Spatial metaphors infuse and shape scholarly conversations about 19th century US history, especially intellectual history. Notions of the public and private, of borderlands and expansion, and especially of domesticity—all of these are powerful concepts for understanding ideas in action. But they are also rooted in the material realities of spaces that constituted the 19th-century US landscape—homes and workplaces, prisons and hospitals, schools and theaters, plantations and reservations, boundaries and borderlands, and the land and sea themselves—as well as the lived experiences of those who created, occupied, shaped, and maintained them. Read more