The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 18 (2007)

Transnationalism andAmerican Studies in Place

Karen HALTTUNEN*

When George Lipsitz proclaimed, in 2001, that the ﬁeld of American
studies was “in a moment of danger,” he demonstrated once again thecultural power of the jeremiad that has shaped this academic enterprisesince its emergence in the ﬁrst half of the twentieth century.1 To a signiﬁcant degree, the intellectual vigor of American studies arises from its
never-ending habit of self-reﬂection and critique. Since the 1960s, threesuccessive and inter-related crises have challenged American studies
practitioners to rethink our most fundamental assumptions about our areaof scholarship. The ﬁrst directly challenged the consensus-oriented
myth-and-symbol school that achieved its apex in the 1950s, by turning
attention from a homogeneous “American mind” to a rich proliferationof “minority” histories, literatures, and cultures, exploring the seemingly
inﬁnite variety of identities shaped by social class, race and ethnicity,
gender and sexuality, and, most recently, physical ability. The second
responded to Benedict Anderson’s concept of the nation as “imaginedcommunity” by exploring the ﬁctive qualities of American bourgeois
nationalism, with special attention to American exceptionalism, and to
the ways in which “American national identity has been produced precisely in opposition to, and therefore in relationship with, that which it
Copyright © 2007 Karen Halttunen. All rights reserved. This work may be used,with this notice included, for noncommercial purposes. No copies of this work
may be distributed, electronically or otherwise, in whole or in part, without
permission from the author.
*Professor of History and American Studies, University of Southern California

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KAREN HALTTUNEN

excludes or subordinates.”2 And the third has registered a growing
awareness of how globalization has “disrupted the isomorphism of culture and place, giving new meaning to national and transnational identities,” and raising questions about what a postnational American studies
would require of us.3
The question we now face is, then, what should be our purview? If we
no longer see the nation-state as a neatly bounded container for a uniﬁed
and meaningful national culture, then to what alternative containers or
networks should we turn? This was the central concern of Jan Radway’s
1998 presidential address to the American Studies Association, “What’s
in a Name?” which pointed out that she was presiding over “an association whose very name still so powerfully evokes the ghostly presence of a fantasmatic, intensely longed-for, unitary American culture.”
Radway critically examined three alternative names for “American studies”—United States studies, Inter-American studies, and intercultural
studies—and concluded that while the American Studies Association’sname might be retained, its members should adopt “new forms of bifocal vision, a capacity to attend simultaneously to the local and the global
as they are intricately intertwined.”4 Conspicuous in its absence here is
the national. Radway and other leading American studies scholars haveechoed historian Prasenjit Duara’s summons to “rescue history from thenation” (his title for a study of early twentieth-century nationalisms in
China and India).5 This summons is particularly compelling to historians,
because of our long-time complicity in inventing and fostering the ideaof nationalism, and the ongoing service that nationalism has done for us,
in turn, by providing us with employment. As Eric Hobsbawm pointed
out, “Historians are to nationalism what poppy-growers in Pakistan are
to heroin-addicts: we supply the essential raw material for the market.”6
Much recent American studies scholarship has responded to Prasenjit
Duara’s call with transnational work. The international symposium on“Framing American Studies in Trans-Paciﬁc Perspective” hosted by theJapanese Association of American Studies (June 2006) was one very
fruitful response to the transnational challenge. Studies of borderlands
and zones of encounter, migrations and diasporas, travel and transculturation, routes and ﬂows, and hybridities have abounded in recent years.
Because these phenomena are themselves so integral to globalization,
the transnational can be particularly well-suited (though not exclusive)
to contemporary cultural studies. Such studies employ new ways ofthinking that are made possible by our contemporary experience of theTRANSNATIONALISM AND AMERICAN STUDIES IN PLACE

