This article examines the development of sartorial visual itineraries for nativism and white nationalism in the United States between about 1840 and 1865. For scholars studying the history of racism in the United States, the documents of so-called “scientific racism” are of paramount importance. These privilege the biovisual body as a site of epistemological and ontological truth. But the first years of the nineteenth century witnessed the proliferation of racialist taxonomies based not on the physical body but on alleged manifestations of ancestral and racial spirit in dress. Using evidence from contemporary costume albums, maps, and theatre prints, this essay argues that US nativist movements took their bodily iconography from a ballooning transatlantic popular and ethnographic interest in what today we call “traditional” or “ethnic” dress, turning nativist figures into folk types, colorful characters who could represent the purity of the so-called Anglo-Saxon US people in their style of dress.

本文考察了大约 1840 年至 1865 年间美国本土主义和白人民族主义裁缝视觉路线的发展。对于研究美国种族主义历史的学者来说，所谓的“科学种族主义”文件至关重要. 这些使生物视觉身体成为认识论和本体论真理的场所。但 19 世纪的头几年见证了种族主义分类法的扩散，这些分类法不是基于身体，而是基于所谓的祖先和种族精神在服饰上的表现。本文利用当代服装专辑、地图和剧院版画的证据，认为美国本土主义运动的身体形象来自于对今天我们称之为“传统”或“民族”服饰的日益膨胀的跨大西洋流行和民族志兴趣，