Description: Analyzes how imagery and rhetoric of pan-American grandeur from 1845 to 1950 used Latin America as a foil for creating US national identity and a particular American way of feeling.
Review Quotes: "Olson's skillful dissection of how visual images inspire feelings of Americanness is a powerful insight into how national identity is grounded in assumptions of racial and cultural superiority, and speaks in important ways to this cultural moment." --Lois Agnew, author of Outward, Visible Propriety: Stoic Philosophy and Eighteenth-Century British Rhetorics