| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

A Time to Every Purpose: The Four Seasons in American Culture. By Michael Kammen. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. 336 pp. $39.95, ISBN 0-8078-2836-X.)

This book examines the evolving cultural theme of nature's seasonal changes as a heuristic vehicle for charting American nationalism and nostalgia over the centuries following European colonialism, political independence, and industrial, urban development in the United States. Michael Kammen argues that the cyclical motif of the four seasons became both a patriotic expression of America's natural beauty and a comforting, nostalgic counter to the jarring fluctuations fostered by modernization. Kammen organizes chapters chronologically, though he frequently crosses time boundaries to make thematic comparisons. For instance, in chapter 1, documenting European verbal and visual prototypes from antiquity to the eighteenth century, he relates the Scottish writer James Thomson's seminal poem The Seasons (1730) to an obscure 1835 figure painting by the Scottish American artist Thomas Sully, but not to Gilbert Stuart's The Skater (1782), a famous representation of winter surprisingly absent from Kammen's narrative.

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