Marcy J. Dinius’s new book, The Camera and the Press: American Visual and Print Culture in the Age of the Daguerreotype, is the latest contribution to a growing body of scholarship committed to addressing the intermediality of nineteenth-century American culture. More than anything else,The Camera and the Press wants us to recognize how “language’s role in structuring the practice of photography makes the two cultures—print and visual—visible as one” (3). To this end, its six chapters document the ubiquity of the daguerreotype in antebellum American culture—both as a material object and as an idea—and they explore how “written descriptions of the daguerreotype as unmediated, mechanically objective, natural, and permanent” shaped people’s experience and understanding of “subjectivity, temporality, democracy, and art when each category was under significant cultural pressure” (33).

The book opens by establishing how photography first came into view verbally, not visually. Before anyone saw daguerreotypes in America, they first read about their “natural” and “mechanical” aspects in the press. That daguerreotypes were taken to be unmediated, objective, and scientific, Dinius argues, has more to do with their textual mediation than their materiality. These initial written descriptions of the new medium—developed in France in the late 1830s—used “the scientific ideal of mechanical objectivity” to distinguish the daguerreotype from prior forms of image making (such as painting, drawing, and engraving), and they “effectively reversed the aesthetic ideal of an artist’s subjective influence” (49).

The remainder of The Camera and the Press traces the effects of this textual mediation of daguerreotypy on mid-nineteenth-century American literature and daguerreotypy. Chapters two and three explore how print descriptions of daguerreotypy’s material characteristics—particularly how they served as a point of contact in discussions of the role of mechanical objectivity and artistic subjectivity in image making—would shape the encounter with the new medium in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables and Herman Melville’s Pierre. The intermedial references to daguerreotypy in these two novels as well as the actual daguerreotype practice of Gabriel Harrison and the firm of Southworth & Hawes are shown not only to “defend the aesthetic value of subjectivity in art,” but also to “define art—from image making to novel-writing—as essentially subjective and thus, opposed to science and the growing influence of mechanical objectivity” (50). Dinius’s close reading of Hawthorne’s “Governor Pyncheon” chapter as a kind of narrative daguerreotype within The House of the Seven Gables reveals how his novel refutes “the argument that all forms of representation be mechanically faithful to an objective idea of reality” (60), and it powerfully discloses the extent to which the novel’s intermediality extends beyond mere reference to literary practice itself.

The fourth chapter of The Camera and the Press—on Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin—connects the interests of the first half of the book (on how daguerreotypy mediated debates about artistic subjectivity and mechanical objectivity) to those of the second (on how those same debates inflected discussions of race and slavery in antebellum America). Where chapters two and three attend to how Hawthorne and Melville rejected “the idea of mechanical objectivity as the new standard for all image making” (113), chapter four demonstrates how Stowe embraced it in order to activate its characters’ and readers’ subjectivities. Uncle Tom’s Cabin generates affect for Eva and Tom, Dinius claims, by trading on “written descriptions of the daguerreotype as both a mechanically objective and a sentimental fetish object and by evoking the optical and affective effects of the medium” (127). The idea that daguerreotypy, as the least mediated form of representation available, offered direct access to its subjects, Dinius suggests, allowed sentimental authors like Stowe to lend materiality to its otherwise fictional characters.

The Camera and the Press closes with two chapters that examine how the notion of daguerreotypy’s perceived objectivity would continue to inform discussions of race and slavery in antebellum America. Chapter five describes how daguerreotype portraits made by the black Liberian colonist Augustus Washington utilized the prevailing idea of the medium’s representational power to render Liberian politicians “real” and their feeble government legitimate in the eyes of their viewers. Chapter six shows how Frederick Douglass’s writings and lectures on daguerreotypy—as well as daguerreotypes of him—adopt “the popular idea of the medium as both a natural and a mechanically objective form of representation to figure some of his most important arguments about personhood, race relations, and material and moral progress” (194). The Camera and the Press reproduces for the first time all six known daguerreotypes of Douglass (including a fascinating profile portrait of him) to support its claim that these images “both represent and enact the dual racial identity that Douglass embodied and experienced” as a mixed race individual (215).

The book’s twin conclusions—that “media are never isolable” (238) and that “our relationship to the past is always necessarily mediated” (238)—will sound familiar to students of media and visual studies and, in some ways, they speak to some of the limitations of The Camera and the Press. While Dinius clearly wants to “move beyond the limited paradigms of literature and photography and photography in literature to recognize the history of media as a form of literature and to understand narrative and literature themselves as forms of media” (11), the book—with the exception of chapter one—does not always do so. Despite its invocation of a media studies/theory approach, its method (predominantly close readings of intermedial references within literary texts) and its leading terms of analysis remain largely literary. Chapters two and three, for example, ultimately return to the customary terrain of aesthetics and what’s “understood as art” (88). The issue is not that The Camera and the Press fails to attend to literature’s media encounter with photography, but rather that it refrains from thinking of literature as media strongly enough. The stakes of literature’s media encounter with photography, in other words, are imagined as and frequently return to literary terms—aesthetics and art—rather than media terms—images, information and the technical means of producing them (words and minds on the one hand; light, chemistry, and eyes on the other). Similarly, the larger argumentative framework of The Camera and the Press—particularly its central analytical terms of “subjectivity” and “objectivity”—might strike some readers as incongruous with theoretical approaches in which media might be considered as helping to constitute those very terms. This may explain whyThe Camera and the Press is unable to consider the possibility that the subjectivity which it frequently understands as expressed by or opposed to nineteenth-century media might not actually be anterior to it.

That The Camera and the Press solicits a more expansive conversation about literature’s relationship to media (among other subjects), I hope, is evidence that its limitations are really a sign of its many strengths. While its larger contributions to literary and media study and, more broadly, to the relationship between them remain somewhat circumscribed, there is little doubt that The Camera and the Press’s careful recovery of the reception of the daguerreotype in mid-nineteenth-century popular print and literary culture will change the way we discuss the history of photography in the United States. It makes the strongest case I know for how and why we need to understand the medium of daguerreotypy as a material social practice. Yet, perhaps the book’s most immediate contribution may be in what it has to say about how culture and technology intersect. Dinius’s study suggests that while newer media forms may remedy prior technologies, they are also mediated by them in ways that go beyond reception and extend into the practice of the medium itself (as her sections on the daguerreotypy of Southworth & Hawes and Augustus Washington amply demonstrate). In short, The Camera and the Press is a smart, well-researched, and provocative study of photography and nineteenth-century American literature, one that will speak to anyone with an interest in literary, visual, and media studies, but particularly to those interested in how we might best articulate the relationship between print and visual culture in nineteenth-century America.