7

globalization of labor and capital, the lightning speed of communications, rapid global exchanges of cultural forms and media, a professional
world in which our status is sometimes measured by the size of our frequent-ﬂyer mileage balances, and our constant employment (both professional and personal) of the powerful new capacities of the world-wide
Web. One marker of the present strength of transnational work is thatthe next jeremiad has already begun to take shape, in criticisms that the[American] American Studies Association’s “international” initiative is“paradoxically conservative” in its reiﬁcation of national boundaries,
and its construction of a “we” of US-based American studies scholars
versus a “them” of “foreign”-based scholars—a framework that inadvertently replicates the structures of US imperialism.7
But I would like to address a different risk incurred by an exclusive
attention to the transnational: the risk of losing track of place, of what I
called, in my American Studies Association presidential address inWashington, DC, the groundwork of American studies. Globalization
does tend to promote the destruction, homogenization, and Disneyﬁcation of place, not just in the US but all over the world. Scholars acrossthe humanities and social sciences have responded to this threat to placewith a renewed interest in the insights of geography: both the humanistic geography developed in the 1970s by such ﬁgures as Edward Relph
and Yi-fu Tuan, who stressed the power of topophilia, the affective bonds
tying people to place; and the new critical cultural geography thatemerged in the 1980s and ’90s, shaped by such scholars as Doreen
Massey and David Harvey, who focus on the power geometries at workin the social construction of space and place. In our eagerness to reject
the nation-state as the self-evident spatial container for our studies, weshould not abandon the concept of place itself.8
The power of place does in fact inform some of the best examples of
the new transnational scholarship, especially in those borderland studies
which, while challenging the treatment of territories as isomorphic cultural containers, reconceptualize them as sites of multiple encounters andexchanges that generate new cultural hybridities. But despite the considerable elasticity of our present usages of “borderlands” (a term often
enlisted more metaphorically than geographically), not all our subjects
can or should be deﬁned primarily as creatures of the borderlands; andwe need to guard against a tendency to project our own globalizing
sensibilities into the past, onto people whose experience was dramatically different from our own, and whose cultural orientation was more

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signiﬁcantly local or regional than national, much less transnational.
Postnationalism, in other words, invites new studies that are organized
not only in the spaces and places of the transnational, but also in the geographies of the subnational: regions, local communities, neighborhoods,
dwellings, and landscapes—not the “national landscape” that ﬁgured so
prominently in the myth-and-symbol school, but landscapes more true
to the original Dutch concept of landskip, meaning a view that can betaken in by a sweep of the eyes from a single ﬁxed point. As historiansof American cultures, we need to recognize that the relationship between
location and identity has not always been as unstable as it has become
under late capitalism. Sometimes, what anthropologist Liisa Malkki has
called “the metaphysics of sedentarism”—the tendency to identify a people and their culture with a mappable place9—is not imposed by “sedentarist” scholars, but embraced by our historical subjects. When the people
we study understand their cultural identities in local territorial terms, ourtask must be not merely to unmask their ﬁctions of place, but to try tounderstand and explain them.
One of the realizations that emerge from a close attention to the local
and the regional is how much, in our enthusiastic rush to unmask the ﬁctions of the nation-state, we have exaggerated both its unity and its hegemony. Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities10 has generated alarge body of scholarship that tends to treat bourgeois nationalism as theinterpretive ace of trump. Two of them have been particularly helpful tomy efforts to think my way out of the nation-state box. Angela Miller’s
Empire of the Eye: Landscape Representation and American Cultural
Politics, 1825–1875 opens with a strong assertion of the problematic
nature of the “national landscape,” and proposes to supplement Benedict
Anderson by adding visual images to print media as critical factors in
the creation of American nationalism. Miller identiﬁes a host of problems with the concept of “national landscape”: the “politicization of thelandscape under the pressures of sectionalism,” the “instrumentalizationof nature as the raw material of American empire,” the usage of landscape painting to ﬁgure social conﬂicts and to “deﬂect the forces of
localism” that threatened the expanding national market economy, andthe environmental contests being waged over land in the context of economic growth and territorial appropriation. Most important, she points
out that “normative deﬁnitions of nationalism” in the antebellum period
had a pronounced northeastern slant expressive of that region’s claim toa special role in the nation’s origins. Miller coins the term “synecdochic

