“In a Few Years the Red Man Will Live Only in Legend and in Cooper’s Charming Accounts”: Portrayals of American Indians in Danish Travel Literature in the Mid- and Late Nineteenth Century

During the middle and late nineteenth century, a number of Danish travel writers visited the United States with a view to narrating about the New World to their readers back home. Four of the most prominent writers were Hans Peter Christian Hansen, Vilhelm C.S. Topsøe, Robert Watt, and Henrik Cavling. Among the many topics covered by these writers was that of American Indians. Establishing a narrative of the “vanishing Indian,” the writers endeavored to tie the Indians to a receding landscape of the past and—for the most part—to establish a contradiction between Indians and white “civilization.” Likewise displaying an interest in Scandinavian immigrants, the travel writers sometimes attempted to create links between the Indians and Scandinavian settlers. With no clear Danish interest in celebrating American exceptionalism in the shape of classical U.S. “Manifest Destiny,” the travel writers were nevertheless involved in processes of bonding with the dominant population element of the United States through their common “civilization” and whiteness

“In a Few Years the Red Man Will Live Only in Legend and in Cooper’s Charming Accounts”: Portrayals of American Indians in Danish Travel Literature in the Mid- and Late Nineteenth Century

During the middle and late nineteenth century, a number of Danish travel writers visited the United States with a view to narrating about the New World to their readers back home. Four of the most prominent writers were Hans Peter Christian Hansen, Vilhelm C.S. Topsøe, Robert Watt, and Henrik Cavling. Among the many topics covered by these writers was that of American Indians. Establishing a narrative of the “vanishing Indian,” the writers endeavored to tie the Indians to a receding landscape of the past and—for the most part—to establish a contradiction between Indians and white “civilization.” Likewise displaying an interest in Scandinavian immigrants, the travel writers sometimes attempted to create links between the Indians and Scandinavian settlers. With no clear Danish interest in celebrating American exceptionalism in the shape of classical U.S. “Manifest Destiny,” the travel writers were nevertheless involved in processes of bonding with the dominant population element of the United States through their common “civilization” and whiteness

A life in progress: motion and emotion in the autobiography of Robert M. La Follette

This article is a study of a La Follette’s Autobiography, the autobiography of the leading Wisconsin progressive Robert M. La Follette, which was published serially in 1911 and, in book form, in 1913. Rather than focusing, as have other historians, on which parts of La Follette’s account are accurate and can therefore be trusted, it explains instead why and how this major autobiography was conceived and written. The article shows that the autobiography was the product of a sustained, complex, and often fraught series of collaborations among La Follette’s family, friends, and political allies, and in the process illuminates the importance of affective ties as well as political ambition and commitment in bringing the project to fruition. In the world of progressive reform, it argues, personal and political experiences were inseparable