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Three The Visual Rhetoric of Northern Evangelicalism
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Published:August 1999
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Abstract
iewed as a single iconographical system, the images illustrating the tracts, almanacs, books, and periodicals of the ATS form a pattern of messages that circulated a distinct ideology about Protestantism and the new American republic. The argument of this chapter is that images distributed by the Tract Society articulated a more or less uniform rhetoric and propagated a national mythology that consisted of expanding boundaries emanating from an inner heartland. In the introduction to their important study of sacred space, David Chidester and Edward Linenthal have argued quite cogently that a boundary or frontier is not a line but “a zone of intercultural contact and interchange.”1 Living as a native on the border of an expansive society means living in a situation that places the heartland to one’s back and the land of others before one’s face. The mass-mediated images produced by the ATS envisioned a national ideology that configured a border advancing against aliens in order to expand the heartland. The two-border and heartland-were constructed as parts of a single cultural system, positing one another in the politics of representation. The border was coded male and consisted of the conquest of such others as Mexicans, Indians, and Catholic immigrants; whereas the heartland was female, the domestic domain of the interior that generated the nation from within. While male colporteurs and missionaries engaged ethnic and racial others on the advancing borders of the American republic, the heartland was visualized in Tract Society publications as the sphere of the nurturing mother, ensconced in her domestic space caring for children. The two iconographies were part of a single ideology and intermingled on occasion, as I will show.
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