Columbia (personification)

Columbia (/kəˈlʌmbiə/; kə-LUM-bee-ə), also known as Miss Columbia, is a female national personification of the United States. It was also a historical name applied to the Americas and to the New World. The association has given rise to the names of many American places, objects, institutions and companies, including the District of Columbia; Columbia, South Carolina; Columbia University; "Hail, Columbia"; Columbia Rediviva; and the Columbia River. Images of the Statue of Liberty (Liberty Enlightening the World, erected in 1886) largely displaced personified Columbia as the female symbol of the United States by around 1920, although Lady Liberty was seen as an aspect of Columbia.[1] Columbia's most prominent display in the 21st Century is as part of the logo of the Hollywood film studio Columbia Pictures.

"Miss Columbia" redirects here. For other uses, see Miss Columbia (disambiguation).

Personified Columbia in an American flag gown and Phrygian cap, which signifies freedom and the pursuit of liberty, from a World War I patriotic poster

Columbia is a Neo-Latin toponym, in use since the 1730s with reference to the Thirteen Colonies which formed the United States. It originated from the name of the Genoese explorer Christopher Columbus and from the Latin ending -ia, common in the Latin names of countries (paralleling Britannia, Gallia, Zealandia, and others).

Appearance

Columbia is usually depicted unaccompanied in illustrations and appears as a goddess-like human. She is portrayed with auburn, brown, and sometimes black hair, usually wears simple white garment, draped in the American flag, or wearing some other dress with different colors. She is often illustrated with a liberty cap and holding an American flag, and sometimes wielding a shield with the coat of arms of the United States on it. She is also known as "Miss Columbia", implying that she is unmarried.

History

Early
Main article: Personification of the Americas
Personification of the Americas in Meissen porcelain, c. 1760, from a set of the Four Continents

The earliest type of personification of the Americas, seen in European art from the 16th century onwards, reflected the tropical regions in South and Central America from which the earliest European travelers reported back. Such images were most often used in sets of female personifications of the four continents. America was depicted as a woman who, like Africa, was only partly dressed, typically in bright feathers, which invariably formed her headdress. She often held a parrot, was seated on a caiman or alligator, with a cornucopia. Sometimes a severed head was a further attribute, or in prints scenes of cannibalism appeared in the background.[2][3]

18th century

Though versions of this depiction, tending as time went on to soften the rather savage image into an "Indian princess" type, and in churches emphasizing conversion to Christianity, served European artists well enough, by the 18th century they were becoming rejected by settlers in North America, who wanted figures representing themselves rather than the Native Americans they were often in conflict with.[4]

Massachusetts Chief Justice Samuel Sewall used the name "Columbina" for the New World in 1697.[5] The name "Columbia" for America first appeared in 1738[6][7] in the weekly publication of the debates of Parliament in Edward Cave's The Gentleman's Magazine. Publication of parliamentary debates was technically illegal, so the debates were issued under the thin disguise of Reports of the Debates of the Senate of Lilliput and fictitious names were used for most individuals and place names found in the record. Most of these were transparent anagrams or similar distortions of the real names and some few were taken directly from Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels while a few others were classical or neoclassical in style. Such were Ierne for Ireland, Iberia for Spain, Noveborac for New York (from Eboracum, the Roman name for York) and Columbia for America—at the time used in the sense of "European colonies in the New World".[8]

Columbia and an early rendition of Uncle Sam in an 1869 Thomas Nast cartoon having Thanksgiving dinner with a diverse group of immigrants[9][10]

By the time of the Revolution, the name Columbia had lost the comic overtone of its Lilliputian origins and had become established as an alternative, or poetic, name for America. While the name America is necessarily scanned with four syllables, according to 18th-century rules of English versification Columbia was normally scanned with three, which is often more metrically convenient. For instance, the name appears in a collection of complimentary poems written by Harvard graduates in 1761 on the occasion of the marriage and coronation of King George III.[11]

Behold, Britannia! in thy favour'd Isle;
At distance, thou, Columbia! view thy Prince,
For ancestors renowned, for virtues more;[12]

The name Columbia rapidly came to be applied to a variety of items reflecting American identity. A ship built in Massachusetts in 1773 received the name Columbia Rediviva and it later became famous as an exploring ship and lent its name to new Columbias.

After independence
John Gast's 1872 painting American Progress depicts Columbia as the Spirit of the Frontier, carrying telegraph lines across the Western frontier to fulfill manifest destiny.
After the United States gained independence from Britain in the American Revolutionary War, the new capital city of South Carolina was Columbia.

No serious consideration was given to using the name Columbia as an official name for the independent United States, but with independence, the name became popular and was given to many counties, townships, and towns as well as other institutions.

In part, the more frequent usage of the name "Columbia" reflected a rising American neoclassicism, exemplified in the tendency to use Roman terms and symbols. The selection of the eagle as the national bird, the heraldric use of the eagle, the use of the term Senate to describe the upper house of Congress and the naming of Capitol Hill and the Capitol building were all conscious evocations of Roman precedents.

Columbian

The adjective Columbian has been used to mean "of or from the United States of America" such as in the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition held in Chicago, Illinois. It has occasionally been proposed as an alternative word for American.

Columbian should not be confused with the adjective pre-Columbian, which refers to a time period before the arrival of Christopher Columbus in 1492.

Personification
The April 6, 1901 cover of Puck depicts Columbia wearing a warship bearing the words "world power" as her Easter bonnet.

