam Ne, 1965.

4. Into the Charnel House of Language: Vietnam's "backwardness" in the American war story led to linguistic machinations intended to help Americans process what was happening: an interesting analysis of the use of the word "quagmire", which holds that the word implies American victimhood, once again: Who's in the wrong, when men are being "sucked into" a war? The thing doing the "sucking", for sure. I'm never calling Iraq a quagmire again. (199)

5. The President as Mad Mullah: Nixon told advisors that he wanted the Vietnamese to see him as an evil madman so they would lose their nerve - a concept which fascinates Engelhardt, given American need to see their leaders as upright moral beings.

6. The Crossover Point: More on the American state of mind in Vietnam, including the "logic" of body counts, which built on itself, and the idea that America wanted to impose a "story" on Vietnam, not just political rule (214).

7. "Something Rather Dark and Bloody": The story of the My Lai massacre, and response to it. Interestingly, Engelhardt points out, everybody on either side of the protestor/establishment divide was interested in comparing the other side with Nazis.

8. The War Crimes of Daniel Ellsberg: Ellsberg, who worked for RAND and then leaked the Pentagon Papers, is seen as an exemplar of a young American who fell out of love with the war story he'd been raised upon.

D. Ellsberg.

9. Ambush at Kamikaze Pass (II): Reflections of the Vietnam War in film. Also, story of how young war protestors singlehandedly realized the twin fears of the Cold War era: Communism, and the vulnerability of the young.

10. Besieged: How the war protestors used the national media by manipulating symbols such as "Good War" paraphenalia in order to create a sort of living MAD magazine: a subordination of the accepted narrative. Those in charge were horrified: not only the war, but also the home agenda, was slipping from their grasp, due to the death of Victory Culture.

11. Reconstruction: How did post-Vietnam Americans, robbed of their self-image of conquering righteousness, think to recoup their self respect? Through the children, of course...

IV. Afterlife (1975-1994): Attempts to rehabilitate American self image include Star Wars, the first Gulf War (in its spectacular, TV-ready execution). More on GI Joe, and a bit of interesting, if slightly out of place, musing on the way that children's culture seems to drive all meaning before it in the creation of an apolitical, timeless global state of conflict (do I agree? don't know) (301).

Reviews: In Contemporary Sociology, George Lipsitz wrote (a bit scathingly, but rightly) that Engelhardt draws "sporadically and unsystematically" on recent scholarship, pointing out holes in interpretation caused by ignorance of such work as that of Eric Lott and David Roediger. Furthermore, Lipsitz continued, Engelhardt's unfamiliarity with the methods of cultural studies led him to write in a narrow, Myth-and-Symbol-style framework, ignoring contradictory or complicating aspects of his Overarching Narrative; and his lack of context for each cultural object (no analysis of the actors involved in production, etc) leads him to make unsupported guesses about their meanings. In the Journal of American History, Stephen Whitfield wrote that the book's analysis was "sprightly", if thin, and that Engelhardt's overall theory about triumphalism was worth encapsulating in book form. Both reviewers called Engelhardt a "leftist". It's interesting to see how differently a "popular" book is reviewed in scholarly publications...

Vocab words: "osculation" ("close contact, an instance of this; spec. (a) the mutual contact of blood vessels (obs.); (b) Geom., contact of curves or surfaces which share a common tangent at the point of contact (also used analogously of spaces of higher dimension)" - also, "kissing").

Books to follow up on: Primary: Books: Textbook from 1953: America Before Man; Nancy Carlsson-Paige and Diane E Levin, Who's Calling the Shots: How to Respond Effectively to Children's Fascination with War Play and War Toys (1990); MIA Hunter series ("Vietnam snuff novels"). Toys: GI Joe "Soldiers of the World" (p 175) and animal enemies. Movies: "North by Northwest"; "The Long Telegram"; "Fail Safe"; Morley Safer's reports on "The Burning of Cam Ne"; "The Dirty Dozen"; "The Wild Bunch"; "Bonnie and Clyde"; "Little Big Man"; "Soldier Blue"; "The China Syndrome"; "Coming Home".

Secondary: Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (1992); Leslie Daikin, Children's Toys Throughout the Ages (1953); Ruth Miller Elson, Guardians of Tradition: American Schoolbooks of the Nineteenth Century (1964); Frances Fitzgerald, America Revised: History Schoolbooks in the Twentieth Century (1979); Antonia Fraser, A History of Toys (1966); Trudier Harris, Exorcising Blackness: Historical and Literary Lynching and Burning Rituals (1984); John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism 1860-1925 (1975); Sydney Ladensohn and Ted Schhoenhaus, Toyland: The High-Stakes Game of the Toy Industry (1990); Edward Tabor Linenthal, Sacred Ground: Americans and Their Battlefields (1991); June Namias, White Captives: Gender and Ethnicity on the American Frontier (1993); David Nasaw, Going Out: The Rise and Fall of Public Amusements (1993); Michael Paul Rogin, Ronald Reagan, The Movie and Other Episodes in Political Demonology (1987); Michael Sherry, The Rise of American Air Power: The Creation of Armageddon (1987); Keith Thompson, Angels and Aliens: UFOs and the Mythic Imagination (1991).