TRANSNATIONALISM AND AMERICAN STUDIES IN PLACE

9nationalism” to convey northeasterners’ efforts to make their regionalpart come to stand for the nationalist whole. “The form [of landscapepaintings] was local,” she acknowledges, “but the program was national.”11 Thus, despite her commitment to critiquing the notion of a “national landscape,” she ends up arguing that seemingly local forms—suchas paintings of the topographically distinctive Oxbow at Northampton,
Massachusetts, or West Rock in New Haven, Connecticut—served asthin disguises for nationalist projects. Nationalism, however problematic, is still the primum mobile of her study.
To take another example: David Noble’s Death of a Nation: American
Culture and the End of Exceptionalism argues that “nationalist American
studies scholars from the 1930s to the 1960s . . . were not self-consciousof their deﬁnitions of geographic and cultural space [i.e. the boundariesof the nation-state] because they believed that their culture was createdby nature.” They accepted the myth of Nature’s Nation because they
inherited an intellectual tradition stretching back through Charles andMary Beard and Frederick Jackson Turner to George Bancroft, who had“deﬁned the United States as a unique state of nature whose cultural virginity needed to be kept isolated from the rest of the world, which because it was not in harmony with nature, dwelled in darkness.” So Noble,
like Miller, traces the origins of American nationalism and exceptionalism to antebellum New England. Following Miller’s lead, Noble argues
that the “painters of national landscapes” (he asserts, rather than argues,
their nationalism) “suggested that there was not a variety of landscapeswithin a nation’s political boundaries,” and deliberately “minimized thesigniﬁcance of the variety of local cultures within those boundaries.” But
after heavily criticizing this oppressively nationalist lineage, he concedes“how difﬁcult it has been for historians, literary critics, painters, musicians, and architects to imagine an alternative” to the metanarrative of
Nature’s Nation. David Noble’s implied response to Prasenjit Duara isthat rescuing history from the nation may not be possible; we may“never,” he writes, “see another metanarrative that hopes to enclose all
human experience within a single framework” as the mythic narrative of
Nature’s Nation has done.12 In Noble’s study, as in Miller’s, nationalism
is still the ace of trump.
But Noble’s strong reaction against the “naturalization” of the nationstate has inadvertently contributed to the illusion of its hegemony, by
elevating George Bancroft (and his intellectual descendants) over allother historians of his era. In fact, Bancroft—author of the ten-volume

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History of the United States of America from the Discovery of the Continent to the Present (published between 1834 and 1885)—was by nomeans the only historian at work in nineteenth-century New England. It
is professional historians who canonized him, initially by making him
president of the ﬂedgling American Historical Association in 1887, andsubsequently by treating him as the single most important pre-professional practitioner of our craft. And we canonized him precisely because
he took a mystically eternal American Nation as his subject—evident in
his grandiose and anachronistic title, history of the United States since
the discovery—and traced its providentially guided progress towards
greatness. E pluribus unum served as his central theme: the story of how
the initially fragmented, thirteen British-mainland colonies marchedthrough time towards Revolutionary unity. And e pluribus unum characterized his historical methodology: he told this story by picking up
fragments of historical evidence and shaping them into a uniﬁed narrative under the command of a single, authoritative voice.13
In canonizing George Bancroft, professional historians have permitted
his long shadow to obscure a deeper, more grass-roots practice of history
in New England, which privileged not the national, but the local and theregional. Historians don’t actually have to “imagine” an alternative tothe nationalist metanarrative, as Noble suggests; all we have to do is recognize it when we see it, in a richly eclectic set of nineteenth-century
historical practices that we have pejoratively labeled, and largely dismissed, as “antiquarianism.” In an essay titled “The Signiﬁcance ofHistory,” in 1891, Frederick Jackson Turner captured his generation of
newly professionalized historians’ criticism of the older tradition of antiquarianism by explaining that “The antiquarian strives to bring back thepast for the sake of the past; the historian strives to show the present toitself by revealing its origin from the past. The goal of the antiquarian isthe dead past; the goal of the historian is the living present.”14 And generations of historians ever since have proved reluctant to treat seriously
the work of earlier antiquarians, as though they feared that even to readsuch work might taint their own scholarship with a lack of professionalism. This is how most of us have overlooked literally hundreds of historians who, though they failed to achieve the national reputation of theircontemporary, George Bancroft, drew signiﬁcant local and regional
attention, especially in Bancroft’s own region of New England.
After 1790, New Englanders were engaged in an extensive antiquarian
project that focused not on the national, but on the local and regional

