This rich collection of essays is intellectually substantial, culturally significant, and much overdue. One of the least appreciated phenomena of American culture is its remarkable history of self-fashioning. The American continent was settled by European immigrants for a variety of reasons over some four centuries, and each wave of settlers contributed to the burgeoning mythology of the New World its own set of self-fulfilling prophecies. America was--and to a significant extent still is--a largely European construct, a cultural matrix whose outlines emerged and evolved often re-actively as individuals and groups found their expectations challenged by the stark realities of the American continent and its Native peoples. Hence much of the American experience has historically had to do with questionable attempts by non-native peoples to civilize the alien experience by recasting both its physical reality and its underlying ethos within experiential, intellectual, cultural, and mythic paradigms whose origins lay in the Old World