Who is Phillis Wheatley? I have often wondered about the possible answers to this question. Sure, I already know that she’s recognized as the first black woman to publish ever. I have read the highly anthologized “On Being Brought from Africa to America” and questioned just how this enslaved black woman could love God and America so much. I have stared upon the frontispiece and looked closely at the brief autobiographical note that John Wheatley writes for her collection, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773). Because I have read these introductory remarks, I know that she was a “Negro Servant to Mr. John Wheatley, of Boston;” not long after her voyage from Africa to America, she learned to read and write in English. At a young age, she wrote poems and letters, too. These simple facts of geographic origin and intellectual ability narrate the life of a woman whose travels—in print and in person—crisscrossed the Atlantic and found her in conversation with the likes of Voltaire, George Washington, and of course, the 18 men of the famed attestation that preceded her poems. But this is all; this is where Wheatley’s story begins and ends, with a vague account of a birth, a voyage, and a compilation of poems and several letters that do little to tell us who Phillis Wheatley is. Every time I read through her collected writings, it seems her story ends rather abruptly on the last pages of my Penguin edition (or Margaretta Odell’s brief and troublesome account of Wheatley’s life). Hers was a story that left me with more questions than answers. That is, until now.

Vincent Carretta’s Phillis Wheatley: Biography of a Genius in Bondage challenges the presumption that where there is a lack of information, there is no story or at least not enough evidence to tell one. This first full-length biography explores the question, “who is Phillis Wheatley?” as it gathers and sifts through the ephemeral and quotidian stuff—the tax records, private letters, broadsides, poems, advertisements, subscription lists —required to answer it. It tells the story of a woman whose fame scholars and students know well but whose life remains largely unknown. Carretta takes up the questions that have puzzled us over the years: “Where did she come from? How did Wheatley overcome the odds against her to achieve transatlantic fame? How active a role did she play in the network of associations that included many of the most important people in North American and British military, political, religious, and social life? What more can be found about Phillis Wheatley’s husband, John Peters?” (x) He thoughtfully narrates his answers, careful to speculate responsibly when necessary. The result accomplishes that which seemed impossible given the three paragraphs, short poems, and brief letters that archive her life.

Despite the limited extant documents penned in Wheatley’s hand or published in her name, Carretta finds her almost everywhere, in church records, letters, newspaper articles, subscription lists, and elsewhere. With each chapter titled after a verse or phrase from a letter, Carretta tracks her name through these records from the time she disembarks off the ship (Phillis—it’s the same name!) from the west coast of Africa until her obituary appears in theIndependent Chronicle and Universal Advertiser some thirty years later. Carretta reconstructs the many missing pieces of Wheatley’s life. He finds her date of arrival to Boston (July 11, 1761), her church home and date of baptism (August 18, 1771, at Old South), her earliest writing, her location during the revolution and thereafter, her thoughts about London and her closest friend (shout-out to Obour Tanner). He makes note of Wheatley’s choice to “live in sin” with her eventual husband, John Peters. He finds the dates, places, and persons that shape this story. Take the example of Wheatley’s friend, Obour Tanner. Between 1772 and 1779, these two African women exchange letters that document the mundane realities of their lives and their religious faith in particular. Wheatley’s surviving letters don’t say much about who Tanner is, yet each letter evidences their “increasingly affectionate epistolary relationship” (43). Carretta takes up the mystery of Tanner and locates her in church records in Newport, Rhode Island. He plots their points of connection, maybe through her master, “James Tanner’s link with Boston” (43). Carretta not only sheds light on Wheatley’s friendship with Obour Tanner, he also redeems the name of John Peters, formerly the no-count husband that had done Wheatley wrong. Carretta offers an alternative ending to Wheatley’s life. Instead of a dead-beat, Carretta tells the story of a hard-working man who provides for Wheatley as best he can as a shopkeeper (177) and a laborer (184). Peters sues those that owe him money, in particular “Joseph Scott, a Boston merchant and ironmaster” even though he is never able to recuperate his losses (177). Thus, Carretta excavates the lives of two people, Tanner and John Peters, that speak to the dimensionality of Wheatley’s life. She wasn’t just a servant girl to the Wheatley family. She was also a friend to Tanner and a live-in girlfriend and later, wife, to John Peters.

Carretta anchors the facts of Wheatley’s life to the histories (of Boston, of London, of the Atlantic world, of the Wheatley family, and others) that take shape around the poet. Where he cannot find an answer, he constructs the spaces within which she must have moved and lived. For example, in chapter five, “A Farewell to America,” Carretta rebuilds the sociopolitical climate of the London to which Wheatley travelled: the racial demographics, the size of the town, and the most important issues of the day. In so doing, Carretta situates Wheatley within a diasporic space through which he charts her movements and the growth of her transnational network that included abolitionist Granville Sharp, the Countess of Huntingdon, Israel Maudit, and Benjamin Franklin. In London, Wheatley has the opportunity to reap the benefits of the Somerset case (which granted freedom to the enslaved brought to England from the colonies). Carretta speculates that this case may have prompted Wheatley’s trip (109). Though she does return to the colonies without her freedom guaranteed, Carretta demonstrates the manner in which Wheatley uses both her words and her movements in a particular space to shape the course of her life.

Where we cannot find her name, Carretta asks us to imagine her as she participates in the mundane makings of history, namely, going to church, reading, traveling overseas, or writing letters to a friend. In chapter two, “Thoughts on the Work of Providence,” he documents her religious education and its importance to her development as a poet. He provides a brief history of religious practice in Boston, and then speaks to the “extraordinary opportunity” that Wheatley has because of her faith and the faith of the Wheatleys (37). Together with Carretta, we become responsible speculators in that journey through time and space and into the center of a colonial and later an American marketplace of ideas and culture. There, Phillis Wheatley is the poet, the servant, the slave, the churchgoer, or the wife. Carretta takes a woman whose life once existed outside of the archive and remembers a place for her at the heart of the makings of an American literary and national tradition. He reminds us that she was there when a nation was made. She wrote her poems from the front lines and made meaning out of a revolution that used the language of slavery and freedom to free itself from colonial bondage, but not her or those who looked like her. She continued to write even as her husband went to and from debtor’s prison and as her fame waned. Sure, she made a literary tradition, but Vincent Carretta asks us to consider, even if only for a moment, the life that made her.

