| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Egypt Land: Race and Nineteenth-Century American Egyptomania. By Scott Trafton. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. xx, 348 pp. Cloth, $84.95, ISBN 0-8223-3375-9. Paper, $23.95, ISBN 0-8223-3362-7.)

From the craze for things Egyptian spurred by the King Tut exhibition to the architectural motifs of the Pentagon, ancient Egypt still resonates in American culture. Most historians, though, would rate Egypt's resonance substantially below that of Attic Greece or the Roman Republic. In Egypt Land, however, Scott Trafton argues that many nineteenth-century Americans saw the United States as neither a latter-day Greece nor a Rome. Instead, America was a new Egypt, with slaves, grandeur, gloom, and all. The Mississippi River would become the new Nile. Trafton is terrific evoking the seductive paradoxes Ancient Egypt created for nineteenth-century Americans: serenity paired with despotism, genius paired with maddening obscurity and morbidity, and, of course, the great problem of whether Pharaoh, the Judeo-Christian tradition's icon of slave mastery, was black.

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