ABSTRACT
Many early modern writers traversing the Atlantic recorded their experiences with natural disasters, including epidemics, droughts and earthquakes. Philothea embraces the diversity of life so often accounted for in Atlantic world writing and argues for the deep social interdependence of any polity, while at the same time eschewing the enlightenment drive to subject all places and peoples to accusatory explanation. In the effort to create a more perfect union within the fragile, post-revolutionary US republic in which Lydia Maria Child grew up, disasters were increasingly attributed to groups of non-citizens and foreign-born people. Lydia Maria Child's romance, Philothea, published one year after Tocqueville finished volume one of Democracy in America, depicts an ancient era when the Athenian leader Pericles introduced a relatively more representative democracy, and the plague spread across the once wealthy and stable city-state.