I like this book. I like this book a lot because of the audacious manner in which it finds Wheatley wherever her name may appear and in whatever form it may take (Phillis, Phyllis, Wheatly, Wheetly, etc.). It does not seem deterred by the limits of the archive and instructs us to consider new approaches to lives that seem to evade our need for clear documentation. Even as I celebrate the 279 pages of her life, I acknowledge what Carretta cannot and does not do. He cannot make Phillis Wheatley speak where and when she is silent or lost to time. Many of the records and the extant materials that feature her name do not leave us with her voice, penned or otherwise. Carretta uses those records, which document her presence, but they don’t give us her thoughts, reactions, or even the mundane intentions that guided her days. Herein lie the flaws of the archive and the stories it holds. I don’t hold this against Carretta’s biography. He leaves us with a point of entry, a place upon which to build and to speculate (albeit responsibly) about the life of a woman who changed the world in which she lived with the power of her word.

Perhaps the most famous words ever recorded about Herman Melville’s relation to faith were written by Nathaniel Hawthorne after Melville’s visit to him in Liverpool in 1856. In his journal, Hawthorne opined that Melville “can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief.” Though he does not directly cite this Hawthorne remark, John Lardas Modern could easily have used Hawthorne’s description of a suspended relation to belief in his book Secularism in Antebellum America, a luminous study of the discursive terrain and affective engagements of secularism in the first half of the nineteenth century.

In this historically rich and analytically keen interpretation of secularism in the antebellum United States, Modern presents not a diachronic narrative of the emergence of secular society but a synchronous argument about the 1840s and 1850s. He locates in these decades the emergence of a secular culture that consolidated variant, and often opposing, philosophical, religious, and scientific discourses. How we define the various terms “secular,” “secularization,” and “secularism” has become a prominent debate in recent years, and Modern’s book engages this debate. Modern draws on new theories of secularism—most particularly on the work of Charles Taylor, Talal Asad, and, in American studies, Tracy Fessenden—that redefine it not as a teleological process in which religion retreats in the face of science and rationality but as an age in which “religion” became newly transformed, classified, and embedded in the practices and institutions of modernity. When invoking the “secular” and exploring its resonances in the antebellum era, Modern, therefore, continually affirms how it contains and exemplifies such religious traditions as evangelical Protestantism rather than being forged in opposition to them.

Secularism in Antebellum Americafocuses on the process by which the secular both solidifies its claims to be “natural” and “real” and, simultaneously, exceeds these claims in its moods and expressions. Antebellum secularism, according to Modern’s argument, is the product of the absorption and reconfiguration of Scottish Common Sense philosophy and republican principles of government by both Protestant and post-Protestant (Modern’s term) subcultures. Though these traditions reach back to eighteenth-century philosophical precedents, Modern privileges the antebellum era as pivotal, when secularism’s claims to be “natural” and “commonsensical” became ubiquitous and relentless. He locates the antebellum period as the moment in which “the metaphysics of secularism,” growing out of its eighteenth-century legacy, “assumed a ponderous and formidable materiality” (45). As Modern argues, this process remade religion in ways evident throughout United States society and culture to this day.

Throughout the book, Modern seeks a difficult balance: he simultaneously looks to explain the methods, meanings, and effects of secularism in the antebellum United States and to assert that its discursive presence could never achieve its own universalizing goals. Modern’s dedication to examining the slippery nature of the “secular”—the moods and subjectivities it calls into being, including certain types of religious subjectivities—allows him to demonstrate how antebellum secularism “was neither totalizing nor utterly determinative. It did, however, possess a kind of agency, defined, barely, as the threshold reflexivity of feedback operations” (46). His inexact phrase—a “kind of agency”—expresses just this attention to the limits of secularism even as he continually recurs to its centripetal force. This very consideration of all that surrounds the powerful energy of secularism, physically and metaphysically, is the great strength of the argument. Modern is most interested in the affective, metaphysical, and subjective senses of antebellum secularism. He locates them in the haunting excesses of the culture’s obsessions with spirituality, ghosts, phrenology, and Native American culture, among other sites.

The book’s attention to weird antebellum secular culture (to put it glibly) is what makes its argument such a crucial contribution to ongoing discussion of how we define “secular” in different moments of American history. In other words, Modern does not obscure the peculiarities of the age to pursue his thesis; instead, spiritualist séances, phrenological readings, and copulation with machines exemplify the era’s heady mix of religious subjectivities and secular insistences, and they become, in his rendering, more than ancillary, outré topics. Modern’s chapters overlay onto one another to represent the “surplus of secularism” through “the resonance of its component parts” (10). These parts include the entanglement of print and evangelical piety to create a category of “true religion” (chapter one); the rise of “spirituality” as a way to describe one’s orientation to religion and the championing of this term in the Unitarian theology of William Ellery Channing and the phrenology of Fowlers and Wells (chapter two); the conflation of spirituality and anthropology in the career of Lewis Henry Morgan (chapter three); Spiritualism, penitentiary reform, and the transposition of Providence into human scales and projects (chapter four); and finally an epilogue that constellates the goals of the book through the spiritual uses of machines.

To list these chapters, though, is to provide a narrative—that is, to flatten into a chronological sequence. Modern’s compilation of a synchronous archive resists such narrative force and offers the reader instead an overload of suggestive associations across registers too often isolated from one another. In his most original and compelling chapter on the emergence of “spirituality” as a meaningful category, Modern displays best his associative method. He aligns Channing’s Unitarian appeals for “a focused interiority” as the basis of “public virtue” (133) with the invention of an organ of “spirituality” in 1842 by New York phrenologists Orson and Lorenzo Fowler and Samuel Wells. Spirituality thus exemplifies how secularism delineates religious orientations—and how it disciplines them. For in the discourse of spirituality propounded by both liberal Protestants and phrenologists, secularism offers a new category: the “human capacity for religion.” This capacity for spirituality, in turn, becomes a way to set what constitutes “being religious” apart from “institutions, traditions, and mere human mandate” (121). Spirituality, in other words, imparts a way of being religious that cannot impinge on secular institutions.

