1. "Editor's Table," Harper's New Monthly Magazine 5 (November 1852), 839. William Wells Brown, Clotel; or the President's Daughter. A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States . (1853; reprint, New York: Carol, 1969), 72.

2. On the structural imperatives within citizenship that erase local identities with abstract affiliations, see Lauren Berlant, "National Brands/National Body: Imitation of Life ," in Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex, and Nationality in the Modern Text , ed. Hortense Spillers (New York: Routledge, 1991), 113-14.

3. "Editor's Table," 839; Melville, Moby-Dick , 153. Important studies of economic and territorial expansion in relation to American literature and culture include Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964); Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Display in the Gilded Age (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982); and Carolyn Porter, Seeing and Being: The Plight of the Participant Observer in Emerson, James, Adams, and Faulkner (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1982).

4. Berlant, The Anatomy of National Fantasy , 5.

5. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature , in Essays and Lectures , ed. Joel Porte (New York: Library of America, 1983), 17. All further references to Emerson in this chapter that use this edition will be cited in the text. I follow Hayden White, who discusses the difference between narrating and narrativizing by defining narration as a discourse that "openly adopts a perspective and reports it" and narrative as a discourse that "feigns to make the world speak itself and speak itself as a story ." "The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality," in On Narrative ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1981), 2-3.

6. Friedrich Nietzsche, "On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life," in Untimely Meditations , trans. R. B. Hollingdale (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 68-70, 62, 64.

7. Edward Everett, "The Bunker Hill Monument," in Orations and Speeches on Various Occasions , 4 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1850), 1:362; George Washington Warren, The History of the Bunker Hill Monument Association during the First Century of the United States of America (Boston: J. R. Osgood, 1877), 375; Daniel Webster, "The Completion of the Bunker Hill Monument," in Works , 1:86; Daniel Kemmis, Community and the Politics of Place (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990), 86; Nietzsche, "On the Uses and Disadvantages of History,'' 71.

8. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia , in The Life and Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson , ed. Adrienne Koch and William Peden (New York: Modern Library, 1972), 205, 196. Frank Kermode's study of the translatio discusses biological aspects informing American exceptionalism. See The Classic (London: Faber and Faber, 1975), 100.

9. Thomas Cole, The Collected Essays and Prose Sketches , ed. Marshall Tymn (St. Paul, Minn.: John Colet Press, 1980), 16, 10. Cole's nativist tone reverberates with themes of Manifest Destiny. The waters of the Hudson, the American prairie, the "margin of the distant Oregon," are "his [the American's] own land; its beauty, its magnificence, its sublimity—all are his" (3). David C. Hunington, The Landscapes of Frederic Edwin Church: Vision of an American Era (New York: George Braziller, 1966), 10.

10. John Sears, Sacred Places: American Tourist Attractions in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 12. The Boston preacher is quoted in Elizabeth McKinsey, Niagara Falls: Icon of the American Sublime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 107. Sears, Sacred Places , 3-30, and McKinsey, Niagara Falls , 100-16, are indispensable in explaining the national and popular resonance of Niagara Falls in nineteenth-century America. Also important in understanding the national appeal of landscape painting in this period is Angela Miller, "Everywhere and Nowhere: The Making of the National Landscape," American Literary History 2 (summer 1992): 207-29. "In the absence of a shared race history," she argues, visual representations from the Hudson River School "proffered a sense of national identity" (213). My understanding of collective imagining draws upon Anderson's discussion of the logo in "Census, Map, Museum," Imagined Communities , 163-85.

