What makes an American home?

American homes are haunted, Thomas Dumm argues, and so is the American concept of home: it was created by immigrants who took land from the inhabitants and en­slaved others in the name of their own freedom. This set of contradictions gives “home in America” a peculiarly fraught character.

Among the houses Dumm considers key to America’s development are Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, Henry David Thoreau’s cabin at Walden Pond, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s little houses, Emily Dickinson’s house of poetry, and Herman Wallace’s dream house sketched from the confines of the Louisiana State Peni­tentiary. Dumm weaves this combination of textual and physical houses into a unique meditation on the means and uses of freedom in American history.

Jefferson’s Monticello is often considered to have been built as a monument to democracy. The white, landholding man in America was free in a way that few others had been throughout the history of the world. But Dumm demonstrates how Jefferson’s attempt to create this monument enslaved others and himself on multiple levels.