Modern’s subtitle is a broader hint to the overarching theoretical and methodological aims of the book—”with reference to ghosts, Protestant subcultures, Machines, and their Metaphors: Featuring Discussions of Mass Media,Moby-Dick, Spirituality, Phrenology, Anthropology, Sing Sing State Penitentiary, and Sex with the New Motive Power.” With this inviting and humorous subtitle,Secularism in Antebellum America displays its own preoccupation with excess. It points, in other words, to styleas an important subtheme of the book. Modern continually returns to “style” as a crucial category for what he attempts to recover about antebellum secularism. He explores in his chapters “the feelings, styles, and ambitions that characterize the discursive practices of secularism” (131), the “style of reasoning,” for instance, of conservative Protestants (66), or the “style of piety” pursued by liberal Protestants and given scientific sanction through phrenology (137). To expand upon the religious styles inherent to antebellum secularism, Modern turns to Herman Melville. Indeed, Melville operates as the most prominent continuity throughout Secularism in Antebellum America. He embodies for Modern, as he did for Hawthorne, struggles with and against the demands of secularism and modernity. Suggestive readings of Moby-Dick, Typee, andThe Confidence Man recreate the stylistic resonances Modern pursues in other aspects of the culture, allowing Melville’s words to enliven the discourses under consideration.

Melville’s role in Secularism in Antebellum America also makes visible one of the argument’s broader disjunctions. On the one hand, Modern positions Melville as the most acute antebellum reader of secularism, both attentive to its attractions and yet positioned outside its full control. On the other hand, Melville often eludes Modern’s critical eye and becomes somehow impossibly positioned as an escape hatch out of the disciplinary logic of secularism. In this way, Modern’s attention to style is at times dissonant with his overarching argument. Although he claims in various places that style, affect, aesthetics, and mood are his foci, he nonetheless spends much of the book in the more popular mode of critique, with special interest in the rise of disciplinary mechanisms. His attention to the resonances and hauntings within secularism—that is, the incomplete and suggestive styles through which secularism announces itself—are often obscured by the driving, disciplinary function of his discursive analysis. This is not to say that Modern ascribes to the much-derided distinction between content and style, with style operating as the frivolous decoration to textual substance. Instead, Modern’s argument demonstrates how difficult it remains to speak of style in a way that recognizes its intrinsic relation to and potential disruption of the discursive terrain of a text.

This disjunction in the argument of Secularism in Antebellum America does not overwhelm its great attractions as a contribution to current scholarship on secularism in American studies. It is a welcome addition, moreover, to antebellum literary study for its methodological model, how it seeks to elucidate the ephemeral affects and styles surrounding a major historical force. In all, Modern’s book expands critical methods for approaching style no less than it provides an enlightening and frankly engrossing articulation of the elusive but powerful force that is secularism in United States culture, past and present.

John McCurdy’s study explicitly challenges earlier interpretations of bachelors’ experiences in early America that often describe single men in pejorative ways such as immature and unmanly. This has been the result, McCurdy argues, of approaching bachelors in the context of examining marriage and family relationships and thus stacking the deck against them since their lives then naturally seem abnormal and peripheral in comparison. To remedy this, McCurdy advocates placing bachelors within the wider scope of early American history, investigating their role in cultural, economic, and, especially, political transformations in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In so doing, he demonstrates that marriage alone was not the defining factor for single men. Mastery also played a vital and even more important role. Single men who owned property, supported themselves through a respectable occupation, or established their own households often possessed the full rights of manhood denied to both propertyless single men and impoverished husbands and fathers.

McCurdy begins with an examination of attitudes towards bachelors in sixteenth-century England and seventeenth-century America. Though colonists were initially heavily influenced by English legal and cultural traditions concerning unmarried men, both demographics and challenges inherent in establishing settlements in New England and the Chesapeake contributed to new conceptions of bachelorhood in America. In the mid-sixteenth century, England’s first laws codifying distinctions between unmarried men demanded that every unmarried man place himself under the authority of a master who often served the dual role of employer and head of household. In Puritan New England, courts likewise attempted to regulate young, single men, encouraging them to seek employment with an established master who would adopt him into his household. These family government laws propped up the local economy while simultaneously providing for surveillance of young men to ensure moral behavior, but declined over time as bachelors and others advanced the right of the individual to be responsible for himself. In the Chesapeake, on the other hand, the concept of the free and autonomous bachelor emerged with fewer legal interventions, in large part due to the skewed sex ratio that made maintaining English ideals for family life impractical. Unlike the New England experience, where young, single men faced a high likelihood of marriage, bachelors in the Chesapeake often remained unmarried into their thirties or beyond. In both regions, ideals of masculine autonomy eventually contributed to the creation of a new bachelor identity.

In the next chapter, McCurdy explores bachelor laws in eighteenth-century America, ultimately arguing that lawmakers recognized the masculine autonomy asserted by bachelors and, especially, the various legal obligations they fulfilled. Though the specific laws varied from colony to colony, McCurdy identifies a general consensus that bachelors were in a unique position to fulfill certain duties for the good of the community—or to suffer specific penalties—since their marital status did not make them accountable for supporting a family. In particular, bachelors were subject to conscription and paying certain taxes while married men were more often exempt. Similarly, married men sometimes enjoyed immunity from prosecution for debt and some crimes. As McCurdy explains, lawmakers believed that men who fathered children had fulfilled a patriotic duty, which they continued to pursue by providing for their families. This led colonists to strike a balance between familial obligations and civic ones, determining that bachelors were thus in a better position to shoulder more responsibility when it came to providing funding and security for the colonies.

Laws that shifted such burdens to bachelors indicated changing attitudes about unmarried men: They were no longer dependents that needed to be overseen by a master who provided supervision similar to that offered by a parent. At the same time, many colonies still did not grant bachelors the same opportunities to participate in the body politic that were granted to married men. Propertyless single men faced bachelor taxes in several colonies, but did not qualify to vote, hold office, or serve on juries. McCurdy stresses that such taxes, as well as other obligations and penalties that weighed disproportionately on unmarried men, helped to create a new bachelor identity by bringing single men into contact with the state. The general public may have simply interpreted a bachelor as a man (rather than a dependent) who could pay taxes and serve in the military, but such demands increasingly politicized bachelors to grasp other rights that were deemed privileges of manhood.

