International Travel, Intellectual Life, and Global Influences on the United States

Until very recently, the antebellum period would have seemed to be a singularly unpromising one to look for global influences upon American culture. Scholarship and, to a lesser extent, textbooks have left behind the old canard that the United States “turned inward” after the War of 1812 in order to focus on internal economic, political, and cultural development. Yet textbooks, in particular, have been slow to change their content to reflect a burgeoning new literature on American overseas engagement in this formative period. Chapters on the antebellum era still focus on economic developments like the transportation or market “revolutions,” on the evolution of a distinct political culture, and debates over chattel slavery. ¹ And, once in a while, the language of inwardness pops up explicitly, sometimes in the most surprising places. ² Nevertheless, recent attention to the embeddedness of the United States in all eras of its history within global commercial, cultural, and population streams has changed how historians approach the antebellum period for good, and for the better. ³