TRANSNATIONALISM AND AMERICAN STUDIES IN PLACE

11past; that was devoted not solely to the relatively recent experience ofnationhood, but to what they called “antiquity”; and that examined notjust documentary evidence, but also material culture and oral traditions,archaeological sites and “ruins” of the human-built environment, genealogy and paleography, and even the ﬁndings of geology, paleontology, and early environmental study. New England antiquarianism wasshaped most fundamentally by the English tradition of chorography (literally, place-writing) dating back to the Elizabethan historian William
Camden.15 A central task of historical studies, explained Prof. William
Gammell of Brown University in 1844, was “clothing each familiar spot,
each ruin, and hill-top, and river, with the associations of history.”16 As
the charters to New England’s six state historical associations (founded
between 1791 and 1838) reveal, within the chorographic tradition, natural history and topography were considered an intrinsic part of “civic”
history; and members were encouraged to contribute mineral samples tothe “cabinets,” as well as books and manuscripts to the libraries, of theearly societies.17 Chorography treated history as inextricable from place,and a crucial instrument for transforming space into place by ascribing
to it meaning and the power of memory. Local historians in nineteenthcentury New England kept busy endowing various features of their landscapes—boulders and trees, mountains and waterfalls—with Professor
Gammell’s “associations of history.”
But chorography was a matter not just of surveying the surface of thelandscape for sites of memory; it enlisted both archaeology and the earthsciences to explore antiquity in three dimensions. As Lucy Lippard
wrote, “A layered location replete with human histories and memories,
place has width as well as depth.”18 New England antiquarians did notconceptualize history as a horizontal time-line on the model of Bancroft’s
teleological vision of the American nation-state moving providentiallyacross time from the nation’s “discovery” to its inevitable fulﬁllment in
the American Revolution. Instead, New England antiquarians understood history as a vertically layered process, ﬁlled with breaks and gaps,
but nevertheless readable in the strata of both the human-built environment and the workings of earth history. Theirs was an intensive effort touncover the history of place—local place—both on and beneath thesurface of the landscape in what geologists were coming to call “deeptime”—a past that was far older than the early modern Christian calculation that a mere 6000 years had passed since the Creation. In an effort
to capture the layered quality of this form of history, I have found it useful

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to understand the antiquarian project stratigraphically on the model of ageological core sample. The top layer of New England’s past was the“ancient” colonial period, which local historians explored in hundredsof town histories, state “historical collections,” genealogies, andgazetteers; town centennial and bicentennial celebrations; gravestones
and monuments; “ruins” such as cellar holes, well dents, and old stone
walls; folk tales and legends and interviews with “ancient inhabitants”;
archaeological ﬁnds of artifacts and caches of coins and possessions
buried by settlers during Indian wars; abandoned corn-hills and old fruitorchards, and more. Local historians tirelessly identiﬁed such landscapefeatures as “Charter Oak” and “Meeting-house Rock” as sites of memory—most typically, places where the “founders” (not of the nation, butof the town) had ﬁrst stepped, or found shelter, or gathered into a polity,
or worshipped. Plymouth Rock—originally known as “Forefathers’
Rock”—is merely one local landscape feature that was successfully appropriated for the nation’s story, at that memorable bicentennial celebration where the young Daniel Webster worked a July Fourth crowd
for several hours of dazzling nationalist oratory to convey his vision of
Plymouth Rock as the “threshold” not just of the modest backwater of
Plymouth, but of the nation.19 Antiquarians sought out the landscape features denoting the “ancient metes and bounds” of their communities, andwalked the land with early land-deeds in hand, demarcating one settler’sland from another’s, and noting where rivers had changed their course,
and marshlands had receded, since the deeds had ﬁrst been drawn. They
located and sketched “ancient” houses and churches. A few of them
resorted to archaeology: two clergymen walked, partially excavated, andmapped the “Ancient Settlement of Sheepscot” in the state of Maine, that
had been wiped out in a late seventeenth-century Indian raid.20
Below the colonial stratum of the antiquarian core sample lay Indian
history, both colonial and pre-contact. Indian history did represent a
conundrum to Anglo-American antiquarians, who were inclined by their
Enlightenment cultural chauvinism combined with racism to believe that
Native Americans, who largely lacked a written language, were thus people without history.21 But they enthusiastically embraced the task of writing about the colonial encounter of Europeans and Indians, and, like theprofessional anthropologists who followed, decades later, in their footsteps, they enlisted the ethnographic present to speculate about native
life before what they called the “discovery.” They collected Indian arrowheads and other “relics,” exhumed Indian burials, mapped virtually

