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King James Bible He found him in a desert land, and in the waste howling wilderness; he led him about, he instructed him, he kept him as the apple of his eye. DEUTERONOMY 32:10. St. John the Baptist Goes into the Wilderness. GIOVANNI DI PAOLO 1454. Temptation of St. Anthony.
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King James Bible He found him in a desert land, and in the waste howling wilderness; he led him about, he instructed him, he kept him as the apple of his eye. DEUTERONOMY 32:10
St. John the Baptist Goes into the Wilderness GIOVANNI DI PAOLO 1454
From WILDERNESS & THE AMERICAN MIND, by Roderick Nash For the Puritans, of course, the wilderness was metaphor as well as actuality. On the frontier, the two meanings enforced each other, multiplying horrors. 17th Century writing is permeated with the idea of wild country as the environ- ment of evil. Just as the Old Testament scribes represented the wilderness as the cursed land where satyrs and lesser demons roamed, the early settlers agreed with Michael Wiggelsworth that on the eve of settlement, the New World was A waster and howling wilderness/ Where none inhabited/ But hellish fiends and brutish men/ That Devils worshipped. The idea of a pagan continent haunted the Puritan imagination . . . . Cotton Mather believed . . . Satan had seduced the first Indian inhabitants for the purpose of making a stronghold . . . . As self- styled agents of God, the Puritans conceived their mission as breaking the power of evil. (36)
WATSON AND THE SHARK John Singleton Copley 1771
Fake INDIAN SURRENDER SCENE Miama leader Little Turtle surrendering to Anthony Wayne at the Battle of Fallen Timbers, but no such scene ever occurred.
MANIFEST DESTINY THE PROMISED LAND. 1821-1873 William S. Jewett
KINDRED SPIRIT Asher Durand 1849
THE NOBLE SAVAGE Benjamin West.