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Framing the Nation, Claiming the Hemisphere examines the national and transnational imagination in travel reports by American authors written between 1770 and 1830. Its range is from John and William Bartram’s pre-revolutionary travelogues and Jonathan Carver’s exploratory report on his journey in the Great Lakes region (first published 1778), to early nineteenth-century reports, such as Anne Newport Royall’s Sketches of History, Life, and Manners, in the United States (1826) and William Duane’s A Visit to Colombia (1826). The chapters of the monograph concentrate on writing about journeys to the North American ‘interior‘, Latin America, the Caribbean, and Africa. The primary sources were written between the beginning of the struggle against British rule, following the end of the French and Indian War, and the beginning of Andrew Jackson’s presidency. The decades between 1770 and 1830 were times of shifting colonial boundaries, nation-building, and emergent discourses of collective identification in North America. The study reads travel writing in the context of the identity-generating discourses of nation-building, imperialism, anti-colonialism, and cosmopolitanism.
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