Apocalyptic Geographies: Religion, Media, and the American Landscape

How nineteenth-century Protestant evangelicals used print and visual media to shape American culture

In nineteenth-century America, apocalypse referred not to the end of the world but to sacred revelation, and geography meant both the physical landscape and its representation in printed maps, atlases, and pictures. In Apocalyptic Geographies, Jerome Tharaud explores how white Protestant evangelicals used print and visual media to present the antebellum landscape as a sacred space of spiritual pilgrimage, and how devotional literature influenced secular society in important and surprising ways.

Reading across genres and mediaincluding religious tracts and landscape paintings, domestic fiction and missionary memoirs, slave narratives and moving panoramasApocalyptic Geographies illuminates intersections of popular culture, the physical spaces of an expanding and urbanizing nation, and the spiritual narratives that ordinary Americans used to orient their lives. Placing works of literature and visual artfrom Thomas Coles The Oxbow to Harriet Beecher Stowes Uncle Toms Cabin and Henry David Thoreaus Waldeninto new contexts, Tharaud traces the rise of evangelical media, the controversy and backlash it engendered, and the role it played in shaping American modernity.