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Nativism and Western Myth: The Influence of Nativist Ideas on the American Self-Image

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

Bronwen J. Cohen
Affiliation:
University of Manchester

Extract

In his seminal work Virgin Land (1950), Henry Nash Smith depicted the bymbolic meaning that Americans attached to their Western empire during the nineteenth century. The West appealed to the American imagination variously as a possible passage to India, a land to be filled, farmed and civilized and a land to lend territorial grandeur to the existing American nation. But a certain squeamishness pervaded the attitudes of many upper-class Easterners to Western society itself, and only towards die end of the nineteenth century did they begin to show a marked enthusiasm for life in the West, and for their own pioneering origins.

Information

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1974

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