ABSTRACT
Historians have long addressed the importance of industrialization to the nascent United States of America in the nineteenth century. Americans were a socially disparate people, spread over an immense, wilderness-filled space, yet national cultures were still effectively promulgated over the Republic’s first century. While significant points of conflict simmered and boiled over at critical junctures (e.g., the moral and political standoffs that culminated in the Civil War, the ongoing war between capital and labor, the virtual extermination of the continent’s original inhabitants, and the anxieties over immigration), a particular image of ‘‘America’’ still coalesced during this period, an image repeated in millions of mass-produced, mass-distributed cultural commodities ranging from dinnerware to sheet music. This image centered largely on the dyad of home and frontier: the reproduction of domesticity on alien terrain. ‘‘America,’’ as circulated through this mass-produced image, was a nation of (white) settlers building communities and sharing in the bonds of Home and Property. The simplicity of this image amplified its appeal, both in the United States and abroad (to actual or would-be immigrants), and its industrialized production seemed to offer voluminous evidence of its veracity. See, it suggested, America really is about turning the wilderness into home, reproducing the familial (and the familiar) in a New World. It is striking that this image, its visibility exponentially amplified through industrial repetition, prophecies the comforting characters, settings, and narratives of so many twentieth-century television reruns.
