River of dreams : imagining the Mississippi before Mark Twain
From empire building in the Louisiana Purchase to the trauma of the Civil War, the Mississippi's dominant symbolic meanings tracked the essential forces operating within the nation. As Thomas Ruys Smith shows in this groundbreaking work, the story of the imagined Mississippi River is the story of antebellum America itself.
Print Book, English, ©2007
Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge, ©2007
Criticism, interpretation, etc
x, 232 pages : illustrations, carte
9780807132333, 0807132330
182615621
Empire : Jefferson and "the Mississippi we must have"
Frontier : Jackson and the "half-horse, half-alligators"
Travel and tourism : Europeans on "this foul stream"
Moving panoramas : the "useful illusion" of the visual Mississippi
Crime and punishment : "extraordinary metaphysical scamps" in the Mississippi