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Exploring gendered personifications of author country, Chapter 4 features internationally celebrated writers who occupy literary zones (often as tenants or guests) during the latter half of the nineteenth century. The Howitts return in visits to William and Dorothy Wordsworth, and Harriet Martineau sets up residence, writes about the Lakes, but does not leave us a museum. Similarly marking regions that endorse national canons, Longfellow rents Washington’s Headquarters and haunts a poetic museum (a private tour is narrated). In Concord, capital of literary New England, Hawthorne inhabits Emerson’s house and yields a layered museum; a narrated private tour looks for the ghosts there. Both Hawthorne and his literary descendant James write ambivalently about English literary shrines, again haunting Stratford. James returns to seek the ghosts of Irving’s Sunnyside, and establishes Lamb House in Rye for literary hospitality; a brief personal tour accepts the invitation.

Reading Judas Maccabaeus as rendered by Manchester Zionist, Joseph Massel, Chapter 1 explores the recruitment of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow for Hebrew language revival and the recovery of sacred Hebrew history. Published at the turn of the 20th century, Massel’s Yehūdāh ha-Makābī offers a Judaic revision of Longfellow’s Judaic drama, translating his American biblicism into authentic biblical idioms. Complex in its national motivations and religious foregrounds, Chapter 1 offers an apt opening to the book as a whole, establishing its focus upon textual circularity, exploring annular transmissions unfolding from ancient Middle Eastern sources, to American literary expression, to modern Middle Eastern rendition.

Accused of parading as ‘a Dandy in the clean and elegantly ornamented streets and trim gardens of his verse,’ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow drew the ire of literary nationalist peers who insisted that his reverence for Old World tradition stifled American creativity. As a professor of European languages and literatures, however, a surprisingly radical Longfellow fought to give Americans access to a cosmopolitan education in open lectures, anthologies, and translations. In his reading of Dante and Goethe, he searched for universal elements of literature, which he invoked to counteract nativist claims made by the Young Americans, whom he satirized as jingoists in his novel Kavanagh (1849). In his narrative poem Evangeline (1847), Longfellow puts his theory of literary universalism into practice as he shapes an American landscape ruled by emotion, not territorial conquest.

This chapter examines the musical versions of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem about a Native American legend titled The Song of Hiawatha. It explains that the first musical version of the poem was German-born composer Robert Stoepel's symphony which engaged the audience in a fascinating debate about musical depictions of native America and expressions of cultural identity. It also analyzes the context for Hiawatha in the 1850s and discusses other musical works inspired by Longfellow's poem.

In the nineteenth century, prominent writers and politicians invoked the Temple of Liberty in debates over slavery. The Temple of Liberty was a symbolic term for the United States. Both pro- and anti-slavery advocates had concerns regarding the stability of the nation’s democracy due to the enslavement of African peoples. The idea of Black Samson in the Temple of Liberty became a powerful image within anti-slavery efforts. For example, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1842 poem “The Warning” popularized the image of a blinded Black Samson figure destroying the temple. In this chapter, we analyze how nineteenth-century American writers used Samson to address not only slavery but also other issues related to race. In doing so, these writers created a lasting link between the biblical Samson and African Americans that helped to generate a uniquely American Black Samson figure.

This chapter describes how the Indian functioned as a figure of American national identity within Britain. By the time of the 1851 Great Exhibition, America was presenting herself as a thoroughly modern country, yet the empty floor spaces within the U.S. section of the exhibition provided plenty of opportunity to assess this claim, as well as to consider the implications of unpopulated—or apparently unpopulated—space. The sculptural figure of the Wounded Indian, which formed part of the American exhibit, was readily seized upon for its ironic potential. In the light of national self-presentation, the chapter asks whether or not the Indian was, in Britain, identified with, or against, American identity in the midcentury, a question that is highly pertinent to the reception of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem Hiawatha (1855). The figure of Hiawatha provides an example, moreover—albeit highly fictionalized and idealized—of the ideals of noble masculinity, something that continues the emphasis on the strongly gendered way in which Native Americans were understood.

This chapter focuses on the depiction of Jacques Marquette as a model of civilizing empire. It talks about Marquette's admirers who drew on and transformed historical sources, hagiography, and even anti-Jesuit discourse to depict the Jesuit as a particularly effective civilizer because of his ability to embody gentleness and bravery at the same time, which they often described as his embodiment of both “female” and “male” attributes. The chapter also provides an analysis of the ongoing popularity of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's 1855 epic poem, The Song of Hiawatha. It also argues that some turn-of-the-century Hiawatha readers invoked the poem's Marquette figure as a way to imagine and celebrate their own ongoing attempts at purportedly “peaceful” forms of conquest through the forced assimilation of Native Americans. The chapter ends with a review of the Marquette of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century commemorations that became a prototypical embodiment of imperial vision of domination without violence.

