View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm—The Oxbow

The island lay, as through the ages past, fair and imperial in the Atlantic. Though now was it becoming wanton, even to its undoing. Else would not this be written.
—Elizabeth G. Birkmaier, Poseidon’s Paradise: The Romance of Atlantis (1892)

This chapter proposes directionality as a key term for ecocritical interpretation, concentrating on the painter Thomas Cole...

American historians refer to the period of the late 1820s to about 1850 as the Jacksonian Era, a way of indicating the importance of the polarizing figure of Andrew Jackson, president from 1829 to 1837, in nearly every aspect of politics, culture, and society in the United States during these years. Jackson was a leader like no other the young nation had seen. The first six presidents had all been...

Among the most famous images of western American art—so famous that many no doubt regard it as a cliché—is Emanuel Leutze’s mural of migrating pioneers, which decorates the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C. An equally famous (and equally...

In the fall of 1773, James Boswell and Dr. Samuel Johnson embarked on a tour to the Hebrides in Scotland. On their way they spent two days at Armadale on the Isle of Skye, waiting for a favorable wind for their vessel to carry them northward. While at Armadale, Boswell wrote: