Ranging through the long nineteenth century, this book explores the evolving cultural relationship between Britain and the United States during this period. From language, speech and racial attitudes to imaginings of the Western frontier, travel memoirs, the role of theatre and Anglophilia and Anglophobia, it shows how actors on both sides of the Atlantic expressed understanding of themselves and their not-so-foreign Other.

Tracing the ways in which these cultural activities served to imagine, shape, confirm and maintain cultural topographies, it shows how they constructed Anglo-American differences which endure today. It challenges narratives of fixed national identity by emphasising cultural borrowing, hybridity and shifting perspectives in an era of faster, easier transatlantic and American continental travel, and promotes an understanding of how these identities were both entrenched and challenged.