Anna O. Marley

This dissertation focuses on important centers of economic and cultural exchange in the early national United States: the wealthy tobacco plantations of Virginia, the booming port city of Baltimore, and the rich farming and mercantile area of the Connecticut River Valley. By using a comparative approach to the study of landscape in this period, this study shows how Americans in various regions of the country invested the landscape with competing meanings, and how they represented those landscapes to themselves within the home in the early national period. In doing so, it explores a genre of landscape representation that has all too often been left out of the history of American art, and thereby yields new insights into late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century American conceptions of nature, home, land, and empire.