Vicious

Howard Pyle, The Salem Wolf, 1909 (painting used on the cover of Coleman's book)

Title: Vicious: Wolves and Men in America (New Haven: Yale UP, 2004)

Author: Jon T. Coleman, now of the department of history at Notre Dame, got his PhD from Yale (I think in history, not AMS). This book was his dissertation. There's not information on this site about his possible new project, but I heard from somebody at some point that he's writing about bears now (scuttlebutt, possibly). He writes often and entertainingly for the Chronicle of Higher Ed.

Argument: Telling the story of wolves in America, Coleman argues, entails creating an "interdisciplinary mutant" of methods from biology, folklore, and history in order to answer his operative questions: Why did European settlers in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, bent on colonizing the "new" world, kill wolves in such a "vicious" manner? And when and how did the balance of opinion shift such that wolves are now conserved instead of slaughtered? Coleman argues that "livestock, folklore, and sex underpinned the longevity of wolf hatred" - the first two being categories of property and cultural heritage that humans "designed to endure"; the third, biological reproduction, creating fodder for the cultural reproduction of the importance of these categories (11).

Chapter-by-chapter:
Part One: Southern New England
1. Howls, Snarls, and Musket Shots: Saying "This is Mine" in Colonial New England: I love the way this chapter opens with the way that the *sound* of wolf howls severely disconcerted and upset English settlers upon their arrival in New England. Coleman sets the tone for the book's focus on animal communication and animal-human misunderstanding. Communication is allied with concepts of territory - Coleman points out that Indians, settlers, and wolves were the top three groups of predators in the region, and each had different ideas of territoriality. When combined with miscommunication and mistrust, these overlapping territories led to strife and hate (see Lepore, as well as Virginia deJohn Anderson's Creatures of Empire). Wolves, who killed livestock, were seen as dire threats to European survival in the region: "The English colonists' concept of territory - the idea that land, animals, and even people were property - ambushed wolves" (36). Here there are also stories of the European use of mastiffs as instruments of control (33).

2. Beasts of Lore: How Stories Turned Fearsome Monsters into Skulking Criminals: This is the Folklore Chapter, which fills out the picture of what ideas the Europeans had brought to the New World about wolves. Here, Coleman addresses interpretive questions: why do certain stories survive, while others are lost? Why are some seen as more important than others? Important sources of English wolf lore included the Bible, in which wolves were seen as threats to the pastoral ideal. Coleman also tries to suss out some ideas of what Native Americans thought about the wolf. These come to us via English sources, so are necessarily somewhat commercial: their hides were ceremonial gifts or currency. Englishmen didn't probe far enough to figure out the Indian's cultural interest in the wolf, if any, though one of them recorded that the Indians thought wolves who allowed themselves to be killed did so because they were atoning for past misdeeds (another interesting tidbit about Indian hunting practices and their possible ecological or non-ecological effects; see Krech).

3. Wolf Bullets with Adders' Tongues: How to Kill a Wolf in Colonial New England: Here we get to the nitty-gritty of how Englishmen carried out their campaigns of extermination. Coleman writes that, although Englishmen tried a variety of individual and social measures to extirpate wolves from their territory and keep them from threatening livestock ("dug traps, offered bounties, erected fences..." [52]), "humans and wolves coexisted belligerently for more than a hundred years in a patchwork landscape of agricultural strongholds and feral woods" (53). It's the record of this coexistence that Coleman examines. Interesting Indian-English relationships ensued: although many Indians killed wolves, they found it unproductive to try to collect bounties, as they were seen as deviant and false and needed white proof of their kill in order to cash in (61). In the end, Coleman writes, white colonists eliminated both wolves and Native Americans, sometimes by "offering rewards to one rival to hunt the other" (65).

Part Two: The Northeastern Woodlands
4. Predator to Prey: Wolves' Journey Through the Northeastern Woodlands: This chapter takes a broader chronological view of human cruelty to wolves, making the point that although wolves were mostly extirpated from the northeast by the eighteenth century, Americans have continued to kill them viciously through the 1950s (and even now). Coleman describes some myths about how wolves kill their prey (they suck blood! they hamstring!) These myths have allowed the animals to be categorized as "savage" and thus worthy of wrath. Coleman then describes how scientists such as Adolph Murie and L David Mech studied wolves in the 1940s and 1950s, using airplanes and radio collars, and finally put many (though not all) of the myths to rest. Returning to the eighteenth century, Coleman tells the stories of big-time wolf bounty hunters in the Northeast - their social standing tended to be high - and establishes the strong agricultural context of these killings.