11. Lincoln, "Fragment on Niagara Falls," in Collected Works , 2:10-11.

12. Hunington, The Landscapes of Frederic Edwin Church , 70; for a discussion of the radical dimensions of Church's Niagara , see 69; McKinsey, Niagara Falls , 206. Hunington states that "Frederic Church and the United States of America were one" (61) in his argument that Church was the artist of Manifest Destiny. Such a view, I think, is essentially correct, though in the absence of further commentary, this interpretation risks reproducing the ideological message of Church's painting insofar as it understands Niagara as an uncomplicated, grand patriotic expression without remarking upon the less glorious aspects that reside in American expansionism and its artistic imaginings. In addition, I want to insist that my grouping of Church and his mentor Cole is not an attempt to collapse the differences between the two. Cole's landscape paintings—often punctuated with tree stumps that suggest an ambivalence about American inroads into the wilderness—cast a more sombre tone than Church's works. Cole's apprehensions culminate in his Course of Empire series, whose ruined classical monuments bespeak reservations about American exceptionalism. For detailed descriptions of the differences between specific works by Cole and Church, see Franklin Kelly, Frederic Edwin Church and the National Landscape (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press: 1988). Adam Badeau's description of Church's Niagara underscores how the antebellum art patron was disposed to imagine herself or himself at the scene, or better yet, how via the image, he or she outdistanced spatial restrictions to stand at the site of a homogeneous polity: "The idea of motion he [Church] has imparted to his canvass, the actual feeling you have of the tremble of the fall." The Vagabond (New York: Rudd and Carleton, 1859), 123.

13. Cole is quoted in Barbara Novak, American Painting of the Nineteenth-Century: Realism, Idealism, and the American Experience (New York: Praeger, 1969), 63; Badeau, The Vagabond , 123-24. For a reading of Cole's Niagara Falls as an evocation of cosmic unity, see McKinsey, Niagara Falls , 213-14. It is important to remember that the sublime works to elevate humans even as it diminishes them. In many nineteenth-century landscapes, faint views of civilization suggest praise for human endeavors that are able to secure a foothold for settlement within the awesome splendor of the wilderness. Thus, Sears argues that the elevated perspective of American landscapes brings to mind "a faintly sacred point of vision that recalls Moses's view of the Promised Land from Mount Pisgah." Sacred Places , 54. Angela Miller extends the implications of this insight, stating that the allusion to Moses's view of the Promised Land was "repeated by Americans like an incantation throughout the period of settlement as they sought to subdue the wilderness and make it blossom as the rose." "Everywhere and Nowhere," 214.

14. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, in Life and Selected Writings , 197.

15. Cole is quoted in Novak, American Painting of the Nineteenth Century , 64. Donald A. Ringe, in The Pictorial Mode: Space and Time in the Art of Bryant, Irving, and Cooper (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1971), examines how the expanse of American nature influenced the consciousness and productions of nineteenth-century painters and writers. And also see Hunington, The Landscapes of Frederic Edwin Church , xi, and McKinsey, Niagara Falls , 247, for instance, who argue that Emersonian principles underlay aspects of Church's and Cole's work.

16. Melville, Pierre , in the Library of America edition, 3. Angela Miller elaborates the political dimensions of nineteenth-century landscape painting. She argues that the tension between part and whole in aesthetic composition replicates the tension between the remoteness of local jurisdiction and the abstractness of federal centralism. See "Everywhere and Nowhere," especially 208-9, 219.

17. John L. O'Sullivan, "The Great Nation of Futurity," in Manifest Destiny , ed. Norman A. Graebner (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968), 19-20; Melville, Moby-Dick , 103, 105, 106. Anderson, Imagined Communities , 22-36. See also Heimert, who discusses how the distinct geographic origins of the Pequod 's mates exemplify positions in the national debates of the mid-century United States. " Moby-Dick and American Political Symbolism," 502.

18. Simms is quoted in Kammen, A Season of Youth , 162; the review of Melville is quoted in Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker, Critical Essays on Melville's 'Pierre; or, The Ambiguities' (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1983), 38; Perry Miller, The Raven and the Whale: The War of Wits and Words in the Era of Poe and Melville (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1956), 31; Melville, "Hawthorne and His Mosses," 1165.

19. Badeau, The Vagabond , 154.

20. Daniel Webster, "The Character of Washington," Works , 1:230; J. Lansing Burrows, "Address Before the Mount Vernon Association, July 4th, 1855," Southern Literary Messenger 21 (1855), 515.

