Imagining America

Before America could be discovered, it had to be imagined. Columbus knew what he hoped to find before he left Europe. Geographically, America was imagined in advance of its discovery as an arboreal paradise, Europe’s dream of verdurous luxury. After that discovery, the political founders of the United States were its inventors. They too, like the explorers, constituted America as a promised land, a conjuration of the liberal hopes or aristocratic fears of Europe. They saw the new kind of state they were creating not as a fact but as a formula, not a natural growth of history but the actualization of an idea. As the Gettysburg Address puts it, America was created in homage to a proposition.