TRANSNATIONALISM AND AMERICAN STUDIES IN PLACE

13

every action in King Philip’s War on the landscape, and restored orinvented Indian place-names for natural features such as mountains andbrooks. They erected memorials to those sachems who had allied with
the English against other native groups in colonial Indian war, andmounted a virtual cult of King Philip or “Metacom.”22 They made someeffort to gather Algonquian folklore from the remnants of New
England’s native peoples, and what they couldn’t gather, they invented;
poets such as John Greenleaf Whittier and Lydia Sigourney wove scrapsof Indian legends into romanticized tales, often explicitly located on particular features of the regional landscape.23
Antiquarianism cut deeper still into the past to uncover the layer of
the “Ancient Visitors”—stories of pre-Columbian travelers to New
England, who were believed to include ancient Phoenicians, the Lost
Tribes of Israel, Vikings, Siberian Tartars, wandering Mayans, exiled
Trojans, pirates, “Hindoos,” and Japanese explorers—depending on
which antiquarian you listened to (although some happily embraced two
or more of these theories simultaneously). A single site in southeastern
Massachusetts focused much of the endless debate over which of thesegroups had preceded the English to the region: Dighton Rock, a seventon sandstone boulder (located about 26 miles from Plymouth Rock) thatwas scrawled all over its wide, ﬂat face with curious hieroglyphic inscriptions, lending it the appearance of a “grafﬁti-covered side of a New
York subway train.”24 Inscriptions such as these actually mandated sometheory of ancient European or Asian visitors, based on the convictionthat Native Americans were illiterate. Similarly inscribed rocks all over
New England were scrutinized as evidence of ancient visitors, as wereIndian legends of ancient newcomers to their land. And in 1831, a Fall
River housewife digging for sand to scour her house uncovered what
quickly became known as the “Fall River Skeleton”—decorated withbrass tubing and encased in a shroud of tree bark—which was variously
claimed to be a great Indian sachem, a Viking warrior, a lost Phoenician
mariner, and “one of the Asiatic race, who transiently settled in Central
North America, and afterward went to Mexico and founded those cities.”
This exhumation prompted Longfellow—who regularly passed throughFall River on his way to vacation at the Rhode Island shore—to write his“Skeleton in Armor,” which linked the skeleton to both nearby Dighton
Rock and an old stone tower in Newport, Rhode Island, and spun fromthese threads a tale of Viking romance.25
Indians and ancient visitors pretty much exhausted even the most14

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imaginative antiquarians’ quest for ancient human inhabitants of New
England. But the newly popular sciences of geology and paleontology
presented possibilities for even deeper explorations into the abyss oftime. Geology extended the promise of tracing New England’s past-inplace all the way down to the Creation; and its practitioners often likened
themselves to antiquarians, reading the stony “leaves” of the book ofnature, and scrutinizing ancient “medallions” or fossils left by the “preadamic inhabitants” of the region.26 Mastodon skeletons, “Ornithichnite”
or dinosaur footprints, and fossilized trilobites—all collected by historical societies all over New England—deﬁnitively demonstrated theprinciple of species extinction, suggesting that New England’s ancientnon-human inhabitants had been even more diverse and exotic than its
ancient human visitors. Geological tourism grew popular, as academic
geologists wrote accessible guides of the region’s most prominent geological features, such as Professor Edward Hitchcock’s “ScenographicalGeology of Massachusetts”; and Louis Agassiz’s glacial theory of the
New England landscape, popularized in the 1840s, sent New Englanders
on trips to see the glacier-scoured peaks of the White Mountains, and the“boulder trains” of the Berkshires.27 The nineteenth-century popularityof the Franconia Notch proﬁle known as “The Old Man of the Mountain”
rested in part on the romantic fantasy that the Old Man had stood as thesole witness, across millions of years, of the region’s geomorphology.28
Even this brief sketch of New England antiquarianism illuminates its
dramatic differences from the nationalist history of George Bancroft.
Bancroft’s subject was the nation-state’s teleological movement towards
its providential realization in the American Revolution; the antiquarians’
central subject was local and regional place, the ground beneath theirfeet. Bancroft created a smooth, nearly unbroken narrative of the nation’sorganic, progressive growth, e pluribus unum, since 1492; the antiquarians produced a jerkily episodic history of “antiquity,” ﬁlled with ruptures, silences, and unexpected leaps. Bancroft told the triumphantly
exceptionalist story of Anglo-Saxons walking a progressive time line
into modernity while pursuing their Manifest Destiny by displacing thesavages to open up new spaces for freedom and civilization to the West;the antiquarians told numerous tales of successive occupations of theland by multiple peoples, races, and even nonhuman species, each ofwhich—including the present Anglo-Saxons—was fated to undergo thesame cyclical process of ﬁrst rising, then declining, and ﬁnally becoming
extinct, leaving behind only ruins and traces and “memorials”—colonial