21. Kirkland, Memoirs of Washington , 57.

22. McKinsey, Niagara Falls , 104. The diminutive figures at the base of the falls, enveloped and partially obscured by the spray from the falls, further makes incidental—and forgettable—Native Americans, suggesting their incompatibility within the monumental nation. Wai-chee Dimock demonstrates how the extermination of Native Americans was made to conform to larger narratives of American destiny: "The Indian, as he is described by antebellum ethnographers and politicians, is therefore always the subject of a predestined narrative in which he is responsible for, guilty of, and committed to a fated course of action, in which he appears as... a legible sign of his own inexorable end." "Ahab's Manifest Destiny," in Macropolitics of Nineteenth-Century Literature , ed. Jonathan Arac and Harriet Ritvo (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 190.

23. Ibid. McKinsey discusses the engraving America in terms of "harmony." But is unity the only message that this engraving can narrativize? In chapter 4, I suggest that Williams Wells Brown presents a different strategy of reading sublime national narrative that listens to the story the muted slave of America might tell.

24. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia , in Life and Selected Writings , 197. Given Webster's message, it is not surprising to hear his speech described as illustrative of federalism, as unifying, as "sublime": "The conception of the whole discourse was magnificent; and, being grandly sustained in all its parts, its effect upon the immense auditory, carried away by his lofty sentiments, mingled into one mass, and wrought up as one man to the highest pitch of enthusiasm, was really sublime." Warren, History of the Bunker Hill Monument Association , 150; Webster, "Completion of The Bunker Hill Monument," Works , 1:59

25. Berlant, The Anatomy of National Fantasy , 186.

26. "Editor's Table," 702; Weems, Life of Washington , 5.

27. Berlant makes a similar point: nationalism produces a "powerful politically sanctioned ideology of amnesia" that leads to the erasure of local memory. The Anatomy of National Fantasy , 194. While I agree with Berlant, at the same time, I want to suggest that national history leads to a forgetting of not just local memory, but of national history itself.

28. Weems, Life of Washington , 22; Jared Sparks, The Life of George Washington (New York: Miller, Orton, Mulligan, 1855), iv.

29. Nietzsche, "On the Uses and Disadvantages of History," 62, 71.

30. For the sake of clarity and simplification, I will hereafter refer to the Washington Monument in Baltimore as the Baltimore Monument, and the obelisk in Washington, D.C. as the Washington Monument. My suggestion of an equivalence between Emerson's writing and the national narratives of American monuments deserves further comment. The volume of Emerson's corpus, and its contradiction and diversity, must be somewhat overlooked in order to argue for a sympathy between Emerson and monumental architecture, and yet, as Donald Pease suggests, Emerson's thought, particularly his popular notions of self-reliance and transcendence, proved susceptible to this sort of seamless rendering by the antebellum public. "Emerson himself was not careful to distinguish what he meant by self-reliance from what the term was popularly understood to mean," writes Pease. "His essays and orations exploited the confusion between what he meant and what the public understood." Visionary Compacts , 205. In short, then, my invocations of Emerson are designed as explications of those discrete elements of his thinking that can be taken up to ratify the projects and philosophy of monumental culture. Following Foucault's "What is an Author?" I read Emerson not so much as an autonomous writer, but as a discursive subject whose writing is infused with various cultural forces including the transcendent imagining of the nation. Champion of Young America and critic of national policy, devotee of American exceptionalism and antagonist of United States social institutions, Emerson represents a complexity and a contradiction, not all of whose ideas filtered equally throughout the republic. Like imperial America, my interest lies in Emerson's notions especially conducive to the monumental project.

31. Everett is quoted in Warren, History of the Bunker Hill Monument Association , 115; Melville, Moby-Dick , 132. In addition, to fabled New World political advancements, the Bunker Hill Monument gave testimony to a progressing and more efficient American ingenuity. One of the first railroads built on the American continent ran between Quincy and Bunker Hill, transporting the granite blocks used in construction. While expenditures for the Baltimore structure totalled two hundred and twenty thousand dollars, the Bunker Hill monument, containing twice the amount of cubic feet and sixty feet higher, was estimated at one hundred and twenty thousand dollars. See Richard Frothingham, History of the Siege of Boston, and the Battles of Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill , (Boston: C. C. Little and J. Brown, 1849), 353-54.

