United States

Brief History

The United States was born on the eastern seaboard, where the white settlers-turned-citizens harbored mixed emotions of dread and delight. When the nation was new, too much wilderness was problematic—a material obstacle and physical threat to be subdued and reconstructed with the pride of a frontiersman. Of course, there were currents of American romantic imagination with an enthusiasm for the primitive, solitary, mysterious, and picturesque. The historian Francis Parkman, having made his arduous journey by horseback across the Oregon Trail in the summer of 1846, gave the primitive landscape the sort of romantic interpretation in history that writers like Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper had given it in fiction, and that Thomas Cole and his Hudson River school had given it in art. Even as the new nation's landscape was changing, Cole still found it so exhilarating in 1836 that he called on his countrymen to remember “we are still in Eden.”

But American romanticism never seriously challenged American pioneer pride. Probably no one amid this vast landscape, with the exception of the American Indian, was free from construing the wild forest and hostile environment as much to godliness as it was to a barrier to westward expansion, material progress, and prosperity. As it happened, physical barriers of the American Acadia were progressively annihilated, as an enormous western landscape was purchased and seized: first, in 1803, when the Jefferson administration (under pressure from yeoman farmers seeking profitable opportunities) purchased from France 828,000 square miles of Louisiana territory; and, later in the 1840s, when the Polk administration, in a spirit of Manifest Destiny, marched westward in order to seize Texas and what are presently New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, California, and part of Colorado. With western expansion came forceful and often violent expulsion of large native populations of Indians. By 1869, the U.S. landscape was undergoing prodigious socioecological transformation through capital investments in physical and social infrastructures—networks of communication and transportation like canals, steamboats, railroads, telegraphy—that required reproduction of a particular sort of material and social relations that could sustain them. A quickened pace of production, exchange, and consumption was, historian John Kasson writes, enough to nudge Ralph Waldo Emerson in circa 1850 to note that, “as distance is annihilated by locomotive and steamboat,” the nation's trajectory might be hell-bent: “Everything is sacrificed for speed … They would sail in a steamer built of Lucifer matches if it would go faster.”

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