Description
Book SynopsisIn the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries depictions of New England flooded the American art scene. Childe Hassam, Willard Metcalf, Theodore Robinson, and Julian Weir, and other well-known artists produced images of quaint villages...
Trade Review"Faced with rapid industrialization, burgeoning social conflict, and massive immigration, late-nineteenth-century New England elites embarked upon the construction of a national identity rooted in the imagined past of their own region. Julia Rosenbaum brilliantly charts how painters and sculptors, writers and intellectuals, economic elites and political players worked to define this identity, and how their imperial project eventually faltered on the shoals of the nation's emerging celebration of regional diversity. By mapping the changing relationship between regional and national identities at the moment of the emergence of modern America, Rosenbaum's beautifully written book is a major contribution to the history of American nationalism." -- Sven Beckert, Harvard University
"Visions of Belonging is a well-written, well-organized, and carefully researched book in which Julia B. Rosenbaum convincingly argues that Americans at the turn of the nineteenth century searched for a national identity through regional affiliation, especially New England. Rosenbaum argues that the American Impressionists celebrated landscape art not for its national identity but for its celebration of rural New England-its identification with place, people, and history." -- Vivien Green Fryd, Vanderbilt University
