Please note: In order to keep Hive up to date and provide users with the best features, we are no longer able to fully support Internet Explorer. The site is still available to you, however some sections of the site may appear broken. We would encourage you to move to a more modern browser like Firefox, Edge or Chrome in order to experience the site fully.

Supporting your high street Find out how »
In This Remote Country : French Colonial Culture in the Anglo-American Imagination, 1780-1860, Paperback / softback Book

In This Remote Country : French Colonial Culture in the Anglo-American Imagination, 1780-1860 Paperback / softback

Paperback / softback

Item not Available

Description

When Anglo-Americans looked west after the Revolution, they hoped to see a blank slate upon which to build their continental republic.

However, French settlers had inhabited the territory stretching from Ohio to Oregon for over a century, blending into Native American networks, economies, and communities.

Images of these French settlers saturated nearly every American text concerned with the West.

Edward Watts argues that these representations of French colonial culture played a significant role in developing the identity of the new nation.

In regard to land, labor, gender, family, race, and religion, American interpretations of the French frontier became a means of sorting the empire builders from those with a more moderate and contained nation in mind, says Watts.

Romantic nationalists such as George Bancroft, Francis Parkman, and Lyman Beecher used the French model to justify the construction of a nascent empire.

Alternatively, writers such as Margaret Fuller, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and James Hall presented a less aggressive vision of the nation based on the colonial French themselves.

By examining how representations of the French shaped these conversations, Watts offers an alternative view of antebellum culture wars.

Information

£26.95

Item not Available
Item not Available
Sign in to add to wishlist
 
Free Home Delivery

on all orders

 
Pick up orders

from local bookshops

Information