Gilbert Imlay's Topographical Description and The Emigrants continued to reverberate through Britain's print culture for a decade or more after they first appeared. In the print war that erupted in the course of the 1790s between the reformist and conservative factions in British society, Imlay's writings featured as seminal texts on both sides of the ideological divide. While the treatises of Carver, Crèvecoeur, Brissot, Cooper and others were certainly prominent catalysts in the Revolutionary Debate, Imlay's American Arcadia became an absolute cornucopia, mined indiscriminately by Jacobins and anti-Jacobins alike in an increasingly contentious wrangle over Britain's socio-political future. Nor was Imlay's reputation restricted to Britain. In Germany, where the Revolutionary War had awakened a keen and sustained interest in America, Eberhard August Wilhelm Zimmermann's translation of Imlay's Topographical Description appeared only a year after the first British publication.1 Many other German Americanists were familiar with the original English edition of Imlay's Topographical Description, among them Joel Barlow's friend Christoph Daniel Ebeling, a keen collector of Americana and author of the expansive Geography and History of America (1793–1816). In the United States itself Imlay quickly became established as an authority on the western territory following Samuel Campbell's publication in 1793 of the first American edition of the Topographical Description – an adaptation of Debrett's second, expanded English edition of the same year. In November 1796 George Washington bought a copy of Imlay's ‘History of Kentucky’ as a present for his wife – thereby tacitly lending presidential recognition to the canonical status of A Topographical Description in America.