I really like this portrait of L. David Mech, pioneer of radio telemetry, by photographer Layne Kennedy.

5. Surrounded: Fear and Retribution in the Northeastern Forests: Here are stories about northern settlers and wolves, with Coleman's attempt to place them in a fuller social context, despite the sometimes overwhelming lack of available clues about where the stories came from and what they meant to those who created and heard them. In these stories, Coleman says, Europeans, the "top predators" of the ecological niche, "an aggressive group of animals intent upon expanding their territory, transplanting their culture, and growing their wealth expressed their frustration and protested their vulnerability" (106). Through communal wolf hunts, colonists restored their primacy while "reordering the biotic community" (114) and regenerating themselves through violence (see Slotkin).

6. Metaphors of Slaughter: Two Wolf Hunts: Two stories of hunts seek to answer the question of why Euro-American colonists "felt so vulnerable" (122) in the face of wolves. One hunt took place in northeastern Ohio (the Western Reserve) in 1818; another took place in Nauvoo, IL, in 1844, and took as its context the precarious position of Mormon settlers in both the natural and cultural worlds of the West (this was not an actual "wolf hunt", but rather a possible massacre of Mormons by non-Mormons, which Coleman uses as a metaphor to show the way that the hunt worked to restore social order).

Part Three: The American West
7. A Wealth of Canines: Mormon Americans in the Great Plains: Coleman continues to use the story of the Mormons and their relationship with the landscape and its fauna, this time to ask the question of whether this story could have ever ended a different way (could humans have adopted/domesticated wolves? etc). He talks a bit about the social structure of wolf packs, and goes into the biology behind their cooperation, seguing into the story of Lois Crisler and her fascination with wolf communication (and the sad end of that story - which I forgot - she ended up killing all of her wolves). Moving back to the nineteenth century, Coleman talks about the Mormon settlers and their wolf relationships, worsened by wolf predation on livestock as well as their habit of occasionally eating dead human bodies (an activity which made them look all the worse to the Mormons, who perceived themselves as a very threatened community whose ties to the past and future were tenuous).

8. Call It a Coyote: How to Exterminate Wolves in Colonial Utah: Coleman makes the point that Mormon settlers very much wanted to leave the wolf-phase behind and enter into a civilized era. For this reason, they situated their wolf-stories in the past (and even changed the name of one species, the prairie wolf, to "coyote" in order to create the illusion of wolf extirpation).

Part Four: The Federal Government
9. Annihilation and Enlightenment: The Cultural Extinction of North American Wolves: Here we have the meaty (sorry) modernity section. Aldo Leopold's "Thinking Like a Mountain" starts us off, as a handy link between wolf-killing and wolf-loving (he used to work as a professional wolf killer via the USFS). Coleman then describes the way the government, in the first half of the twentieth century, organized wolf hunts in such a way that the wolves were cleared from "every region in the temperate United States in which a human could grow a marketable plant or animal" (192). Most interestingly, during this time, "last wolves", which were often seen as the most strong or powerful or smart of their species, were made into heroes (but not so heroic that they didn't deserve to die). Here, wolves were made sympathetic for the first time, through such stories as those of Ernest Thompson Seton, and urbanizing and industrializing America began to feel sad about their disappearance. (But, see footnote about utilitarianism of animal control in the 1920s, and traveling exhibits of animal parts, p 221).

Ernest Thompson Seton.

Reintroduction: A conclusion, based on contemporary wolf stories and conflicts between ranchers and conservationists. Some hopeful stories about the success of introduction into national parks, and Coleman's final assessment: "Wolves embody an unbroken history of conquest, worth pondering and protecting" (235).

The wolf-loving site I got this from, www.heartofthewolf.org, had this pic animated so that the wolf's mouth was opening and closing and you could see steam coming out. Tragically, I couldn't figure out how to transfer the Quicktime.

Reviews: In the Journal of American History, Karen Jones wrote that the book effectively pointed out the need for an integration of animal stories into human history. She liked the beginning of the book better than the end - she wished that the contemporary story of the wolves' image rehab had been covered more extensively. I remember that I read a positive review of this book in the Atlantic - that's what made me get the book in first place, and, not incidentally, reading the book is what made me want to go to grad school. That review started off "This is a sick-making book." It's interesting to think that this project could be seen by some as so overtly political - I don't think of it as being an animals rights book, though it's very anti-colonial, but I guess if you wanted to deploy it for animal-rights purposes, you certainly could.

Books to follow up on: Secondary: Carl Degler, In Search of Human Nature: The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought (1991); Patrick Malone, The Skulking Way of War: Technology and Tactics Among the New England Indians (2000); Marion Schwartz, A History of Dogs in the Early Americas (1997).

The Circus Age

Title: The Circus Age: Culture and Society Under the American Big Top (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002)

Author: Our own Janet Davis!

