Landmark mountains: a vertical history of empire-building and nation-making in the American West

Abstract

Landmark Mountains is a vertical history of the United States that argues landmark mountains reveal how ideology, imagination, and the contradictions of settler colonialism coalesced in the making of empire and nation. These iconic and prominent mountains in the American West were contingent spaces, places to assert the ideology of continental republicanism, settler sites, and contested landscapes in the formation of the American republican empire and nation-state. American explorers and settlers from the Founding of the Republic (1763) to the post-frontier era (1898) imagined prominent western mountains as imperial prizes and as iconic symbols of national meaning and identity. Beginning with early republican ideology, continental presumptions were essential in bolstering the symbolic and imaginative use of both Western and vertical spaces in the service of an expansive republic. During the nineteenth century, explorers and settlers construed the iconic landmark mountains of the American West as both barriers to and symbols of a continental republican empire and, later, of national identity. At key moments in national history, landmark moments were geographical spaces to define again and again what the United States was, who the republic was for, and the role of the citizen in it.