Egypt Land

Images and ideas of Egypt have figured prominently in American culture since the turn of the nineteenth century. Discoveries about ancient Egypt by European explorers and scientists coincided almost exactly with the earliest explorations of the American West. American surveyors, politicians, and clergy likened the United States to the Egyptian empire; they compared the Mississippi River to the Nile. In popular and professional cultures and sacred and secular forums, the American obsession with ancient Egypt accelerated throughout the nineteenth-century. Arguing that this Egyptomania was directly related to anxieties about race and race-based slavery, Scott Trafton provides the first comprehensive study of the revealing connections between constructions of race and representations of ancient Egypt in nineteenth-century America. Drawing on literary and cultural studies, art history, and the histories of archaeology and ethnology, Trafton considers different manifestations of nineteenth-century American Egyptomania: the development of American Egyptology and the rise of racialized science, the narrative and literary tradition of the imperialist adventure tale, the cultural politics of the Egyptian Revival architectural movement, and the complex invocations of ancient Egypt within nineteenth-century African America. He shows how debates over what America was and what it could become returned again and again to ancient Egypt. From visions of Cleopatra to the tales of Edgar Allan Poe, from the works of Pauline Hopkins to the construction of the Washington Monument, from the measuring of slaves' skulls to the singing of slave spirituals - claims about and representations of ancient Egypt served as linchpins for discussions about nineteenth-century American racial and national identity.