Argument: "This book argues that the turn of the century railroad circus was a powerful cultural icon of a new, modern nation-state" (10) - that the circus took shape in the way it did, where it did, because of the particular society in which it flourished. The circus represented the diversity and pleasure of the spectacle of a multitudinous America, but often in a way which reiterated cultural norms.

Chapter-by-chapter:

Circus Day: Rich descriptions of the public spectacle that was a circus coming into town in "railroad circus" days, followed by a basic overview of the historical currents which fed into the phenomenon (immigration, "the search for order", racism, empire, expanding overseas markets, incorporation - see Alan Trachtenberg). Davis then describes the three largest railroad circuses upon which the book will focus (Barnum & Bailey, the Ringling Bros, and Adam Forepaugh & Sells Brothers), making a case for them as the three largest, most widely-traveled, and most influential of the circuses, and differentiating them from Wild West Shows (the circus was less historically minded, more eclectic in subject matter, and employed the definitive "big top" canvas covering).

This photo of Barnum & Bailey camels on a main street parade was found on a website called camelphotos.com. Cue the "I love the Internet" theme song.

The Circus as Historical and Cultural Process: This chapter dips back in time to the 1790s, describing the evolution of the circus during the 1800s as "a metonym for national expansion and infrastructural development" (12). (In other words, the railroad, Western expansion, and the circus were intimately linked.) This chapter also discusses, using cultural theory of Stuart Hall, Edward Said, and Judith Butler, how the different groups involved in the production of the circus came together to produce its "ideological content" (25). NB: On p 35, Davis discusses children's circus culture, including a circus toy set which modeled itself after TR's African safari of 1909.

These men were supposed to be "pearl divers from the Sandwich Islands" - an instance of American imperialism's absorption into circus-world.

Spectacular Labor: This chapter "illuminates the thick, physical framework in which the circus produced its ideological content" (39) - in other words, how did it all get done, and how does this "how" help us understand what workers, supervisors, and spectators expected? Spectators who watched the circus were not only intrigued with the parts of the show specifically designated as performance. They also congregated to watch the set-up and strike of the tent, and were fascinated/repelled by the lives of circus performers. Davis argues that these performers created a social world apart from "regular life", and also that the tightly wound methods and processes of the circus (they had to be tight, to fit onto the railroad schedule) brought the industrial order of organization to small towns far away from factories.

Respectable Female Nudity: Women were becoming more and more visible in the public sphere (see the "New Woman"), and the people who ran these circuses faced an interesting gender conundrum: what to do about their very visible female performers? In general, they tried to "reconfigure strong Euroamerican circus women into dainty, domestic ladies, and women of color into educational artifacts" (12). They did so with an eye to a subtle titillation of the viewer, playing with transgression, referring to sex obliquely, through "emphasis on female performers' lives, loves, and body-hugging tights" (85). Here is also a discussion of presentation of "untouched" tribes or "savages" in the circus context.

From the King of Beasts to Clowns in Drag: Masculinity in the circus and its contrasting meanings is the subject of this chapter, which holds that "performances...were sites of gender play that could provide audiences with liberating alternatives to disciplined lives of manly capital accumulation" (12). Although circus men were seen as exemplars of the athletic, "strenuous" ideal, they were also sometimes androgynous or dressed in drag - or, they were actually animals, dressed up as men. Here are examples of the animals' roles in particular tableaux, as well as the integration of evolutionary theory (chimpanzees used as examples of "Man, Previous to His Degeneration" [153]) and the emphasis placed on "ideal" or "alpha" specimens of megafauna (just like Carl Akeley and his Giant of Karisimbi). Men of color, even African-Americans, were often used as examples of apes or savages (182). Do hippos really have teeth that look like that?

Instruct the Minds of All Classes: Through the circus (and the Wild West show), American involvement in foreign countries was processed, naturalized, and contained. Episodes of foreign entanglement were re-broadcast in circus format, reenacted or dramatized. The overriding philosophy behind these representations was that circuses were "moral cheerleaders of expansionism" (194). Meanwhile, on a material level, animals and labor from overseas were used in performance, dramatizing the advantages of selective American extraction of talent and labor from foreign countries - however, Davis points out, the freakiness of these performers may have served to subtly uphold an anti-imperialist racial logic of exclusion (see Eric Love).

Looks like kind of a scary dream for a kid to have.

Legacies: From Las Vegas to the Bridges of Madison County: Contemporary analogues of circus culture, and some speculation as to what forms of culture may have taken its place.

Reviews: In the Journal of American History, Don Wilmeth lauded the book for being "clearly written, persuasively argued, exhaustively documented", and wrote that it did an admirable job of completing its project of connecting the circus to the cultural history of the time. The book was also well-reviewed in non-scholarly pubs, including the NYT and the Times Literary Supplement.