McCurdy next examines literary representations of bachelors by seventeenth-century English political and economic writers as well as Benjamin Franklin and other eighteenth-century Americans. Literature supplemented laws in establishing a distinctive bachelor identity that depicted single men as autonomous and masculine as opposed to earlier depictions of them as dependents who could be classed with single women. Not all representation were so positive; many literary works rendered them as irresponsible partakers of luxury and vice who did not live up to their civic duties of strengthening the state through responsible fatherhood. While some English authors suggested coercive bachelor taxes as a means of controlling bachelors and encouraging them to marry, satirists like Richard Steele and Joseph Addison opposed punitive measures in favor of publishing stories of reformed bachelors in the Tatler and the Spectator.

Americans, through imported versions of Addison and Steele, first encountered stories of ridiculous bachelors who ultimately yielded to moral suasion and married before eventually hearing from local authors who formulated their own concerns that single men perhaps opted for selfish luxury and unrestrained sexuality rather than acting in the best interests of the nation. Such men were perhaps too independent. Still, American authors did not favor the English plan to force bachelors into marriage and assess financial penalties against those who refused. In contrast, Franklin suggested that the abundance of land in America was an important resource for convincing single men to marry. Rather than be threatened with pecuniary losses, they could enhance their financial position by taking a wife and fathering children who would then assist in productively working the countryside. While serving the needs of the nation and bringing supposedly unruly bachelors under control, such proposals offered tangible benefits to single men who yielded some of their independence as a result of marrying.

Given these cultural representations of bachelors, what were the actual experiences of single men in early America? McCurdy notes that neither laws nor literature necessarily provided authentic depictions of what it meant to be a single man. In the fifty years before the Revolution, American bachelors enjoyed several benefits that had not been available to single men who came before them. For instance, many experienced increased mobility as they pursued their occupations, opting to board with women rather than remain within the family home or affiliate themselves with a head of household who served a dual role as master and fictive father. Bachelors also developed rich homosocial networks, including participation in clubs, that yielded an increased sense of independence. Being free of the financial obligations of supporting a family enabled many to participate more fully in the transatlantic consumer revolution. In general, bachelors became more economically independent in this period.

The liberties seized by eighteenth-century bachelors included new attitudes toward sexuality. Single men found ways to explore sexuality, whether engaging in liaisons with women themselves or sharing stories with other men about their experiences. Letters, diaries, and club minutes all included innuendo and humor that more than implied that single men were not celibate. This is not to say that such freedoms negated certain duties and expectations. McCurdy argues that bachelors certainly enjoyed the freedoms that the transitional period between the constraints of childhood and the responsibilities of married life presented, but even as they increasingly pursued opportunities for romance and sexual play, many continued to wait to marry until they had achieved sufficient economic success to support a family. Rather than internalize the criticisms consistently communicated in contemporary satires of single men, they celebrated the emergence of a distinct bachelor identity in the middle of the eighteenth century, an identity that promoted autonomy and independence both economically and socially.

As bachelors experienced these gains, they also increasingly advocated for political independence. McCurdy traces this theme throughout Citizen Bachelors, but most fully addresses it in a final chapter examining single men in the age of the American Revolution. Literary depictions of bachelorhood reached a nadir during the 1770s and 1780s as authors engaged in allegorical strategies of depicting single men as unpatriotic, selfish Anglophiles addicted to imported British luxuries. Supposedly lacking the self-control and sense of sacrifice inherent in marrying and supporting a family, they did not merit the benefits of citizenship. Other writers, also suspicious of unmarried men, diverged, playing on earlier laws that placed greater obligations of military service on bachelors to argue that military service could provide an alternate path to manhood and mastery.

Single men objected to such formulations and laws that forced greater obligations on them than their married counterparts, including special poll taxes and harsher punishments for crimes. As Americans debated the nature of citizenship in the last third of the eighteenth century, bachelors stepped forward to demand equal treatment. This movement found expression during the debates to extend the suffrage to all taxpayers in the Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776. Although this move enfranchised many voters, McCurdy stresses that propertyless single men comprised the most numerous new faction. As an unintended side effect, paying taxes that singled out bachelors now qualified single men to vote.

As public discourse increasingly emphasized individual rights in a republican system of government in the decades that followed the Revolution, almost all of the bachelor laws enacted during the colonial period disintegrated by 1800. McCurdy also suggests that single men did not only gain politically, but that they simultaneously experienced greater freedom in their personal lives during this period. Many conceived of bachelorhood as something other than a period of courting women and a prelude to marriage, choosing instead to pursue occupations and interests they found fulfilling even if those activities did not necessarily prepare them to be husbands.

In the end, McCurdy concludes that even though lawmakers and authors on both sides of the Atlantic attempted to place constraints on bachelors in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century America, single men were not as marginalized nor their experiences as bleak as we might have previously imagined. The family was indeed a central institution in early America, but exceptions existed. Many bachelors embraced the single life, finding fulfillment in their occupations, participation in homosocial revelries, and sexual experimentation. As modern Americans contemplate the founding generation’s vision of the nation and its citizens, we must realize that they renounced colonial-era strategies for coercing single men to marry and support families. New attitudes toward bachelors in the Revolutionary era resulted in white men, regardless of marital status, becoming entitled to the same political and economic rights. As McCurdy sums up, “Americans granted that there were certain individual rights that should not be subjected to the will of the majority” (202).

What work of English literature had the most significant influence on American literary history? Any given answer would of course depend on what, in the end, one wanted that history to look like. Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, if one wants to authorize a masculine adventure tradition. Richardson’s Pamela, if one wants to emphasize the sentimental-domestic. Milton’s Paradise Lost, to fathom American attempts at epic. It’s a crude thought experiment; no single text generates a literary tradition. But different strains of a tradition are pulled into focus when we choose particular transatlantic points of departure.

