Described by Margaret Fuller as "one of [Illinois's] true patriarchs, the Abraham of a promised land," Morris Birkbeck is remembered for his failed attempt in the early 1800s to found English Prairie, a utopian community sixty miles west of the Illinois-Indiana border. His proposal to reform English society on the American prairie, promoted in Notes on a Journey in America (1817) and Letters from Illinois (1818), initiated a debate between written works that included the eye-witness accounts of such travel writers as William Cobbett, Frances Wright and William Faux. Their discussion of issues like emigration, literary representation and the nature of moral society anticipate current debates in New Western History and in New Historicism about the necessity of revising our narratives of Anglo-American settlement. Specifically, their texts foreground the inseparability of text and terrain when identifying the meaning of Birkbeck's accomplishment. They also highlight the moral dimension of that meaning, reminding us of the generally ignored moral dimension of our own revisions of the American West.
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