The Genius of Place

William Gilpin (1813–1894), the first governor of the Colorado Territory, believed that the physical geography of North America, bounded by mountain chains and bisected by the river system of the Mississippi Valley, had been deliberately shaped like a concave bowl to encourage Americans to “subdue the continent.” It would, he concluded, “teach old nations a new civilization” (Mission of the North American People, 1873, p. 124). This is not a new lesson. The depiction of physical geography had always been subjective, demonstrated by the placing of Jerusalem at the center of the Hereford Mappa Mundi (ca. fourteenth century). Christopher C. Apap applies this insight to twenty years in American history, from 1816 to 1836. This period reveals “a deep and fundamental shift in perspective away from the global scales that obtained in the late eighteenth century and toward a localized imagination” (p. 24, emphasis in original). Apap believes that the “broader interpretive contexts” of scholars such as Paul Giles are “insufficient to account for the literature of the period that has been called the Age of Jackson” (pp. 7, 8). Instead, he follows the trajectory of the second volume of Donald Meinig's The Shaping of America (1993), which sees the United States transformed from an Atlantic nation, creating instead “a genuine continental destiny for the young republic” (The Shaping of America, Vol. 2, Continental America, 1800–1867, p. 12). But rather than beginning, like Meinig, with the Louisiana Purchase, Apap starts with the aftermath of the War of 1812, and the war hawk John C. Calhoun calling in 1817 for a system of roads and canals to “bind the Republic together” (p. 2). Apap's intention is to “establish the period of study as a complex crucible out of which the typical narrative of American literary nationalism of [Ralph Waldo] Emerson and his contemporaries arose” (p. 24

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• You feel embodied with the cataract

  Sharon Halevi•Studies in Travel Writing•2020

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