Sandra Gustafson’s remarkable new book begins by inviting us to give this kind of pride of place to Joseph Addison’s 1713 play, Cato, A Tragedy, though she does it with a good deal more subtlety than I just displayed. With tongue in cheek, she imagines George Washington hailing Addison, in the way Lincoln is supposed to have hailed Stowe, as the man who wrote the play that started this great war—in this case, the Revolutionary one. In Cato, a deeply popular literary work throughout the eighteenth century and one particularly beloved by the statesmen who shaped the U.S. republic, we have a dramatic representation of deliberative democracy as an ideal form of discourse. In the play’s second act, as Cato and his fellow senators debate whether to continue their resistance to Caesar’s dominion or to end the war with a well-considered surrender, they not only dramatize an historical event of great moment, but model for contemporary audiences and future readers the virtues and rigors of deliberation itself. So: what version of American literature would that origin project? What genres or literary modes would deliberative thinking tend to engender? Would imaginative literature grounded in such a notion of civic participation be tethered to drama? To the dialogue?

Now, to tell the truth, Gustafson does not seem at all interested in authorizing a particular version of the canon, nor, even if she calls oratory the “preeminent genre of republicanism” (42), is she interested in establishing an equivalence between an argument about civic participation and a particular literary form. If her playful opening gambit seems to raise such questions, she soon quite decisively changes the subject. Her object is deliberation as a rational and formal process of “moderate, thoughtful consideration of public issues” (2), and some of the cultural forms that represented it. In order to take account of this idea, she returns to the two decades following 1815, a period during which deliberation “began to be imagined as a democratic form of republican self-governance and a defining characteristic of American civil society” (40), yet at the same time, a period of crisis in which this idealized national self-image found itself seriously challenged by debates over slavery and Indian removal that threatened to break it apart.

That national story is framed by the larger context of “Modern Republicanism in the Atlantic World,” as the book’s second chapter has it. This larger frame not only brings something important to the argument, but as Gustafson shows, is demanded by her subject. For as much as the U.S. republic may have celebrated its exceptional capacity for deliberative democracy, it could only make that exceptionalist claim through referential gestures to world history and global context. As a self-styled modern republic, it cast itself explicitly as a revival of classical ideals formerly incarnated in the Roman republic and finally perfected in modernity. But it also defined itself in relation to other modern forms, setting the United States against the global backdrop of other recently constituted republics in France, Haiti, Spanish America, and Greece. Thus, for example, Daniel Webster expressed his commitment to deliberative republicanism by invoking a larger context of “international republican movements” in order to “place the history of the United States in the leading ranks of an Atlantic world transformation” (59).

Anglo-American artists began depicting Native Americans soon after their arrival in North America, creating a large body of visual documents that contain varying degrees of truth, fiction, and myth. In Painting Indians and Building Empires in North America, William H. Truettner, senior curator of painting and sculpture at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, examines two distinct groups of Native American portraits, which he suggests were each “conceived, directly or indirectly, to accompany attempts to expand white hegemony across North America” (3). The first includes eighteenth-century depictions of Mohawk leaders with whom the crown needed to negotiate in order to maintain access to important colonial holdings in what would become New York State. Truettner sees these images as counterparts to the Noble Savage ideal described by Enlightenment writers and philosophers. The second group of paintings dates to the first half of the nineteenth century and portrays members of the Upper Missouri River tribes, whose cooperation the new Republic depended upon to further fur trapping, exploration, and settlement. Truettner calls this group “Republican Indians,” a term more elastic and less clearly defined than the Noble Savage. He highlights these two groups in order to demonstrate how white observers, in this case, artists, pictured a shift in beliefs about Native Americans, “from one that encouraged the upward mobility of native tribes to one that tied them to the level of human development far below that of white Americans” (5).

Truettner begins his study with an often repeated anecdote about American artist Benjamin West’s first encounter with classical art during his visit to Rome in 1760. Viewing theApollo Belvedere,one of the most celebrated works of the ancient world in the Vatican collection, West reportedly exclaimed, “My God, how like it is to a young Mohawk warrior!” West followed his outburst with a description of the virtues of the Mohawk, suggesting that they might indeed resemble an archaic version of the enlightened Greeks who crafted the Apollo. West characterized the Mohawk as exceptional Indians, gifted with intelligence and superior physical abilities. While this elevation of the Mohawk fulfills an Anglo-American ideal of the Noble Savage, Truettner also suggests that the appeal of the Noble Savage may have been heightened by the British need for Indian allies to serve their imperial ambitions in North America. As Truettner observes, West made his remark at the conclusion of the French and Indian War, during which the British relied on Mohawk allies. In this way, he challenges the belief that the Noble Savage myth was solely a construct of “Rousseauian fables in which ‘savages,’… lived lives of redeeming virtue until they finally (and tragically) came in contact with ‘civilized’ society” (18). Instead, Truettner suggests that to some degree the Noble Savage myth originated in real life interaction between Anglo-American observers and North American Indians. Toward this end, he sees the Mohawk as a special case. The Mohawk both demonstrated idealized Rousseauian virtue and also served an important political purpose for their Anglo-American interpreters.

As an art historian, the heart of Truettner’s argument is rooted in the visual. While the first, second, and fourth chapters provide the bulk of his more-textually based historical discussion of Noble Savages and Republican Indians, the lengthier third and fifth chapters provide the visual evidence. For example, in the second chapter Truettner uses first-hand accounts of the Mohawks from Anglo-American observers who characterized the tribe in terms suggestive of the Noble Savage myth. Many of these figures—Cadwallader Colden, James Adair, William Johnson, and Benjamin Franklin—described virtuous Indians using language that evoked the classical past. Additionally, Truettner details how the British specifically cast the Mohawks as Noble Savages in order to serve their imperialist goals in North America. In the third chapter, Truettner discusses a series of portraits of Mohawk leaders, mostly by British artists, which make his case. He begins his study with the John Verelst’s portraits of “four Indian Kings,” who were summoned by Queen Anne to London in 1710. This marks the beginning of what Truettner sees as “portrait diplomacy” by the British. The portraits also initiate the process of turning Indian subjects into denizens of Arcadia through the use of costume, setting, and posture (a tactic that Benjamin West also pursued, most notably in his career-making The Death of General Wolfe.) Truettner includes a useful discussion of six portraits of Mohawk leader Joseph Brant painted by different artists over a span of three decades. Through the Brant portraits Truettner observes “a divide in Indian portraiture at the beginning of the nineteenth century. One trend moves on to picturing ‘civilized’ Indians in European dress … a second and dominant trend leads to a more ethnographic style of imaging, featuring Republican Indians … wearing reasonably authentic attire” (56). Truettner further illustrates the waning of the Noble Savage portrait with an 1828 depiction of Red Jacket by Robert Weir, a work that overlaps chronologically with the rise of the Republican Indian.