Chapter 5, “E Pluribus Unum: The American Verse-Novel,” travels across the Atlantic to consider how and why verse-novels, imported and indigenous, garnered such remarkable American popularity, especially in the period of the Civil War and during Reconstruction. Beginning with a description of European verse-novels’ transatlantic journeys, fostered by what Meredith McGill has called an American “culture of reprinting,” the chapter then contemplates the native literary scene, which had borne many successful writers of long narrative verse, including Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Finally, it examines a trio of American verse-novels, all heavily indebted to Aurora Leigh, which exemplify, in variously negotiating that debt, how their poets used the form to navigate the cultural terrain: Josiah Holland’s Kathrina: Her Life and Mine, in a Poem (1867), Lucy Larcom’s An Idyl of Work (1875), and Epes Sargent’s The Woman Who Dared. For these writers, verse-novels promised peculiar purchase on their American publics.

This chapter discusses Nicholas Murray Butler's campaign for peace and international cooperation as well as his dispute with two faculty members of Columbia University, James McKeen Cattell and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Dana. In July 1912, Butler traveled to Europe to receive honors and preach the gospel of international understanding. In Paris to be named a Commander of the Legion of Honor, he talked about the new vision of international unity taking over the world. The high point of his trip was a lunch with Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany. This chapter considers Butler's role as purveyor of the international mind and minister without portfolio for world peace, courtesy of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. It also examines Butler's system of international cooperation; Columbia's commitment to World War I effort and its faculty's support of the American military involvement in the war; and the expulsions of Cattell and Dana from Columbia.

This chapter follows the careers of Anthony Philip Heinrich, William Henry Fry, and George Frederick Bristow after their tussle with the New York Philharmonic. Heinrich returned to Europe, where an orchestra in Prague performed two of his symphonies to critical acclaim. Fry’s music did not persist in concert programs, but audiences would remember it as having symbols of democracy with rich metaphorical meanings. The chapter continues with the introduction of Robert Stoepel, a German immigrant composer whose symphony based on Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha took Boston and New York by storm in 1859. Although critics in New York praised the work highly, Bostonian John Sullivan Dwight argued that audiences did not need any more new music, thus thwarting the efforts of all American composers. After reconciling in 1856, Bristow and the Philharmonic premiered his ambitious third symphony three years later.

Pre-existing musical motives absorbed into Parsifal include the “Dresden Amen” formula associated with J.G. Naumann, and the “Excelsior!” motive Wagner assimilated from Longfellow and Liszt. Wagner’s sustained composition of the music during 1877-79 is recorded in many individual sketches whose role is clarified by detailed entries in Cosima Wagner’s diary. Numerous fragmentary sketches can be reconstructed into larger worksheets. Much light is shed on Wagner’s creative process from study of the musical sketches and drafts. Wagner did not proceed in strict sequential order, but needed to envision certain passages in advance before he could begin writing out the continuous drafts of the music: the composition draft and orchestral draft. As the manuscript sources reveal, the last music written was the second half of the transformation music in Act 1, composed in March 1881.

This chapter narrates the event surrounding the first installment of a serial biography in a Honolulu-based newspaper. Alongside this event, an editorial called for people to read the biography to know their history better, reminding them that William Gladstone said that the true enlightenment of a race of people is found once the stories of their birthland are known to them. This editorial, entitled Ka Ipu Alabata (The Alabaster Jar), was written by a highly nationalistic Hawaiian author well-versed in Hawaiian literary traditions. The editorial quoted Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's A Psalm of Life to remind the people of Kamehameha I, the unifier of the Hawaiian Islands.

Aided by American antiquarians, the Royal Society of Northern Antiquities of Denmark produced Antiquitates Americanae (1837) which argued Vinland of the Norse sagas was in southern New England. Editor Carl Christian Rafn published a borderline fraudulent interpretation of Dighton Rock that turned it into a Viking inscription. A colonial windmill in Newport, Rhode Island was misinterpreted as the ruin of a Christian Norse church. An Indigenous burial near Dighton Rock at Fall River was miscast as Norse or Phoenician and immortalized by Henry Longfellow in “The Skeleton in Armor.” This chapter argues Antitquiates Americanae and the RSNA’s Mémoires represented an elaborate exercise in transatlantic Gothicism. White Tribism also factored in Rafn’s analysis, as he made Norsemen the improvers of ancestral Native Americans.