Books to follow up on: Primary: Peter Harkness, Andy the Acrobat; or, Out with the Greatest Show on Earth (1907); William Hornaday, The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals (1922); Harvey Root, Tommy with the Big Tents (1924).

Secondary: Harvey Green, Fit for America: Health, Fitness, Sport, and American Society (1986); Elizabeth Haiken, Venus Envy: A History of Cosmetic Surgery (1997); RJ Hoage and William A Deiss, New Worlds, New Animals: From Menagerie to Zoological Park in the Nineteenth Century (1996); Michael Kammen, American Culture, American Tastes: Social Change and the Twentieth Century (1999); Robert Kanigel, The One Best Way: Frederick Winslow Taylor and the Engima of Efficiency (1997); Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907 (1990); Patricia Vertinsky, The Eternally Wounded Woman: Women, Doctors, and Exercise in the Late Nineteenth Century (1990).

The Machine in the Garden

A 1983 photo by Richard Misrach of an abandoned swimming pool at the edge of the Salton Sea (itself a product of man's failed earth engineering, as I saw in the awesome documentary film "Plagues and Pleasures of the Salton Sea"). Neither the photograph nor the film nor the sea itself are discussed in this book, but they all could be.

Title: The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (London: Oxford UP, 1964)

Author: Leo Marx, professor emeritus at MIT in the program in Science, Society, and Technology. Marx has been the head of the ASA and the head of the American Lit section of the MLA. He simply lists his interests as "the relationship between technology and culture in the 19th and 20th centuries", and his other book is The Pilot and the Passenger: Essays on Literature, Technology, and Culture in America (1988). He has also produced two edited volumes, one with Merritt Roe Smith - Does Technology Drive History?: The Dilemma of Technological Determinism (1994) - and the other with Bruce Mazlish - Progress: Fact or Illusion? (1999). Here is a page with links to articles by him in the New York Review of Books.

Argument: America, more so than other places (here's that American Exceptionalist mode of thought), is afflicted with a "soft veil of nostalgia that hangs over our urbanized landscape", the result of the conflict between our ideals of pastoral perfection - "an undefiled, green republic, a quiet land of forests, villages, and farms dedicated to the pursuit of happiness" - and the actuality of our technologized, urbanized landscape (6). While these impulses toward agrarian regression, when translated into the popular, are "the starting point for infantile wish-fulfillment dreams", American canonical writers have managed to translate this peculiarly American mode of thought into "writing that is invaluable for its power to enrich and clarify our experience" (11).

Chapter-by-chapter:
I. Sleepy Hollow, 1844: Marx sets up his argument, then describes an incident in the life of Nathaniel Hawthorne by way of an object lesson. Sitting and recording his impressions in a supposedly "wild" spot (the "sleepy hollow" of the chapter's title), Hawthorne's reverie was interreputed by a train whistle. The use of this sound, or its thematic equivalent, Marx argues, is omnipresent in American literature, lending a dissonance that moves plots along and creates vital contrast. Referring to Virgil's Eclogues, Marx historicizes Hawthorne's mode, then describes what he will call the "pastoral design" - a complex mode which embraces "some token of a larger, more complicated order of experience" (25) - and which he distinguishes from earlier pastorals by the presence of a heightened technological power which will integrate country and city.

II. Shakespeare's American Fable: In order to understand Hawthorne's response to the whistle, Marx says, we must understand the pastoral mode "as it had been adapted, since the age of discovery, to New World circumstances" (33). To that end, this chapter looks at "The Tempest", written three or four years after Jamestown. Dealing, as it does, with "an unspoiled landscape suddenly invaded by advance parties of a dynamic, literate, and purposeful civilization" (35), Marx sees the play as a direct response to events of New World colonization. Marx sets up the two paradoxical, bifurcating ideas of American landscape ("the hideous wilderness at one end and the garden at the other" [42]), using travelers' accounts to do so. He then makes the point that "The Tempest" contains the same contrasts within it: the initial glorification of the untouched island's environmental beauties, set against Prospero's eventual triumph using the tools of Western intellectual thought and control. Shakespeare, he argues, resolved these contrasts by employing a pastoral ideal: creating a comedy which is "in praise neither of nature nor of civilization, but of a proper balance between them" (65), signified by Prospero's renunciation of his staff and book (signifiers, for Marx, of his inhuman technological prowess). Finally, he concludes, "'The Tempest' may be read as a prologue to American literature", containing elements of the heroic withdrawal from society and eventual construction of an ideal "landscape of reconciliation" (72).

An engraving of a 1776 production of "The Tempest", mounted in London at Covent Garden.

