Joel Daehnke

The recipient of a Charlotte W. Newcombe Fellowship, Joel Daehnke teaches American literature and literary theory at the University of Northern Colorado. He lives in Boulder with his family.

In the Work of Their Hands Is Their Prayer

Cultural Narrative and Redemption on the American Frontiers, 1830-1930

Westward expansion on the North American continent by European settlers generated a flurry of writings on the frontier experience over the course of a hundred years. Asserting that the dominant ideology of America's Manifest Destiny embodied a tense, often contradictory union of Christian and secular republican views of social progress, In the Work of Their Hands Is Their Prayer investigates the ambivalence of the frontier as it was inscribed with redemptive, historical significance by a host of frontier writers.…