Wil Verhoeven
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9781846311802
- eISBN:
- 9781846315084
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9781846311802.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter demonstrates the existence of a historically significant, yet at first sight unlikely, connection between two very different groups who wanted to establish attachments to American ...
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This chapter demonstrates the existence of a historically significant, yet at first sight unlikely, connection between two very different groups who wanted to establish attachments to American spaces. On the one hand, British Jacobin radicals of the 1790s who were dreaming of building agrarian utopian communities founded on republican principles of liberty and social and racial equality on the American frontier; and on the other hand, a motley crowd of early Kentucky pioneers and settlers, as well as a variety of land speculators from Virginia and the Middle States, who were dreaming of exorbitant wealth and, in some cases, personal fame.Less
This chapter demonstrates the existence of a historically significant, yet at first sight unlikely, connection between two very different groups who wanted to establish attachments to American spaces. On the one hand, British Jacobin radicals of the 1790s who were dreaming of building agrarian utopian communities founded on republican principles of liberty and social and racial equality on the American frontier; and on the other hand, a motley crowd of early Kentucky pioneers and settlers, as well as a variety of land speculators from Virginia and the Middle States, who were dreaming of exorbitant wealth and, in some cases, personal fame.