As a quasi-mythical figure, Columbia first appears in the poetry of the African-American Phillis Wheatley in 1776, during the Revolutionary War:[13]

One century scarce perform'd its destined round,
When Gallic powers Columbia's fury found;
And so may you, whoever dares disgrace
The land of freedom's heaven-defended race!
Fix'd are the eyes of nations on the scales,
For in their hopes Columbia's arm prevails.[14]

Especially in the 19th century, Columbia was visualized as a goddess-like female national personification of the United States and of liberty itself, comparable to the British Britannia, the Italian Italia Turrita and the French Marianne, often seen in political cartoons of the 19th and early 20th century. The personification was sometimes called Lady Columbia or Miss Columbia. Such an iconography usually personified America in the form of an Indian queen or Native American princess.[15]

The image of the personified Columbia was never fixed, but she was most often presented as a woman between youth and middle age, wearing classically draped garments decorated with stars and stripes. A popular version gave her a red-and-white-striped dress and a blue blouse, shawl, or sash, spangled with white stars. Her headdress varied and sometimes it included feathers reminiscent of a Native American headdress while other times it was a laurel wreath, but most often, it was a cap of liberty.

Early in World War I (1914–1918), the image of Columbia standing over a kneeling "doughboy" was issued in lieu of the Purple Heart medal. She gave "to her son the accolade of the new chivalry of humanity" for injuries sustained in the World War.

In World War I, the name Liberty Bond for savings bonds was heavily publicized, often with images from the Statue of Liberty (Liberty Enlightening the World). The personification of Columbia fell out of use and was largely replaced by the Statue of Liberty as a feminine symbol of the United States.[16]

After Columbia Pictures adopted Columbia as its logo in 1924, she has since appeared as bearing a torch similar to that of the Statue of Liberty, unlike 19th-century depictions of Columbia. The Columbia Pictures logo is the most famous and prominent display of Columbia to many current Americans.

Statues of the personified Columbia may be found among others in the following places:

Modern appearances

Since 1800, the name Columbia has been used for a wide variety of items and places:

See also

References
  1. Donald Dewey (2007). The Art of Ill Will: The Story of American Political Cartoons. New York University Press. p. 13. ISBN 9780814719855. Retrieved February 1, 2020. (Minus the torch and the book, Columbia herself had been called 'Liberty' long before F. S. Bartholdi's sculpture was dedicated in New York harbor in 1886.)
  2. Le Corbellier, 210–218
  3. Higham, John (1990). "Indian Princess and Roman Goddess: The First Feale Symbols of America" (PDF). Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society. 100: 48. Retrieved July 3, 2022. America alone was a savage. An early predilection for exhibiting her as a naked cannibal, toying with a severed head or a half-roasted human arm, gave way in the seventeenth century to less threatening but still muscular images. She became, for example, a barbaric queen, borne aloft in a giant conch shell, scattering baubles from her cornucopia to the European adventurers crowding below [...].
  4. Higham, 55–57
  5. Thomas J. Schlereth, "Columbia, Columbus, and Columbianism" in The Journal of American History, v. 79, no. 3 (1992), 939
  6. The Gentleman's Magazine, Vol. 8, June 1738, p. 285
  7. Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Dec. 1885, pp. 159–65
  8. Debates in Parliament, Samuel Johnson.
  9. Kennedy, Robert C. (November 2001). "Uncle Sam's Thanksgiving Dinner, Artist: Thomas Nast". On This Day: HarpWeek. The New York Times Company. Archived from the original on November 23, 2001. Retrieved November 23, 2001.
  10. Walfred, Michele (July 2014). "Uncle Sam's Thanksgiving Dinner: Two Coasts, Two Perspectives". Thomas Nast Cartoons. Archived from the original on March 5, 2016. Retrieved March 5, 2016.
  11. Hoyt, Albert. "The Name 'Columbia'", The New England Historical & Genealogical Register, July 1886, pp. 310–13.
  12. Pietas et Gratulatio Collegii Cantabrigiensis apud Novanglos, no. xxix. Boston, Green and Russell, 1761.
  13. Steele, Thomas J. (1981). "The Figure of Columbia: Phillis Wheatley plus George Washington". The New England Quarterly. 54 (2): 264–266. doi:10.2307/364975. ISSN 0028-4866. JSTOR 364975.
  14. Selections from Phillis Wheatley Poems and Letters Archived 2006-09-08 at archive.today
  15. "Origins: The Female Form as Allegory". Archived from the original on October 23, 2019. Retrieved March 25, 2014.
  16. David E. Nye (1996). American Technological Sublime. MIT Press. p. 266. ISBN 9780262640343.
  17. "Hail Columbia". Hail Columbia. Archived from the original on November 18, 2012. Retrieved February 2, 2013.
  18. Literata (2011). "Columbia". The Order of the White Moon Goddess Gallery. Archived from the original on October 24, 2012. Retrieved February 2, 2013.
  19. Hatchett, Charles (1802), "Outline of the Properties and Habitudes of the Metallic Substance, lately discovered by Charles Hatchett, Esq. and by him denominated Columbium", Journal of Natural Philosophy, Chemistry, and the Arts, I (January): 32–34.
  20. Nicholson, William, ed. (1809), The British Encyclopedia: Or, Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, Comprising an Accurate and Popular View of the Present Improved State of Human Knowledge, vol. 2, Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, p. 284.
  21. Bernard F. Dick. The Merchant Prince of Poverty Row: Harry Cohn of Columbia Pictures. University Press of Kentucky. pp. 40–42.

Sources
  • Higham, John (1990). "Indian Princess and Roman Goddess: The First Female Symbols of America", Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society. 100: 50–51, JSTOR or PDF
  • Le Corbeiller, Clare (1961), "Miss America and Her Sisters: Personifications of the Four Parts of the World", The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, vol. 19, pp. 210–223, PDF Archived 2019-08-05 at the Wayback Machine
  • George R. Stewart (1967). Names on the Land. Houghton Mifflin Company: Boston.
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