III. The Garden: Here Marx tells the story of how the pastoral ideal for America was articulated before the end of the eighteenth century, describing how the literary device was turned to "ideological" or "political" uses (73). He discusses Robert Beverley's History and Present State of Virginia (1705), describing the contradiction inherent in the text between Beverley's respect for the way of life of the Indians and the sadness or disgust he displays at seeing the land's effect on the English (dissipation, decadence, etc). Marx then jumps back over the pond to describe how the way in which Enlightenment ideals developed during the eighteenth century, between the publication of Beverley's book and that of Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), "helped create a climate conducive to Jeffersonian pastoral" through the emergence of "the general notion of 'the middle state' as the desirable, or at any rate the best attainable, human condition" (88). Here is a discussion of Crevecoeur's Letters, which Marx sees as an example of pre-industrial American pastoral. Then, Marx moves into analyzing Jefferson's book, which he sees as moving the pastoral ideal beyond the literary design and into "thinking about real life" (130) and embodying in the inherent push-and-pull in Jefferson's thought: he wanted agrarian life, but in his heart of hearts understood the need for industrial progress.

IV. The Machine: What of technological progress, then? Beginning again with Jefferson and his confusing attitude to industry (he wants the new machines to come to America, but doesn't seem to connect them with the industrial cities he deplores in England [147]), Marx then describes the dawning consciousness in America that technology could bring major change. Tench Coxe (sweet name), a manufacturer who assisted Alexander Hamilton at the Treasury Dept, is an example of one who advocated industrial development, arguing that the particular landscape of America and its natural amenities rendered it perfect for manufactures (a rhetorical strategy which Marx argues drew upon the American affection for landscape [158]). Marx then describes how English thinkers such as Locke moved toward "mechanistic" thinking (describing the mind, for example, as a machine), while others, such as Carlyle, opposed this turn in thought on the basis of its denigration of the spontaneous and imaginative aspects of human life (175). Returning to America, Marx describes how the debate over mechanism played out in elite intellectual circles, with the accepted point of view holding that technology could be "the instrument appointed to fulfill the egalitarian aims of the American people" (187). By 1844, Marx says, the machine had become a public symbol, embodying all of the meanings of progress in its physical body, symbolizing the special-ness of America. Analyzing a speech by Daniel Webster (he whose virtue came from his Granite provenance), Marx shows how Webster used a rhetorical device of acknowledging his own uncertainty about technology (in this case, a railroad) in order to "reduce the psychic dissonance generated by industrialization" (213), associating such uncertainty with unseriousness and irrationality. Marx compares this speech to an article written by a pseudonymous author who was probably actually John Orvis, a "socialist lecturer" (215) and one of the only anti-technological voices apparent around this time.

George Inness, Lackawanna Valley, 1855 - a painting which Marx uses as an example of American reconciliation of the pastoral and the technological.

V. Two Kingdoms of Force: Marx explores the "Sleepy Hollow motif" in three separate works of literature, which he says embody the "transcendental, tragic, and vernacular" versions of the mode (229). First up: Emerson, who, he says, believes that geography ("the incalcuable effect of place upon the native consciousness" [236]) will mitigate technology's possible bad influence. Moreover, Marx points out that Emerson's philosophy of the alliance of man and nature holds that man, as a product of nature, cannot have produced something else natural (technology) which will represent an "unresolvable conflict" (242). Next: Thoreau, who believes, as shown in Walden, that the pastoral way of life is doomed - "he removes it from history, where it is manifestly unrealizable, and relocates it in literature, which is to say, in his own consciousness, in his craft" (265). Finally: Hawthorne and Melville, in whose work the pastoral design "conveys a sense of the widening gap between the facts and ideals of American life...the implications are more ominous" (265). Marx uses Hawthorne's "Ethan Brand" (1850) and Moby-Dick as illustrations. In the latter, for example, Ishmael feels a sense of transcendence in "The Mast-Head", only to be brought back to earth with the butchering of the whale, which, as Marx says, Melville "uses machine imagery to relate the undisguised killing and butchery of whaling to the concealed violence of 'civilized' Western society" (296). Finally/finally (he said three, but used more!) is The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), which Marx sees as the first time the pastoral mode is "wholly assimiliated to a native idiom" (319), and The Education of Henry Adams (1907).

VI. Epilogue: The Garden of Ashes: Using The Great Gatsby's ending as case in point, Marx holds that "American writers have seldom, if ever, designed satisfactory resolutions for their pastoral fables," and that the reason we love these stories so much has to do with the intensity of our confusion about how to feel about the machine. These writers have not been able to create a "surrogate for the ideal of the middle landscape", but they have been able to "clarify our situation" and thus have "served us well" (365).

Charles Sheeler, American Landscape (1930)

Reviews: This is one of those AMS books that seems like it was part of the original firmament, and not just because its name provides the moniker for our departmental softball team. So many books cite it (for example, almost every environmental studies book I've read so far) that it's hard to imagine a time when it was new. I think a more important question for this one (rather than "What did people think of it when it came out?") would be "What have people done with its thesis since its publication?" I have one example so far, Annette Kolodny's The Lay of the Land, of a book which questions or revises part of Machine's thesis (Kolodny thought Marx didn't do enough with connections between the pastoral mode and actual actions of the settlers or other Americans). I will continue to add criticism in this space as I go along.

