“Let Us Paint History”: Religious Visions, Usable Pasts, and Nationalist Futures in the US Capitol Rotunda

This paper demonstrates how the historical paintings in the Capitol Rotunda contributed to the formation of an American national identity by constructing memories of a heroic past, animated by a religious imagination. It considers these paintings in light of Anthony D. Smith’s work on nationalism and reads them alongside primary source materials relating to their production and reception. Despite the sometimes differing, even competing, political and theological visions of these paintings, they cohere in the (re)production of a national creation myth in order to make visible an imagined providential destiny for the American project. This usable past continues to fund nationalist futures that understand domination as America’s divine mission and sacralize regenerative violence, which prompts the question of whether other futures are possible. And if not, what forms of forgetting must be cultivated for the sake of a livable future?