The book then shifts to a study of Republican Indians, who hail from tribal groups situated along the Upper Missouri River. Truettner admits that “to claim that Noble Savage portraiture was replaced at a certain time by the next generation of Indian painters, those who created what are here called Republican Indians, is making a neat package of what is essentially a messy, drawn-out transition” (61), and indeed the transition from one type of image to the other is not seamless. According to Truettner, Republican Indian portraiture was initiated in Washington and the east “to service an ambitious, if at first relatively restrained expansionist agenda, begun by Jefferson after the Louisiana Purchase and continued under the administrations of Madison, Monroe, and John Quincy Adams” (70). Republican Indians differ from Noble Savages in significant ways and reflect shifting American perceptions about native peoples. While the Noble Savage might have been an idyllic Arcadian on the verge of civilization, the Republican Indian was widely perceived as doomed to vanish, having no place in a white-populated West and little ability to assimilate. Truettner sees this born out in the tendency of portraitists to emphasize racial characteristics and ethnographical detail where once an effort had been made to classicize Indian subjects. Readers will likely be more familiar with the images in this section of the book, which includes paintings by Charles Bird King, Alfred Jacob Miller, Karl Bodmer, and George Catlin. To a large extent, these are the Indian pictures that have defined popular American notions of the Plains tribes.

Artists painted these Indian men and women for a variety of reasons, but they began with diplomatic intentions similar to those of earlier portraits commissioned by the British. U.S. War Department officials often brought visiting tribal delegations to Washington, D.C., portrait studios. During his tenure in charge of Indian Affairs for the War Department, Thomas McKenney acquired hundreds of such portraits, mostly painted by Charles Bird King, for the U.S. government. Yet this would be a short lived practice as McKenney was fired by Andrew Jackson (a figure who is curiously absent from Truettner’s book). Around this time, artists began traveling out West in search of “authentic” Indian subjects. Truettner sees Catlin, Bodmer, and Miller, all of whom painted Upper Missouri Indians on their home turf, as “effective in serving the government’s cause” (77). While this may be true, in that each of these artists shared a similar perception of the Indians as a vanishing race, it elides the sometimes overtly pecuniary motivations of the artists. Bodmer made his paintings for the German Prince Maximilian of Wied-Neuwied’s exploration of the Missouri River. Catlin toured his “Indian Gallery” and certainly hoped to make money from it. Even the civil servant McKenney, though not himself an artist, tried to make a profit by borrowing the War Department’s portraits in order to make copies for the multi-volume portfolio History of the Indian Tribes of North America. This is not to say that these men couldn’t be motivated by both a financial interest and a desire to document the ways of a doomed culture, but Truettner gives much more weight to the latter. It may be that the very idea of picturing a vanishing race created a market for such images.

On the whole, the book offers keen insight into these powerful works. At roughly a hundred and fifty pages, the book is tight and lean. According to the author, the project began as a lecture, and expanded from there. A benefit of this method is that the book has a coherence and clarity that makes it ideal for classroom adoption. And I can think of no other source that brings together so many of these rich images. Although Truettner rightly notes that the book is the first to unite these two campaigns of Indian painting, I sometimes wished that he had expanded his argument further by connecting the dots between these groups. Readers might enjoy more of the “messy, drawn-out transition” between the two. As it stands, the category of Republican Indians encompasses a broad array of material, which Truettner could profitably explore further. Additionally, although the visual evidence pushes into the 1840s, Truettner almost entirely avoids the policy of Indian Removal. While this may be due to his focus on the Missouri River tribes, it might be worth considering how this policy shaped white Americans’ perceptions of the Indian.

Akela Reason is assistant professor of history at the University of Georgia. She is the author of Thomas Eakins and the Uses of History (2010).

The Arts of the Americas Wing opened with great fanfare on November 20, 2010, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. This grand wing, designed by Foster and Partners, boasts 53 galleries, more than 5,000 works of art, and over 133,000 square feet, with a dramatic glass courtyard and gallery space, along with a grand new name. The half a billion-dollar expansion of the museum intends to offer a hemispheric perspective, uniting the traditional United States with Native North America and Central and South America. The new space and the occasion aspire to a “new” way of viewing, seeing, and understanding works of art—and the museum and its curators have promoted this widely. Much comes across as innovative and opulent, in my opinion: the lavish architectural setting, the unified approach to the Americas, the bringing together of work in various media, and the extensive multimedia program. These aspirations can be measured by numbers, evidenced in the Facts and Figures on the museum’s website. More significantly, they can and should be measured in the new ways visitors learn to understand the art collections, the primary purpose of a museum. The unique chance to re-install a major museum’s collection from scratch and in an expanded space comes only every few generations.

Well, how successful are they in Boston? A mixed bag, I would say. Certainly the space is grand, although some of the architectural reviews have found the Foster design to be cold (fig. 1). The Shapiro Family Courtyard with its New American Café has been humanized by installations; during my recent visit in May there was a marvelous and enormous Dale Chihuly glass piece in the courtyard—very green and tall—that visitors repeatedly stood before, while peering up and gasping. The four floors of galleries allow for a comprehensive setting that moves over the centuries and the continents, making for interesting juxtapositions of galleries and objects. Visitors enter the series of central galleries from the courtyard. Additional galleries lie off passageways along with the two “Behind the Scenes” galleries. The chronological and the geographical organize the two central floors that move from the early eighteenth to early twentieth centuries (fig. 2). In these galleries, the museum’s curators have been able to unite many of its familiar objects with less familiar ones that had formerly been relegated to storage, more than doubling what had been on view before. Along with “the rebirth of masterpieces,” or those favorites that visitors expect to see, such as Thomas Sully’s Passage of the Delaware (fig. 3), comes the unexpected and the unknown. This setting and arrangement certainly seem to justify the hype surrounding the opening.