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15

cellars, Indian and Viking bones, dinosaur tracks. And these antiquarianstories most purposefully did not follow the movements of any people,
including the Anglo-Saxons, off the New England landscape into theWest (though they did occasionally follow the migrants until that point
when they disappeared over the western horizon). Theirs was a determinedly, conscientiously “sedentarist” treatment of the past-in-place.
New Englanders were profoundly threatened by the American West,and by the Jacksonian Democrats (including that renegade New
Englander, George Bancroft) who were aggressively promoting its exploration, conquest, and development. In a sense, the exploration of
antiquity was New England’s internal version of what has been called
the “Second Age of Discovery,”29 particularly with reference to the
exploration of the trans-Mississippi West. The nation’s expansion was
draining New England’s political power, cultural authority, and its youth
to the west; and pushing those who stayed behind into increasingly capitalistic enterprises—both industrial production and market-oriented
agriculture—that were transforming the landscape beyond recognition.30
As the nation’s center of gravity shifted horizontally to the west, a wide
range of cultural workers in New England directed their mental energy
vertically into the ground beneath their feet, trying to anchor themselves,
their young people, and yes, their nation, in place. New England chorographers—local historians, ethnographers, poets, geologists, landscapepainters—devised their own peculiar version of Romantic travel: antiquarian time-travel. They managed to explore new territory and discover
exotic curiosities and wonders, all the while heeding Henry David
Thoreau’s dictum that “If a man is rich and strong anywhere, it must be
on his native soil.”31
Was the antiquarians’ version of New England’s past in any sense a
nationalist story? At times, yes, though “micro-nationalist” better captures their tendency to tell the story of a town’s founding as though it
were a microcosm of the nation’s. And Benedict Anderson might recognize in the antiquarian project the nationalist quest for an ancient pastsuitable for a great nation. But it was also transnational, especially in its
accounts of “ancient visitors” from Europe, the Middle East, and Asia
who preceded the ﬁrst English settlers of New England. Above all, it was
subnational, with its focus on local and regional histories, genealogies,
place-names, topographic features, and geomorphology. The central taskof New England chorographers was to transform space into place byplanting memories on and in the land, to reassert the power of the local

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and the regional against the national during an era of aggressive nationformation, the dramatic expansion of the national market economy,
major outmigration from the Northeast, and a Democratic regime thatwas often at odds with New England interests. As Arjun Appadurai has
observed, “the attachments of local subjects to local life” can provide a
point of resistance to the nation-state. “National space can come to bedifferently valorized for the state [which values territory] and for its citizen-subjects [who value what he calls “soil”].” He explains the distinction: “While soil is a matter of a spatialized and originary discourse of
belonging, territory is concerned with integrity, surveyability, policing,and subsistence.”32
Whether or not the antiquarians’ histories of Indians, Vikings, anddinosaurs should be identiﬁed as “an originary discourse of belonging,”
the strong allure of local soil or ground in their work is ungainsayable.
In our tendency to focus on the histories offered by such men as George
Bancroft and Daniel Webster, we risk overlooking hundreds of other
New Englanders who offered an alternative to their nationalist imaginings. New England antiquarians embraced a more hybrid and eclectic
history than the single-stranded story of the Pilgrim Fathers. Their history of New England was not limited to white colonists, but included
Native Americans, a ﬂuid range of pre-Columbian visitors from Europe,
the Middle East, and Asia, and even extinct non-human “inhabitants” ofthe land. Their stories of the invasion of New England did not offer a triumphal account of an Anglo-Saxon conquest leading ineluctably to thebirth of a great and immortal nation, but a long and complex tale of successive populations across the centuries, all of which—including the present Euro-Americans—would eventually give way to their successors.
Their historical research did not stop with documentary evidence, but
employed oral history, legend and folklore, material culture, archaeology, and even paleontology. And their tales of the past did not assume
that the nation-state was the most important unit for study, but focusedon towns, topographic features, and environmental regions such as theWhite Mountains and the Rhode Island coast.
In short, early nineteenth-century New England antiquarians engaged
in many historic practices that were contemptuously cast aside during
the professionalization of history in the late nineteenth century, but havebeen revived in recent decades. To take just one example: antiquarians
could be scornfully dismissive of any historian who failed to walk theland of a town under study; modern environmental historians now rou-

