Offering a fresh perspective on the making of the American nation, Forging America: New Lands and High Culture shows how the various new portions of the country--the Northeastern wilderness, the West, and later the South and Midwest--were assimilated into the national and intellectual consciousness of the young nation. Specifically, author David P. DeVenney examines the ways in which the arts helped achieve this assimilation, primarily through music and painting, but also through literature and architecture. The search for American-ness in the arts, for what it meant to be an...