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Kate Sampsell‐Willmann, Nick Yablon. Untimely Ruins: An Archaeology of American Urban Modernity, 1819–1919. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2009. Pp. xiii, 380. $25.00, The American Historical Review, Volume 116, Issue 1, February 2011, Pages 174–175, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr.116.1.174
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In his erudite yet stunningly accessible new book, Nick Yablon has added substantially to the intellectual history of paradoxical and insecure American modernist identity. This monograph rests on the thesis that post‐revolutionary Americans lacked a deep (especially imperial) past during which John Ruskin's “eventful history” could accumulate. Thus, American cultural observers imagined a “heroic past” (p. 5) to justify the republic's heroic destiny. This temporal telescoping meant that past and future existed on the same (untimely) plane, and evidence of longing for historical context for the present found expression in nearly all cultural outlets.
Since American urban expansion occurred during the first age of archaeology—marked by discoveries in Troy and Pompeii—Yablon convinces the reader that the visual impact of ancient ruins was to breed world‐historical legitimacy, a longing at the intellectual heart of a growing nation. “During and immediately after the [R]evolution, the translatio [imperii] connoted the immensity and urgency, as much as the historical legitimacy, of the task of confronting Americans” (p. 38), fulfilling a historical “course” of civilization. Built on the translatio, the transit of empire from East to West, America, as both New Rome and legatee to European empires, needed ruins as emblems and evidence of cyclical history: failure and progress.
