Beginning with the first English plantations of l585, this course will explore the peculiar intersections of religious language and political belief in early America. We will trace the logic enabling a rhetorical construction of America as a “New Jerusalem” and of colonization as an “errand into the wilderness.” Turning our attention to the American Revolution and the early national period, we will consider how this reading of the “new world” as a sacred text transformed into a doctrine manifest destiny. We will conclude with Melville’s searing critique of these myths of origin in Moby Dick. Our archive will include promotional literature, sermons and political tracts, maps and charters, histories and war narratives, traveler’s portfolios and landscape paintings