Heartless Immensity: Literature, Culture, and Geography in Antebellum America

As the size of the United States more than doubled during the first half of the nineteenth century, a powerful current of anxiety ran alongside the well-documented optimism about national expansion.
Heartless Immensity
tells the story of how Americans made sense of their country’s constantly fluctuating borders and its annexation of vast new territories. Anne Baker looks at a variety of sources, including letters, speeches, newspaper editorials, and schoolbooks, as well as visual and literary works of art. These cultural artifacts suggest that the country’s anxiety was fueled primarily by two concerns: fears about the size of the nation as a threat to democracy, and about the incorporation of non-white, non-Protestant regions. These fears had a consistent and influential presence until after the Civil War, functioning as vital catalysts for the explosion of literary creativity known as the
American Renaissance.
Building on extensive archival research as well as insights from cultural geographers and theorists of nationhood,
Heartless Immensity
demonstrates that national expansion had a far more complicated, multi-faceted impact on antebellum American culture than has previously been recognized. The book argues that in order to understand the nation’s shift from republic to empire as well as to understand American culture in a global context, it is first necessary to pay close attention to the processes by which the physical entity known as the United States came into being.