Susan Gillman is distinguished professor of literature and American studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of Blood Talk: American Race Melodrama and the Culture of the Occult, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

• List of FiguresPreface: The Strange Career of the American MediterraneansIntroduction: Beginning with Humboldt1 American Mediterraneans: A Space-Timeline2 Nineteenth-Century Geographers and Their Mediterraneans3 1890s California-Pacific Mediterraneans4 1940s Gulf-Caribbean MediterraneansEpilogue: Ending with BraudelAcknowledgmentsList of AbbreviationsNotesIndexA gallery of figures follows page 000

"In this stunningly original book, Susan Gillman takes the reader on a journey through multiply imagined American Mediterraneans and their contrasting encodings of race, climate and geographical destiny. Opening and ending with vigorous interrogations of the legacies of Humboldt and Braudel, she focuses on the two New World regions where the Mediterranean allusion has had the most fraught political history. In Southern California, Anglo-American entrepreneurs, otherwise ignorant of the authentic Mediterranean character of the environment, invented a romantic Spanish culture to sell real-estate while expunging indigenous and Mexican histories. In the circum-Caribbean, meanwhile, Mediterraneity with a more Roman and imperial inflection helped justify the expansionist project of slaveowners. In each case, Gillman warns us that geohistorical metaphors have often served as quasi-scientific projections of a Western right to conquest."

Susan Gillman is distinguished professor of literature and American studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of Blood Talk: American Race Melodrama and the Culture of the Occult, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

• List of FiguresPreface: The Strange Career of the American MediterraneansIntroduction: Beginning with Humboldt1 American Mediterraneans: A Space-Timeline2 Nineteenth-Century Geographers and Their Mediterraneans3 1890s California-Pacific Mediterraneans4 1940s Gulf-Caribbean MediterraneansEpilogue: Ending with BraudelAcknowledgmentsList of AbbreviationsNotesIndexA gallery of figures follows page 000

"In this stunningly original book, Susan Gillman takes the reader on a journey through multiply imagined American Mediterraneans and their contrasting encodings of race, climate and geographical destiny. Opening and ending with vigorous interrogations of the legacies of Humboldt and Braudel, she focuses on the two New World regions where the Mediterranean allusion has had the most fraught political history. In Southern California, Anglo-American entrepreneurs, otherwise ignorant of the authentic Mediterranean character of the environment, invented a romantic Spanish culture to sell real-estate while expunging indigenous and Mexican histories. In the circum-Caribbean, meanwhile, Mediterraneity with a more Roman and imperial inflection helped justify the expansionist project of slaveowners. In each case, Gillman warns us that geohistorical metaphors have often served as quasi-scientific projections of a Western right to conquest."

Susan Gillman is distinguished professor of literature and American studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of Blood Talk: American Race Melodrama and the Culture of the Occult, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

• List of FiguresPreface: The Strange Career of the American MediterraneansIntroduction: Beginning with Humboldt1 American Mediterraneans: A Space-Timeline2 Nineteenth-Century Geographers and Their Mediterraneans3 1890s California-Pacific Mediterraneans4 1940s Gulf-Caribbean MediterraneansEpilogue: Ending with BraudelAcknowledgmentsList of AbbreviationsNotesIndexA gallery of figures follows page 000

"In this stunningly original book, Susan Gillman takes the reader on a journey through multiply imagined American Mediterraneans and their contrasting encodings of race, climate and geographical destiny. Opening and ending with vigorous interrogations of the legacies of Humboldt and Braudel, she focuses on the two New World regions where the Mediterranean allusion has had the most fraught political history. In Southern California, Anglo-American entrepreneurs, otherwise ignorant of the authentic Mediterranean character of the environment, invented a romantic Spanish culture to sell real-estate while expunging indigenous and Mexican histories. In the circum-Caribbean, meanwhile, Mediterraneity with a more Roman and imperial inflection helped justify the expansionist project of slaveowners. In each case, Gillman warns us that geohistorical metaphors have often served as quasi-scientific projections of a Western right to conquest."