Something Coming: Apocalyptic Expectation and Mid-Nineteenth-Century American Painting.

Morgan, David

Something Coming: Apocalyptic Expectation and Mid-Nineteenth-Century American Painting. By Gail E. Husch. Hanover: University Press of New England, 2000. xiv + 305 pp. 74 illus. (11 color). $60.00 cloth; $29.95 paper.

This rich study of the iconography of apocalypticism in American painting and popular illustration is a significant contribution to a steadily expanding body of literature on the visual dimensions of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American religion. Husch trains her attention on just a few years at mid-century, from 1848 to 1854, when painters, illustrators, and printmakers participated in what she argues was a national consciousness shaped by "an unusually evocative cluster of historical events that increased anxiety and a sense of lost control" among many American Protestants (2). This close focus allows her to develop detailed readings of images, which she deftly places in conversation with one another. The results are consistently insightful and historically grounded.

Husch shrewdly bases her analysis of visual apocalyptic on a flexible definition of nineteenth-century eschatology. This enables her to show how a considerable range of imagery was informed by the visual rhetoric of apocalypticism, from liberal understandings of progress to pessimistic Whig fears about the decline of republican virtue and divine judgment to longings for the balmy peace of the millennial age. In every case, Husch demonstrates how images were used to discern traces of the nation taking shape in the midst of deep structural change. Millennial visions were carefully regarded by antebellum Americans for the sense of order and hope as well as caution they might offer.

David Morgan
Valparaiso University