But after two extensive visits, I’m not so sure. I will focus my discussion on the late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century galleries and materials. I applaud the “en suite” installations where paintings stand before furniture, needlework beside silver: the fine and decorative arts are no longer consigned to different spaces. While the museum had done this mixing before in its American galleries, the results here are quite striking. Most dramatically as you enter on the first level from the courtyard, you see the museum’s perhaps most iconic object, the John Singleton Copley portrait of Paul Revere(fig. 4) but standing before, in a vitrine, is the Sons of Liberty Bowl (1768). The silver bowl can be seen as a political declaration on its own from its inscription and iconography (fig. 5). Further on in this gallery of Revolutionary Boston (fig. 6) is displayed the clothespress owned by Gilbert DeBlois, a wealthy merchant and prominent loyalist. The history of this object facilitates a discussion of the trade and consumption of textiles and the important story of loyalists in Revolutionary Boston. Such an arrangement begins to approximate a setup of the cultural context for the visitor, so he and she can explore the material culture of a particular time and place. Context is given greater emphasis in certain areas such as the neoclassicism gallery on the first floor, entitled “At Home in the New Nation,” next to the central “Art in the New Nation” (fig. 7) that is dominated by Sully’s monumental painting (fig. 3). Here various object groups, such as paintings and textiles or fashion and clocks, complement each other, toward the larger goal of portraying how men and women in the early Republic utilized neoclassical themes as they created a new government and a new culture. Indeed, I applaud the clever idea to lay out the gallery as a gendered space—after entering and seeing the initial display of the gallery on “Neoclassical Dining,” you must go either to the left of the display or the right. If you choose the left, you have a series of objects interpreted as “Men in the New Nation” with Duncan Phyfe furniture and portraits of elite men. If you go to the right, you encounter a display of domesticity and “Women in the New Nation” with a lady’s writing desk and a piano on view. This approach is subtle but effective as a way to lead the visitors to view the spaces as separate spheres. The labeling overall and in this gallery is concise and often contextual. Instead of working from the succession of styles, neoclassicism becomes embedded in the search for a national culture in the decades after the War for Independence and that culture also becomes depicted as gendered.

This possibility is not realized throughout. More to the point, while neoclassical galleries feature cosmopolitan cities and patrician classes, contemporaneous worlds are relegated to distant side galleries where far fewer visitors venture. The possibilities for breaking up categories, one of the lofty aspirations stressed in the museum’s promotions about mixing continents and media, doesn’t get taken far enough in the Arts of the Americas Wing. Putting the “Rural and Vernacular Arts of the Eighteenth Century” on the first floor and the “Folk Art” gallery on the second floor, and at some distance from the central galleries, a rather conventional grouping, misses an opportunity to think seriously about the relationship of the academic and the provincial, the commercial and the amateur, and the spectrum of art makers. It is much easier to leave the folk alone, putting commercial portraitists such as Erastus Salisbury Field or Rufus Porter across from weathervane makers. Why not put Winthrop Chandler’s 1770 portrait of the Connecticut minister Ebenezer Devotion next to a John Singleton Copley portrait of a Boston merchant, and try to explain how these two worlds—artistic and social—exist contemporaneously in Revolutionary-era New England? This kind of installation could lead the visitor to the question of why some sitters might patronize Chandler’s style as “cousins to high-style urban pieces,” as the wall label says, and teach us about these period ways of seeing.

What seems on first glance to be a breakthrough installation turns out to be much less adventurous on closer examination. We find the “Latin America before 1900” gallery situated between a “Regional Styles in the Eighteenth Century” space and the flanking “American Artists Abroad around 1800.” “Regional Styles” displays regional preferences in portraiture, furniture and silver. It features a striking wall of eighteenth-century chairs that shows visitors how to look at the structural forms of the chairs to discover the methods of the craftsmen or the taste of the patron. The case “Three Coffee Pots, Three Cities” about silver in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, emphasizes those northeastern British ports as style centers. Still, the gallery labeling and display, along with the central gallery on “Eighteenth-Century Boston,” push us to think about how these cosmopolitan port cities were embedded politically and culturally within the Atlantic world. Then the Latin American gallery features objects and text about the work of indigenous artisans, the role of the Catholic Church in commissions, and the movement of Asian goods and designs across the Pacific—a welcome corrective to our current Atlantic World predilection—along with discussions of racial categories in “Casta Painting” and the introduction of horses to the Americas in a display on “Silver for Horses.” The labeling in this gallery leans to the cultural and historical, compared to the adjacent ones. It recognizes the burden of providing an overview of Spanish Empire in the Americas in a few sentences, but the effort seems more token than consistent. These contiguous galleries inform us about the nature of art in the colonial Americas, but visitors could use more explicit connections between, for example, the Atlantic or Pacific orientation of mercantile life and the relative role of the church in artistic life.

Or worse, the “Native North American Art” gallery sits along with those about “Mesoamerica, Marine Art, Embroidery, and Seventeenth-Century New England” in the lower ground level, where fewer visitors venture. Seemingly harder to integrate with the rise of an American art narrative, Native American art is organized according to the convention of regional traditions. The curators also decided to intersperse contemporary objects, such as the 1993 olla or water jar (fig. 8), amid historical ones. This is an interesting mode of display, one that the Museum of Fine Arts and other art museums have used to great effect. But in the new wing, where it is only done in this Native American gallery, it promotes, however unintentionally, the falsely ahistorical and timeless world of Native America.

Accompanying the broadening of the story of American art comes a deepening of that experience in a series of multimedia installations—”Behind the Scenes Galleries,” multimedia handhelds, and touch screens in the galleries. The Museum of Fine Arts conducted focus groups and in-depth interviews with visitors to learn that they desired knowledge about how the curators and conservators go about their work and how decisions were made about what to include in the collection and exhibit in the galleries. Along those lines, I found the “Behind the Scenes Galleries” to be most innovative in their compelling focus on questions of collecting and conservation, classification and curatorial choice. The ample space devoted to these areas is located literally behind the galleries, and that means that they receive a lot less visitation; however, those who do notice and venture over to the galleries are rewarded by some striking media walls with images from many aspects of museum work. For example, a large touch screen with an array of teapots awaits the visitors’ attempts to organize them, by style or in chronological order; or to make decisions about which early national portrait should receive gallery installation, according to particular thematic concerns. This interactive display provides ample additional information to facilitate the visitor’s interests and choices. These presentational materials on the two levels open up a proverbial black box about how the museum makes certain choices, but they transcend the “talking head” curator presentation to achieve a more robust interactive experience where visitors make decisions grounded in the additional information. Short of asking visitors to rearrange the galleries, these sorts of multimedia-facilitated experiences provide an alternative and compelling way to understand how and why certain objects enter a collection and receive space in an installation.