Empire of the Eye

Thomas Cole, View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts (The Oxbow), 1836.

Title: The Empire of the Eye: Landscape Representation and American Cultural Politics, 1825-1875 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1993)

Author: Angela Miller, professor of American Studies at Washington University. Lists research interests as "19th/20th century visual culture (histories of panoramas, animation, cartoons, photography and graphic design); gender and sexuality in the Gilded Age and fin-de-siècle; visual constructions of nationhood; the Atlantic world during the period of first European encounters; early American modernism, and the cultural histories of arts between the two world wars." So it looks like she's ranged a bit, chronologically, from this book's subject matter. Empire of the Eye won the John Hope Franklin Prize from the ASA when it came out.

Argument: Because America, during this time period, did not have much of a shared history to draw upon in creating a feeling of "imagined community", and because the land was so far-flung, visual media - in this case, painting - came to perform the function of nation-building, particularly through the invocation of the power of the Environment or Nature. Of landscape art, Miller writes "Its political intent was to root nationalism in the physical body of the republic" (7). Meanwhile, the contemplation of nature supposedly eliminated the possible moral corruption of "both the governed and the governors" (13), so these paintings came to perform a moral/pedagogical function while consolidating the body politic through a shared visual experience. Miller argues that within the grand project of landscape painting during this time period, various artists responded various-ly to questions of empire and to sectional tensions (esp. during the 1850s).

Chapter-by-chapter:

1. Thomas Cole: Self, Nature, and Nation: Cole, as the forebear of many of the other landscape painters Miller will examine, might serve as a prototype for the concerns of his later artistic heirs; however, Miller sees Cole as a throwback to eighteenth-century republican ideals, "continuing to believe in the existence of universal truths and historical laws" at a time when American exceptionalism was the go-to explanation for the way things were unrolling in the new republic (21). A Whig, Cole was upset with the election of Andrew Jackson and deeply troubled by America's imperial actions. His cycle The Course of Empire (which I'm inserting below, because I really love it) explicitly warned Americans of what would come of these expansionist tendencies, but the reception of the painting showed that others did not read it in the way he intended. Miller also believes that Cole was ambivalent about the effects of American expansion on the landscape, as illustrated in his famous The Oxbow - a difference between him and his contemporaries, who believed that nature would be the source of America's strength.

Thomas Cole, The Course of Empire: The Savage State, 1833-1836.

Thomas Cole, The Course of Empire: The Arcadian or Pastoral State, 1833-1836.

Thomas Cole, The Course of Empire: The Consummation of Empire, 1833-1836.

Thomas Cole, The Course of Empire: Destruction, 1833-1836.

Thomas Cole, The Course of Empire: Desolation, 1833-1836.

2. The National Landscape and the First New York School: Cole's legacy was not reflective of his ambivalence toward the direction of the nation. This chapter looks at his influence on the "New York School", pointing out that the style "fused topographical, German and English romantic, and seventeenth-century French and Italo-Dutch influences into an American idiom characterized by its linkage of naturalism, nationalism, and Protestant piety toward nature as the revelation of deity" (66). Here Miller discusses how the "center" of American painting, which claimed to speak for "the country", ended up cohering in New York, and centering around the National Academy of Design and painter Asher B. Durand. This school's paintings served different ideological purposes than Cole's, attempting to galvanize nationalistic feeling around some specific sites, especially New Hampshire's White Mountains (my home on the range!)

3. Millennium/Apocalypse: The Ambiguous Mode: Here Miller looks at paintings made between the Mexican-American War and the end of the Civil War, all of which "embody in compositional or narrative terms the uncertainty at the heart of America's 'enterprise sublime.'" These paintings explored "moments of national reckoning" and usually hoped to incorporate Biblical history into American contexts, to re-prove that Americans were "the chosen people" (109). Some painters examined include Asher B. Durand, Frederic Church, Jasper Francis Cropsey, and Thomas Cole.

4. The Imperial Republic: Rewriting The Course of Empire: Post-Cole painters had different - more positive - visions of how the American empire would unfold - visions which were in tune with the business interests of the developing nation. Asher B. Durand's 1853 Progress (The Advance of Civilization) "telescoped the discrete stages of America's movement from wildness to civilization into one image" (154), using the development of technologies as indicators of said progress. Miller also points out that railroad companies would pay artists to go on trains, seeking to mitigate possible negative reactions to railroad expansion by positive publicity showcasing the railroad's ability to bring people in touch with nature (159).

