The Promised land

Episode number 2 of Series “American visions”.
In the second program of the series, Robert Hughes explores how religion was to have a fundamental impact on the shaping of American culture. The first European settlers presented the New World as both paradise and hell, a source of plunder, and a center of religious fantasy. During the early years of what Hughes describes as an invasion of North America by Europeans, the Spaniards conquered New Mexican Indian pueblos and citadels such as Acoma and set up their own architectural forms. These came to include the adobe Catholic church and the art of the santos- crude and vivid and designed to drive out the ancient gods from Indian minds. Meanwhile, seventeenth-century New England began to create a severe culture of practicality and moral rigor produced by Puritanism and later Utopian sects such as the Shakers. Then the Germans came, the Pennsylvania Dutch, the Quakers. In an America conceived as a religious refuge, a sanctuary for what Abraham Lincoln called the “half-chosen people,” what was used bears the print of what was believed. This pervaded the early paintings, crafts and buildings of Puritan America. The program concludes with the emergence of a culture which could begin to be called American. Written and presented by Robert Hughes.