"When Nathaniel Currier started his publishing business in 1834, the mass production of visual images was almost unknown. Currier and his partner, James Ives, literally changed the American landscape by mass-producing inexpensive lithographs and selling millions of copies that adorned countless homes, businesses, and even barns. The Currier and Ives catalog included some 7,000 works by dozens of artists, accounting for 95 percent of all lithographs purchased nationwide. Bryan F. Le Beau provides the first in-depth study of the sweeping range of Currier and Ives images produced until the end of the century, placing them in historical context as meaningful representations and reflections of American values, beliefs, hopes, and dreams."--Jacket.

In 1763 British America stretched from Hudson Bay to the Keys, from the Atlantic to the Mississippi. Using maps that Britain created to control its new lands, Max Edelson pictures the contested geography of the British Atlantic world and offers new explanations of the causes and consequences of Britain’s imperial ambitions before the Revolution.

Why has "America" - that is, the United States of America - become so much more than simply a place in the imagination of so many people around the world? In both Europe and Latin America, the United States has often been a site of multiple possible futures, a screen onto which could be projected utopian dreams and dystopian nightmares. Whether castigated as a threat to civilized order or championed as a promise of earthly paradise, America has invariably been treated as a cipher for modernity. It has functioned as an inescapable reference point for both European and Latin American societies, not only as a model of social and political organization - one to reject as much one to emulate - but also as the prime example of a society emerging from a dramatic diversity of cultural and social backgrounds.

America’s Imagined Revolution explores the Reconstruction period after the Civil War to ask narratological, historiographical, and theoretical questions about how slave emancipation has (and has not) been theorized as revolution. Reading historical fiction by authors such as George Washington Cable, Albion Tourgée, Charles Chesnutt, Frances Harper, and W. E. B. Du Bois in dialogue with nineteenth-century historical writing—and the era’s legal, political, and print culture—Tomos Wallbank-Hughes excavates an evanescent form of historicist writing sensitive to the revolutionary changes that shaped life in the emancipation-era South. As an aesthetic form, the historical novel of Reconstruction poses questions about revolutionary experience in plantation societies, and in the process challenges critical assumptions about historical time in the nineteenth century: How do authors narrate epochal change that also feels like retrenchment? In what direction does history travel if it does not progress? What narratives of race, class, and region encompass both continued domination and ruptured power? By plumbing the situations that give it form, the historical novel of Reconstruction provides a window into the literary culture of the South’s long nineteenth century in which, rather than a storehouse of tradition, the region became a terrain for interpreting social revolution and uncovering slavery’s revolutionary afterlives. America’s Imagined Revolution offers a new interpretation of the literary and historiographical significance of the Reconstruction period and its relationship to American literary history.

How did the nationalisms of Latin America's many countries - elaborated in everything from history and fiction to cookery - arise from their common backgrounds in the Spanish and Portuguese empires and their similar populations of mixed European, native and African origins? This book discards one answer and provides a rich collection of others. highly influential book Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Anderson traces Latin American nationalisms to local circulation of colonial newspapers and tours of duty of colonial administrators, but this book shows the limited validity of these arguments. influences shaped Latin American nationalisms. Four historians examine social situations: Francois-Xavier Guerra studies various forms of political communication; Tulio Halperin Doghi, political parties; Sarah C. Chambers, the feminine world of salons; and Andrew Kirkendall, the institutions of higher education that trained the new administrators. Next, four critics examine production of cultural objects: Fernando Unzueta investigates novels; Sara Castro Klaren, archeology and folklore; Gustavo Verdesio, suppression of unwanted archeological evidence; and Beatriz Gonzalez Stephan, national literary histories and international expositions.

Following the American Revolution, French observers often viewed the United States as a laboratory for the forging of new practices of liberté and égalité, in affinity with and divergence from France's own Revolutionary ideals and experiences. The volume examines French views through musical/theatrical portrayals of the American Revolution and Republic, soundscapes of the Statue of Liberty, and homages to the glorified figures of Washington, Franklin and Lafayette. Essays investigate paradoxical depictions of slavery in the United States and French Caribbean colonies of 'Amérique'. French critiques of American music and musicians, including the reception of Americanized or Creolized adaptations of European art traditions as well as American popular music and dance, are also presented. The subject of race features prominently in French interpretations of American music and identity. These interpretations see French constructions of the Indigenous American and African American "exotic" that intersect with tropes of noble, pastoral savagery, menacing barbarism, and the "civilizing" potency of French culture. The French reinterpretation of African American music and dance reveals both a revulsion of Black alterity and an attraction to the expressive freedom, and even subversiveness, of these "foreign" forms of music and dance. Contributions include essays by music, dance, theatre and opera scholars, and the volume will be essential reading for students and scholars of these disciplines.

For more than two hundred years, Americans have imagined and described Cuba and its relationship to the United States by conjuring up a variety of striking images--Cuba as a woman, a neighbor, a ripe fruit, a child learning to ride a bicycle. Louis A. Perez Jr. offers a revealing history of these metaphorical and depictive motifs and discovers the powerful motives behind such characterizations of the island as they have persisted and changed since the early nineteenth century. Drawing on texts and visual images produced by Americans ranging from government officials, policy makers, and journalists to travelers, tourists, poets, and lyricists, Perez argues that these charged and coded images of persuasion and mediation were in service to America's imperial impulses over Cuba.