American Expansionism and Universal Allegory

ACHILLE LORIA's words of 18891 speak not only to the promise but also to the central paradox of the nineteenth-century myth that the United States was both the child and the parent of history: the redeemer nation could fulfill its historical mission only by transcending the very agencies that had given rise to it. Marking the beginning of a new dispensation, history's most recent republic, although conceived without sin, still bore the burden of the European past. The Nativity of Truth, or The Spirit of the Age (fig. 1; terminus ante quem 1853), a hitherto unpublished painting

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