Louis P. Masur
“Remodeling the Nation asks big question and provides eye-opening answers. Duncan Faherty's ambitious book sheds new light on the formation of American identity between the Revolution and Civil War, and through his focus on architecture offers a way of reconceptualizing the period. This is essential reading for all students of post-Revolutionary and antebellum American culture.”
Andy Doolen
"Remodeling the Nation is a thoughtful and illuminating study of how architecture informs representations of American cultural identity during the post-revolutionary and antebellum periods. Faherty has written a persuasive, and long overdue, account about the centrality of architectural models in the lives and work of formative American writers such as Thomas Jefferson, Charles Brockden Brown, William Bartram, Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Faherty provides an insightful analysis of how architecture became an important cultural text for making an ideological break with the colonial past, for forming the private and public character of the new republican citizen, and for speculating on the future direction of the U.S. Remodeling the Nation shows how architecture was essential to the invention of a usable past that could serve as a stable foundation for national development. Tracing a richly historicized genealogy of real and fictional homes that American writers imagined in their attempts to build the nation from the ground up, Faherty restores the missing text of architecture to our understanding of the contested cultural work of nation-building."
David Reynolds
"Showing how views of domestic architecture reflect shifting conceptions of American identity, Faherty adds a fascinating chapter to American cultural and intellectual history. Expertly navigating between architecture, literature, and art, Faherty provides a broadly interdisciplinary study that illuminates each of these fields and creates a sweeping panorama of American culture."
— David Reynolds, author of Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography, winner of the Bancroft Prize and the Ambassador Book Award; finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award
