Joel Barlow's Columbiad: A Bicentennial Reading

The year 2007 marks the two-hundredth anniversary since Joel Barlow, an American poet and diplomat, first published his controversial and lengthy poem, The Columbiad. Grandiose in its ambition, Barlow framed the poem as an epic for the New World, a nationalist primer to teach republican citizens the history of the relatively new nation culminating in the American Revolution and the promise of a future utopia stimulated by the United States’ republican ideas and institutions.

Unfortunately, h...