Book Review: Imaginative Constructions of the Nation

July/August 2008 Historically Speaking free public schools; plentiful, densely populated areas; churches; factories; a diversified labor force—and the ideals of freedom and equality. The reluctance of Virginians in the early 19th century to dismande slavery and launch practical plans to improve their state and enrich the lives of ordinary citizens condemned the Old Dominion to irrelevance and poverty. But loath to give up memories of slow-moving, honey-colored days and the long shadows of soft Tidewater evenings, the members of the Old Dominion's small ruling class believed that they were right to take a principled , courageous, and rational stand in defense of a way of life—and a human civilization—that they cherished. And might they have been right in their skepticism about laissez-faire capitalism, materialism, urbanization, commercialization, and even about the inflated promise of progress itself? That skepticism would linger for a century. "It all comes down to the most practical of all points— what is the end of living?" wrote a Southerner, Stark Young, in 1930. It may be that success, competition, speed and progress are the goals of life, he remarked. And yet his southern instincts told him that the true meaning of life could be found in "more fleeting and eternal things . . . more grace, sweetness and time." Were the early 19th-century Virginians who desired those "fleeting and eternal things" hardy optimists who believed it possible to retrieve an idyllic past? Or were they moody dreamers determined to wage an impossible batde—a battle against time itself? "I linger still in the haunted domain of my memory," wrote Virginia novelist John Esten Cooke before the Civil War, "a company of ghosts which I gaze at, fading away into mist. A glimmer—a murmur—they are gone!" Susan Dunn is the Preston S. Parish '41 Third Century Professor of Arts and Humanities at Williams College. This essay is drawnfrom her book, Dominion of Memories: Jefferson, Madison, and the Decline of Virginia (Basic Books, 2007). Book Review: Imaginative Constructions of the Nation Michael Kämmen This learned and wide-ranging study by a post-Marxian admirer of Gramsci and Althusser is a revisionist project filled with illuminating and timely surprises. It rather unfashionably reaffirms the importance of nationhood (in reality and as units for inquiry ), for example, because the author believes that nation-states are here to stay and that certain topics lend themselves less well than others to internationalization and comparative inquiry. Allen's essential argument acknowledges that many Americans "celebrated the expansion of the nation across space" (Manifest Destiny and all that), but his purpose is to "shift the focus of our understanding of nationhood away from a preoccupation with this process of spatial expansion and toward a recognition of the equally important role of temporality in imaginative constructions of the nation." His revisionism is therefore directed (respectfully) against works like MyraJehlen's American Incarnation (1986) and David Noble's Death of a Nation (2002). Although historians traditionally think of expansionists like President Polk and editorJohn O'Sullivan as intensely present-minded, Allen calls attention to their emphasis on the future, exploring in depth O'Sullivan's comparatively neglected essay, "The Great Nation of Futurity" (1839), and arguing that that piece plus numerous references in letters "brings the temporal dimension of this vision of egalitarian empire to the fore. An empire of liberty would descend through time by changing and even fragmenting, taking on forms that could not be anticipated in the present." Once Allen gets past chapter one, where he may strive too hard to dissuade us from the customary perceptions of westward expansion in the 19th century , he has much to say that is fresh and revealing. He devotes a chapter to the changing role of clocks and American clockmakers in the antebellum period, with notable attention to the little known Chauncey Jerome and the more famous Simon Willard. A discussion ofJerome illuminates the actual clock-making process for us, and Willard takes us into the realm of clocks as bourgeois artifacts, just as important in ornamental terms as practical ones. Allen devotes excellent space to Catharine Beecher, which takes him into the realm of didactic fiction on household...