... as part of Melville’s Battle-Pieces and a damaged pastoral tradition in Traces of War: Poetry, Photography, and the Crisis of the Union (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 165–200. The spirited commerce at the mouth of the Mississippi that makes New Yorkers drool in “Thomas Elliott’s...

... The wager of this chapter is that Thomas Paine’s cultural afterlife, especially in antebellum evangelical circles, as both an open atheist and, however contradictorily, a sneaking moral hypocrite can generatively recalibrate how scholars of the Early Republic define “religion” and help us...