32. Pease, Visionary Compacts , 217. John Bodnar reads monuments such as the Vietnam Veterans Memorial as instances in which "official culture" tries to override "ordinary" culture by using nationalism to predominate the "profane" experiences of "ordinary people and ordinary emotions." He suggests that Webster's speeches at Bunker Hill, by championing the middle classes, worked to foreground this ordinary citizen, but I find it hard not to see Webster's praise as a ratification of a common, undifferentiated culture committed to prosperity and progress. In Webster's era, so much of what was considered to be "common'' or "ordinary" was understood as coincident with America itself. See John Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 7, 25.

33. Weems, Life of Washington , 9; Everett is quoted in Warren, History of the Bunker Hill Monument Association , 116; William W. Wheildon, Memoir of Solomon Willard, Architect and Superintendent of the Bunker Hill Monument (Boston: Monument Association, 1865), 223. Just as contributions and certificates permitted the citizen to imagine himself or herself as part of national history, at Niagara Falls the souvenirs, guide books, and certificates from trips to Termination Rock were all directed at "tourists who stepped out of their ordinary routines, their familiar and obscure surroundings, and stepped onto the stage of history." Sears, Sacred Places , 23-24.

34. Wheildon, Memoir of Solomon Willard , 191; Frederick Loviad Harvey, History of the Washington National Monument and the Washington National Monument Society (Washington, D.C.: Elliot Printing, 1902), 72. Traces of division still disfigure the Washington Monument even though it was completed in 1886. The visible discrepancy in the shading of the marble blocks between the lower and upper portions of the monument preserves memory of the cessation of national construction in the Civil War era.

35. Melville, Moby-Dick , 141; see Anderson, Imagined Communities , 24-25.

36. Webster, "Completion of the Bunker Hill Monument," Works , 1:86-87, 105. Hannah Arendt outlines this republican notion of the past and religare in "What is Authority?" in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Viking, 1968). Arendt describes how the Roman republic saw itself moving into a future that extended to the foundations of the past.

37. Foucault, Discipline and Punish , 202-3. The entire chapter on Panopticism (195-228) is key to understanding Foucault's ideas about the intersection of visibility and disciplinary individualism. In light of Foucault's investigations, one is struck by the fact that the granite for the Bunker Hill Monument, an icon of democratic freedom, was prepared by forced labor at the state prison.

38. Pease, Visionary Compacts , 45. By saying that American monumen-talism does not make individuals visible, I do not intend to discount that within the United States, individuals are also highly visible registers of simultaneously, power, knowledge, and resistance. The existence of extensive police forces, public-opinion polls, and the popularity of psychological therapy may be taken as signs of panopticism.

39. Webster, "Completion of the Bunker Hill Monument," Works , 1:83.

40. Foucault, Discipline and Punish , 201, 207.

41. Melville, Letters , 210.

42. Herman Melville, Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile in the Library of America edition, 425. All further references made to this edition will be included in the text.

43. Melville, Letters , 170; "Editor's Table," 701. Daniel Reagan, in "Melville's Israel Potter and the Nature of Biography," American Transcendental Quarterly 3 (September 1989): 257-76, though he may misrepresent an elitist tendency of Emerson's notions of biography by concentrating upon Representative Men , is helpful in generating a historical context for nineteenth-century American biography. For the monarchical tension within Melville's authorship, see chapter 2 of Dimock, Empire for Liberty .

44. Chase's classic work, Herman Melville , locates many of Melville's figures within the American folk tradition; for further treatment of the folk influences in Israel Potter , see 176-83.

45. Brodhead, Hawthorne, Melville, and the Novel , 191.

46. Melville, Letters , 78. For an exploration of the parallels between Melville and Bartleby, see Leo Marx, "Melville's Parable of the Walls," in Herman Melville's 'Billy Budd,' "Benito Cereno," "Bartleby the Scrivener," and Other Tales , ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1987), 11-29. John Seelye further elaborates on metaphysical grounds the differences between Melville and Emerson. Melville , 7-8.

