A Journey to Brazil, 1853

Figure 5.2: A pair of pressed bug wings from the back of George Dunham's travel journal.

Another instance in the journal that nds Dunham re ecting on the connections between the U.S. and
Brazil centers around their respective celebrations of independence.

He re ects, I think there is as much money spent in Brazil for powder and reworks every week as there is in the United States on the fourth of July the 2nd day of July they celebrate their Independence and it is a queer kind of independence to make much fuss about (111). Here Dunham is forced to recognize, even as he struggles to downplay, the commonalities between the U.S. and other places throughout the Americas, parallel histories that revolve around settler colonialism, anti-colonial independence, and African slavery.

By reading Journey to Brazil carefully, one can detect the multiple strands for reading the nineteenth-century relationship between the U.S. and the rest of the hemisphere. Is that relationship one of imperialist domination, as presaged in José Martí's brief essay Our America and analyzed in scholarly works such as Gretchen Murphy's Hemispheric Imaginings: The Monroe Doctrine and Narratives of U.S. Empire? Or is that relationship better explained by the set of mutual cultural, political, and economic exchanges chronicled by Anna Brickhouse in her book, Transamerican Literary Relations and the Nineteenth-Century Public Sphere? The real value of the Dunham journal, nally, lies in its ability to remind us that for writers and readers in the nineteenth-century U.S., concerns about the intersections between the national and the foreign stretched beyond the ever-expanding western frontier, beyond even a burgeoning spot of economic activity such as the South Paci c, and included, in fact, the entirety of the Americas.

Bibliography
Brickhouse, Anna. Transamerican Literary Relations and the Nineteenth-Century Public Sphere. New York: Cambridge UP, 2004.
Cummins, Maria. El Fureidis. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1860.
Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick, or, The Whale. Berkley: U of California P, 1979.
Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life; Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas; Mardi: A Voyage Thither. New York: Viking Press, 1982.
Murphy, Gretchen. Hemispheric Imaginings: The Monroe Doctrine and Narratives of U.S. Empire. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2005.
Nelson, Dana. The Word in Black and White: Reading Race in American Literature. New York: Oxford UP, 1992.
Poe, Edgar Allan. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. New York: Modern Library, 2002.
Warner, Susan. The Wide, Wide World. New York: Putnam, 1851.