In the Shadow of the Moon by Anthony Aveni

Author:Anthony Aveni
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300227574
Publisher: Yale University Press

First U.S. eclipse map, showing the path of the February 1831 eclipse. (The American Almanac and Repository of Useful Knowledge for the Year 1831 [Boston: Gray & Bowen], p. 13, from the John Adams Library at the Boston Public Library)

When the early nineteenth-century eclipses took place, tourism did not exist in the United States. It first began to flourish in the Hudson River Valley in the following decade close to the environs of New York City, where wealthy aristocrats acquired easy access to the picturesque Catskills.46 By 1825, American tourism spread to points farther west, like Niagara Falls, again via the Erie Canal. America was now beginning to shape its own national identity, which meant further distancing itself from European ways (recall John Quincy Adams’s appeal to Congress for the creation of the Smithsonian Institution). The scenic American landscape was part of structuring that distinction.

Seeing nature in a unique American setting became one response to the negative forces of industrialization and urbanization affecting the culture.47 As historian Marguerite Shaffer remarks, the elite classes “turned to the romantic notion of the sublime to enact personal dramas of spiritual transcendent fantasies of the Protestant culture of salvation now threatened by consumerism.”48 By the time of the 1878 eclipse in the Great American West, the subject of the next chapter, touring by rail had begun to flourish. (The Raymond and Whitcomb Tour Company included Pike’s Peak on one of its itineraries.)49 There the gaze of eclipse chaser and eclipse prophet would meet the inquiring eyes of expeditionary forces of astronomers and other scientists pursuing the lunar shadow in search of answers to new questions of their own.

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