47. "Editor's Table," 701. In his account of monumental history, Nietzsche describes a situation relevant to Israel's effacement, emphasizing the pitfalls of neglect, of smoothing out "what is individual,": "If, therefore, the monumental mode of regarding the past rules ... the past itself suffers harm : whole segments of it are forgotten, despised, and flow away in an uninterrupted colourless flood." "On the Uses and Disadvantages of History," 69, 70-71.

48. Perhaps inadvertently, Warren records the ways in which the monumental forgets and pushes the individual toward oblivion. Warren notes that "it was promised in the beginning that the names of all those who should give a single dollar would be preserved in perpetual remembrance," only to apologize that such a project remained to be realized. History of the Bunker Hill Monument Association , vii. Peter J. Bellis's discussion supports the idea that Israel Potter identifies amnesia and alienation as key elements of the monumental. Melville's "reinscription" of Potter's autobiography as biography works to " discredit the notion of historical narrative as simple 'recollection'; history is, he insists, a fictionalizaton, a reinscription that obscures the reality of alienation and loss." "Israel Potter: Autobiography as History as Fiction," American Literary History 2 (winter 1990): 610.

49. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 179; Frothingham, History of the Siege of Boston , 344; Webster, "Completion of the Bunker Hill Monument," Works , 1:86. Wu Hung's essay on Tiananmen Square provides a helpful account of how monuments can act to implement a fixed, temporal order. The Goddess of Democracy that sprang up under much different auspices than the official state buildings in the square, he suggests, offers an almost antimonumental posture insofar as "it was prepared to be destroyed." It is this ephemeral nature that connotes the political for Arendt. "Tiananmen Square: A Political History of Monuments," Representations 35 (summer 1991): 113.

50. Webster, "Completion of the Bunker Hill Monument," Works , 1:107; Lincoln, "Address before the Young Men's Lyceum," Collected Works , 1:112, 1: 115. This understanding of Lincoln's politics emerges from my reading of Arendt, who describes politics as a human realm of interconnection that is necessarily transitory and fragile. See The Human Condition , especially 199-200.

51. Nietzsche, "On the Uses and Disadvantages of History," 72.

52. Carolyn Porter, "Reification and American Literature," in Ideology and Classic American Literature , ed. Sacvan Bercovitch and Myra Jehlen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 203. See also Pease, who comments on the "incomprehensible," nonactual aspect of this passage. Visionary Compacts , 227.

53. See Bellis, " Israel Potter ," for a thorough accounting of the differences between Melville's biography and Potter's autobiography. Bellis sums up the significance of these differences by suggesting that Israel Potter is a "critique of narrative representation that is at once a theoretical or self-reflexive gesture and an attack on the mythmaking that supports an ideology of national progress" (622).

54. In his discussion of Pierre , Sundquist suggests a relation between parody and patricide. Home as Found , 177-82. For an illuminating account of contemporary resistance to the official history of the monumental, see Marita Sturken, "The Wall, the Screen, and the Image: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial" Representations 35 (summer 1991): 118-42.

55. Israel R. Potter, Life and Remarkable Adventures of Israel R. Potter (1824, reprint; New York: Corinth Books, 1962), 50. As Melville remarks in his preface, despite the original's autobiographical form, it was written by another, most probably its publisher, Trumbull.

56. Arendt, The Human Condition , 186; Bellis, " Israel Potter ," 607.

57. Foucault, Power/Knowledge , 82, 81; Berlant, The Anatomy of National Fantasy , 149, 105.

58. Nietzsche, "On the Uses and Disadvantages of History," 76. See also Bhabha, "DissemiNation," for a discussion of how alterity and difference such as is found in Israel Potter represents the nation as an "ambivalent, ragbag narrative" (318).

59. Nietzsche, "On the Uses and Disadvantages of History," 69, 71. Laughter performs another vital function by guarding against the excessive use of critical history, which can destroy life. Critical history can lead to an outlook that declares "For all that exists is worthy of perishing. So it would be better if nothing existed" (76). For further elaboration of the need to temper critical history with metaphor and tragedy, see White, Metahistory , 332-72.