5. Nationalism as Place and Process: Frederic Church's New England Scenery: Miller writes that the educated classes in America, in the antebellum era, were schooled in Scottish "common sense" thinking, which held that a part could stand in for a whole - and thus, a single landscape could stand in for a nation.Church's 1851 painting, here, stands for Miller as an example of the efforts of New Englanders to get their region established as the foremost "cultural heart" of the country, during a time when sectional conflicts meant that the stakes were high. Unfortunately, at the same time there was a depression in New England farming, meaning that this supposedly great place was getting stripped of its people (Miller sees the Conestoga wagon in this painting as a possible nod to this phenomenon). Church also faced the problem that, due to his new interest in Humboldtian science, he had started wanting to be more particular about natural details in his painting - how was he to do this, while maintaining a sense of universal appeal?

Frederic Edwin Church, New England Scenery, 1851.

6. The Sectional Conflict in the 1850s: Fissures in the National Landscape: During this very fraught decade, painters faced the problem of a newly politicized vision of "nature": what had previously seemed to unite the nation, now could be a source of divisiveness. Some of them, like Church, responded by painting places, like South America, which meant roughly the same to both North and South (there was, of course, however, that thing about how the South wanted to colonize the rainforest with slave plantations...) There's a lot of interesting stuff in this chapter about how Northerners viewed Southern landscapes...Miller also points out that because of poor transportation and other infrastructure, painters were not likely to go down South to paint.

7. Domesticating the Sublime: The Feminized Landscape of Light, Space, and Air: Shifting gears a bit, Miller examines how painters in the 1850s shifted their presentations, compositionally and technically, to echo/adjust to sentimental culture (the association between the two is not very carefully drawn). What Miller terms "atmospheric luminist landscapes", which made use of fuzzy-looking paint to create mists and depth, "did not rely on associational psychology, with its dependence on historical and literary references...their power over the viewer could not be translated into any nonvisual, programmatic form" (247). I have to agree with Goetzmann (see below): I think this argument seems to reaffirm the very divisions between male and female that she seeks to criticize. I am interested, however, in the section of this chapter which talks about how new changes in science, emphasizing "uniform operations of natural forces", might have changed painting's style (255).

Sanford Robinson Gifford, Kauterskill Clove, 1862.

Reviews: William Goetzmann wrote in Reviews in American History that this work, which he called a "masterful analysis", contributed to a new historiography of the antebellum era which focused on the instability of the body politic. Despite liking the book very much, he wished that Miller had gone into Cole's romanticism more, discussing the difference between Scottish Realism and Romanticism. "On a philosophic level, Miller is out of her depth," he charged, and he also really didn't like it when Miller characterized science as masculine; he then doubled back to praise the book for "interestingly relating...art to a political context without reaching for the absurd in interpretation." In the Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Andrew Isenberg pointed out, quite rightly, that although Miller wanted to look at these paintings as examples of national culture (rather than simply high culture), the sources she used did not generally stray away from the rarified circle of elite critics who set the bar for painting during this era. He also didn't feel as though her historical chops were as strong in the section on the 1850s...he thought her analysis made it seem as though the "Civil War was inevitable." This reminds me that I need to know more about the 1850s, politically.

John Frederick Kensett, The White Mountains—Mount Washington, 1851.

Odds and ends: People thought Daniel Webster turned out well because of being from New Hampshire. A man named EL Magoon wrote "the master statesman and orator of his age [that's DW]...was cradled in the rugged bosom of Alpine New Hampshire, where all is cool, colossal, sublime." Whatever - so was Bode Miller. I am the number one Granite State booster, but this reminds me of those progressive-era racists who thought Alaska would save the white race...I'm looking at your patrician nose, Madison Grant...(230) Emerson wrote that women were "poets who believe in their own poetry. They emit from their pores a colored atmosphere...wave upon wave of rosy light, in which they walk evermore, and see all objects through this warm-tinted mist that envelops them." (See the relationship to the painting described in the final chapter?) This is kind of hilarious, because if there was ever a "poet who believes in his own poetry", wasn't it Ralph Waldo? (264)

Vocab words: "proleptic" ("of a date, calendar, etc.: calculated retrospectively using a dating system not in use at the specified point in time; projected backwards in time"); "soteriological" (-ology: "the doctrine of salvation"); "psychomachy" ("conflict of the soul"); "mephitic" ("esp. of a gas or vapour: offensive to the smell, foul-smelling; noxious, poisonous, pestilential" - used by a Northerner to describe the air of the South); "hegira" ("the flight of Muhammad from Mecca to Medina in 622 A.D., from which the Muslim chronological era is reckoned; hence, this era" - transferably, any flight or exodus - used by some writer to refer to the seasonal mass exodus of painters out of NYC and Boston to paint far-flung expeditionary locations).

Books to follow up on: Secondary: Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of Racial Anglo-Saxonism (1981); David Miller, Dark Eden: The Swamp in 19th C American Culture (1989) (this one has come up in a couple of books...wish I had known about it before making my enviro list...I had such a hard time finding 19th-c stuff); James Moorhead, American Apocalypse: Yankee Protestants and the Civil War, 1860-9 (1978).