Tourism and Taxonomy: Marianne Moore and Natasha Trethewey in Jefferson’s Virginia

In the poetry of modernist Marianne Moore and contemporary American poet Natasha Trethewey, we find tours of historic places that are associated with the country’s founding history. How does the activity of the tour contemplate the ways in which historical knowledge takes shape and around what priorities and ideals? Exploring this question, these poems stage touristic encounters that serve not only to document the places visited but to question the frames by which a site is “seen” in relation to—often in support of—selected versions of American history. The impact of systems of classification and categorization that are common to the development of taxonomic thought, embraced by Thomas Jefferson and other early Americans, comes under inspection in these touristic poems

Framing the view: The *Western landscape and nineteenth-century narratives of expansion.

This study traces the flowering of Western scientific exploration during the fifteen years following the Civil War. During these years, the empirical modes of perception and representation associated with Western exploration gained growing cultural authority and increasingly came to frame discussions of Western policy. At the same time, the systematic exploration of the West revealed the region in new and sometimes startling ways, in some cases prompting far-reaching revisions in the nation\u27s self-perception. The stakes of these revisions became especially acute in the 1870\u27s as the nation\u27s frontier line flowed toward the alien landscapes of the arid West, prompting both anxieties and debates concerning the nation\u27s future. These anxieties and debates found expression in the verbal and visual discourses associated with nineteenth-century science, discourses that played a vital role in mediating the West for Eastern readers. The discourses under examination here include the following: exploration narratives and reports, especially the work of John Wesley Powell; cartography and graphic representations of data, with particular emphasis on Francis Amasa Walker\u27s Statistical Atlas of the United States; the elite magazine press, notably the Nation and the North American Review, which provided forums for debate of Western policy; and, finally, the discourse of public display, especially as exemplified in the Western geographic and ethnological exhibits at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition. The roots of these discourses and the modes of vision they suggest are traced to the foundational figure of Thomas Jefferson, whose early support for Western exploration formed the template for later efforts. The discourses noted above combined to form important perceptual frameworks brought to bear on the West, and they in turn supported an image of the region and its native inhabitants that naturalized and legitimated dominant narratives of American progress, while occluding many of the troubling political dimensions of national expansion, including the place, both literal and figurative, of Native Americans in the nation\u27s future. This occlusion took place within a broader ideological process whereby the West, traditionally a symbol for republican individualism, was reconfigured as a field for corporate consolidation

Portraits of Working Women: Lola Ridge’s “The Ghetto” and the Visual Record

This essay focuses on Lola Ridge’s long poem “The Ghetto” in relation to the gendered imagery and visual construction of the modern laborer emerging across early twentieth-century print media. Perpetuating gendered notions of the modern worker as predominately masculine, late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century visual representations of the laborer typically feature manly, virile figures, often in resistance to capitalism and inevitably eliding the industrial woman laborer. Ridge’s “The Ghetto” alternatively locates modern labor in the female industrial worker. The essay considers the poem’s splicing of collective and individual portraits of immigrant working women, developing a visual rhetoric that asserts women’s agency amidst modernity’s changing forms of work, insisting upon their visibility as workers, activists, and feminists. Consideration of several visual print genres includes women’s labor publications; social and industrial documentary photography; and periodical illustrations from The Masses. In visually representing women workers, these sources of visual media contextualize Ridge’s approach in “The Ghetto” and social attitudes toward gender and labor persisting in the century’s early years