My dissertation examines visual representations of the Mississippi River created between 1832 and 1861. Advances in printing and transportation technologies enabled maps, illustrated magazines, engravings, bird’s-eye views, landscape paintings, and moving panoramas to circulate the river’s presence widely throughout the United States. I analyze how these popular visual representations – which combined pictorial conventions from the realms of science, fine art, and spectacular entertainment – situated the river in relation to contemporary debates about progress and civilization, masculinity and work, and the role of slave labor and industrial commerce. These images highlight the complex and often fragmented place that the Mississippi occupied in the cultural terrain, even as nationalist rhetoric positioned the river as the lynchpin of an increasingly conflicted and far-flung nation.