In the nineteenth century, as white Americans proceeded to build and delineate
their nation, they carried on a process they had started as colonists, settling a new world, and transforming its landscape, which had been modelled by Native Americans up to that time. Meanwhile, this landscape profoundly affected postcolonial United States. It was a time where one discovered complicated links between material conditions, ideology and power. It affected the physical context of the American environment and the changing experience of American life.
The nineteenth century saw the continental expansion of the United States and a transportation revolution that resulted from it, as well as industrialization, astonishing population growth and urbanization. The artistic community was called into action, producing whole schools of painting, which glorified the development of the nation. Starting with the Hudson River School founded by Thomas Cole, the nation obtained a visual representation of Manifest Destiny. While the shift to landscape painting in Europe at about the same time was seen as a move away from the more eminent topics of historical painting, in America the representation of landscape by the Hudson River School was un

This painting has often been taken as a celebration of the supremacy of man over nature. Yet, the way the sky is represented, this huge amount of smoke seem to have the sole purpose of showing how industrialism is devastating nature. The Lackawanna Valley is very much representative of this crucial dilemma that many Americans faced in the nineteenth century: expansion requires the destruction of nature. In the best case, it delivers a rather ambiguous message about the value of technological progress.

Asher Brown Durand was also a Hudson School painter and, although made a few years later, his Progress appears to have many common points with Cole’s Return of the Hunter.

In 1868, the year before the achievement of the new transcontinental railroad, Frances F. Palmer produced Across the Continent: Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way, a title borrowed from Leutze's Westward The Course of Empire Takes Its Way (1861), a famous fresco in the Capitol, in Washington D.C. Palmer’s work of art was then made famous and popular by Nathaniel Currier and James Merritt Ives, most likely the most renowned American print makers of the nineteenth century.

The painting was made to order of the proprietor of the Delaware-Lackawanna-and Western Railroad, and depicts a wide landscape with a steam train coming toward the foreground, the tender of which is filled with wood, not coal, an interesting detail, since logs are far less polluting than coal. In the background, a view of Scranton, Pennsylvania. The picture seems to unite wilderness and civilization in a pleasant description of a bucolic, flourishing rural town.