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2 Imagining America: The Promise and Peril of Boundlessness D A V I D M . K E N N E D Y 39 The European imagination was already groping toward a meaning for America bien avant la lettre. Hope and anxiety alike attended the enterprise from the outset. When Dante’s Ulysses dared “to venture the uncharted distances” oceanward of the Pillars of Hercules, in search of “the uninhabited world behind the sun,” was it heroism or hubris, a valorous quest to broaden the sphere of human endeavor or an insolent rebellion against the will of the gods? In Dante’s account, Ulysses, after persuading his balky crew to slip the confines of the Mediterranean by sailing west of Gibraltar , roams the open ocean for five months before whirlwind-driven seas engulf his vessel. He is ever after encased in a tongue of flame deep within the eighth circle of Hell, the place of punishment for counselors of fraud.1 Dante’s haunting allegory suggests that for medieval Europeans, the quest for lands beyond the known was sinfully treacherous. To cross the physical and imaginative boundaries of the world as then understood was to commit a transgression so grievous as to court divine ire and merciless retribution—even for a personage of such epic attributes as Ulysses. That sentiment did not wholly disappear even after the Middle Ages came to a close. In significant ways, it has colored attitudes toward America right down to the present day. Some two centuries after the publication of Dante’s tale, the liberating energies of the Renaissance began to usher Europe into the modern era. In , at the Renaissance’s zenith, in the decade when jubilant Roman workers excavated the classical Greek sculpture of the Apollo Belvedere, in the very year that a newly united Spanish monarchy consolidated Christendom’s domains by expelling the last Jews and Muslims from the southern Iberian province of al-Andalus, a real-life mariner, . Dante , Hell, –. Christopher Columbus, carved a course toward the setting sun from Palos, Spain, scarcely a hundred kilometers beyond the Mediterranean’s western exit through which Dante’s mythical Ulysses had fatefully voyaged. Unlike Ulysses, Columbus returned in triumph, bearing electrifying news of “innumerable people and very many islands” to the far westward in the ocean sea.2 Columbus’s contemporary Francisco López de Gómara soon hailed his achievement as “the greatest event since the creation of the world.”3 Some three centuries later the Abbé Raynal declared that “no event has been so interesting to mankind in general, and to the inhabitants of Europe in particular, as the discovery of the new world”—though he also pointedly asked, “Has the discovery of America been useful or harmful to mankind?”4 Adam Smith later called the discovery of America one of “the two greatest and most important events recorded in the history of mankind.”5 Columbus’s discovery was unarguably momentous. No less so was the still unfinished task of making sense of it. The staggering impact of Columbus’s report on the fifteenth-century European imagination can scarcely be exaggerated. As he declared to his royal Spanish sponsors : “Your Highnesses have an other world here”—not merely undiscovered islands or unexplored territory or unheralded peoples, but an entire world, a whole sphere of existence, all of it, Columbus noted, hitherto “unknown, nor did anyone speak of it except in fables.”6 In modern parlance one might say that Columbus had uncovered something like a parallel universe, with all the challenges that such a revelation would pose to received ways of knowing and understanding. Physically hemmed in by the Ottomans to the east, Europe now poured its energies westward, seeking to make use of America. In the first of several geopolitical tectonic shifts that the New World would occasion, the Atlantic replaced the Mediterranean as the Western world’s most important sea. Andalusia, recently cleansed of both Muslims and Jews, once on Europe’s far periphery, was about to become its center, at least for a season. First Spain and Portugal, then France and Britain, would seek domination in Europe on the basis of their New World possessions , until at long last an independent New World nation, the United States of America, would come to dominate the planet on a scale that earlier powers could not have envisioned. Mentally hemmed in by the intellectual legacies of classical antiquity and Christian doctrine, Renaissance Europe sought a meaning for America as...

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