Red Jacket Bathed Here: Creating Race and Nation at Early National Mineral Springs

Beginning after the American Revolution, bourgeouis white northern Americans began to tell Indian origin stories about their mineral springs and spa towns. Appearing in guidebooks, periodicals, fiction, poetry, travel narratives, and scientific discourse, these origin stories had some identifiable r...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of the early Republic 2022-09, Vol.42 (3), p.421-450
Main Author: MACKINTOSH, WILL B.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
19th century
Academic discourse
American culture
American Indians
American Revolution
Culture
Fiction
Identity formation
Legitimacy
Leisure
Minerals
National identity
Native peoples
Periodicals
Poetry
Race
Resorts & spas
Summer
Towns
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Beginning after the American Revolution, bourgeouis white northern Americans began to tell Indian origin stories about their mineral springs and spa towns. Appearing in guidebooks, periodicals, fiction, poetry, travel narratives, and scientific discourse, these origin stories had some identifiable roots in Native American practices but were largely an invention of elite white culture. They served as a neat intellectual resolution to some of the central problems of national legitimacy and national identity formation that faced the most privileged Americans. They imagined alternative non-British origin stories for shared Anglo-American cultural practices, which enabled elite white northerners to construct an alternative elite American national identity. They also established the legitimacy of white claims to an American landscape that was still in the process of being expropriated from Indians, and served to explain and deny the continued presence of Indians in white leisure spaces. The cultural script of Indian origins for Anglo-American summer leisure practices at mineral springs resolved a complex and interconnected set of cultural ambivalences through the simple, emblematic figure of an Indian at a spring.
ISSN:0275-1275
1553-0620
1553-0620
DOI:10.1353/jer.2022.0045