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tinely open their studies with accounts of their own walks on the land.
Though it is not my primary intention to celebrate either the methodological prescience or the scholarly achievements of these antiquarians,
I do take them more seriously as historians than previous scholars havedone. Though in many ways a defensively conservative action, New
England antiquarianism did not promote an exclusively reactionary,parochial sense of place, but constructed what cultural geographer
Doreen Massey has called “a global sense of place” that was hybrid,
ﬂuid, and contested.33
NOTES
This paper was given at the Annual Meeting of the Japanese Association for American
Studies, Nanzan University, 10 June 2006.
1
George Lipsitz, American Studies in a Moment of Danger (Minneapolis: Universityof Minnesota Press, 2001).
2
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reﬂections on the Origins and Spreadof Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991); Janice Radway, “What’s in a Name?” in Donald
E. Pease and Robyn Wiegman, eds., The Futures of American Studies (Durham, N.C.:
Duke University Press, 2002), 53.
3
Lipsitz, American Studies in a Moment of Danger, xvi.
4
Radway, “What’s in a Name?” 51, 65.
5Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995).
6
E. J. Hobsbawm, “Ethnicity and Nationalism in Europe Today,” Anthropology
Today 8 (Feb. 1992): 3.
7
See Sheila Hones and Julia Leyda, “Geographies of American Studies,” American
Quarterly 57 (Dec. 2005): 1019–1032.
8
Karen Halttunen, “Groundwork: American Studies in Place—Presidential Address
to the American Studies Association, November 4, 2005,” American Quarterly 58(March 2006): 1–15.
9
Liisa Malkki, “National Geographic,” in Culture, Power, Place, eds. A. Gubta and
J. Ferguson (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press), 42–62.
10
Anderson, Imagined Communities.
11
Angela Miller, The Empire of the Eye: Landscape Representation and American
Cultural Politics, 1825–1875 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 6, 14, 3, 17.
12David W. Noble, Death of a Nation: American Culture and the End of Exceptionalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), xxiv, xxvii, xlii, xlvi.
13
See Richard C. Vitzthum, The American Compromise: Theme and Method in the
Histories of Bancroft, Parkman, and Adams (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press,
1974), chap. 1.
14
Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Signiﬁcance of History,” quoted in Ellen Fitzpatrick,
History’s Memory: Writing America’s Past, 1880–1980 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 49.
15
On the English tradition of chorography, see Leslie Cormack, Charting an Empire:
Geography at the English Universities, 1580–1620 (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1997), chap. 5.

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16

KAREN HALTTUNEN

William Gammell, “Address delivered before the Rhode Island Historical Society,at the opening of their cabinet, on Wednesday, November 20, 1844” (Providence: B.
Cranston and Co., 1844), 9.
17
For example, the Maine Historical Society proclaimed its duty to collect and preserve everything related to the “civil, ecclesiastical, and natural history” of the state; seeCollections of the Maine Historical Society, I (Portland: Day, Fraser & Co., 1831), i.
The cabinet of the Massachusetts Historical Society contained “an Ermine from New
Hampshire,” “Two natural Garnets, found in the district of Maine,” and “Specimens ofPetrifactions found at Brookline” among its many curiosities; see Proceedings of the
Massachusetts Historical Society, I (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1835),
68, 76, 82.
18
Lucy R. Lippard, The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society(New York: New Press, 1997), 7.
19
See John Seelye, Memory’s Nation: The Place of Plymouth Rock (Chapel Hill: The
University of North Carolina Press, 1998), esp. chap. 4.
20
On the Sheepscot site, see David Cushman, “Sheepscot,” Collections of the Maine
Historical Society IV (Portland, 1855):209–233; and Rev. Samuel Johnson, “Accountof an Ancient Settlement on Sheepscot River,” Collections of the Maine Historical
Society, vol. II (Portland, 1847):229–232. The Collections and Proceedings volumes ofthe six state historical associations for New England are ﬁlled with the materials summarized in this and the following paragraphs.
21
On the perceived “problem” of Native American history, see Steven Conn, History’s
Shadow: Native Americans and Historical Consciousness in the Nineteenth Century(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004), esp. chap. 1.
22
Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American
Identity (New York: Vintage, 1999); Constance A. Crosby, “From Myth to History, or
Why King Philip’s Ghost Walks Abroad,” in Mark P. Leone and Parker B. Potter, Jr.,
eds., The Recovery of Meaning in Historical Archaeology (Washington, D.C.:
Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988), 183–209.
23
See e.g. John Greenleaf Whittier, “Metacom,” in Legends of New England(Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Co., 1992), 37–45; Lydia Sigourney, “TheMohegan Church,” in Select Poems by Mrs. L. H. Sigourney (Philadelphia: John E. Potter
and Co., 1841), 323–25.
24
Stephen Williams, Fantastic Archaeology: The Wild Side of North American Prehistory (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 213. For an overview oftheories concerning Dighton Rock, see Edmund Burke Delabarre, Dighton Rock: A
Study of the Written Rocks of New England (New York: Walter Neale, 1928).
25
John Stark, Esq. in American Monthly Magazine III (Boston, 1837), reprinted inJohn W. Barber, Historical Collections . . . Relating to the History and Antiquities ofEvery Town in Massachusetts (Worcester: Dorr, Howland & Co., 1839), 123–125; Rev.
Orin Fowler, History of Fall River, with Notices of Freetown and Tiverton (Fall River:
Almy Milne, 1862; originally published in 1841), 11; Charles Christian Rafn, Supplement to the Antiquitates Americanae (Copenhagen: Royal Society of Northern Antiquaries, 1841), 3, 6, 15, 19, 27; Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Letters and Journal,
1840.
26
See Edward Hitchcock, Reminiscences of Amherst College: Historical, Scientiﬁc,
Biographical and Autobiographical (Northampton, Massachusetts: Bridgman Childs,
1863); Hitchcock, “An Account of the Ornithichnites or Foot Marks of Birds, on the
New Red Sandstone of the Valley of the Connecticut,” American Journal of Science andArts, vol. 29 (1836); Hitchcock, Ichnology of New England: A Report on the Sandstoneof the Connecticut Valley (Boston: William White, 1858).

TRANSNATIONALISM AND AMERICAN STUDIES IN PLACE19

See Edward Hitchcock, Sketch of the Scenery of Massachusetts (Northampton: J. H.
Butler, 1842). On New England tourism, see Dona Brown, Inventing New England:
Regional Tourism in the Nineteenth Century (Washington: Smithsonian Institution
Press, 1995).
28
See Karen Halttunen, “That Great Natural Curiosity: The Old Man of the Mountainas Lusus Naturae,” Common-place 4 (January 2004) at
http://www.common-place.org/vol-04/no-02/halttunen/.
29
See William Goetzmann, New Lands, New Men: The United States and the Second
Great Age of Discovery (New York: Viking, 1986).
30
See Joseph A. Conforti, Imagining New England: Explorations of Regional Identity
from the Pilgrims to the Mid-Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2001).
31
Bradford Torrey and Francis H. Allen, eds., The Journal of Henry David Thoreau,
14 vols., introduction by Walter Harding (Salt Lake City: Gibbs M. Smith, Inc., 1984):
vol. 10, 20 November 1857, 191.
32
Arjun Appadurai, “Sovereignty without Territoriality: Notes for a Postnational
Geography,” in The Anthropology of Space and Place: Locating Culture, ed. Setha M.
Low and Denise Lawrence-Zuniga (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2003), 338, 340.
33
Doreen Massey, “A Global Sense of Place,” in Reading Human Geography, ed. T.
Barnes and D. Gregory (London: Arnold, 1997), 315–23.
27