Curating the Republic: The Origins of the US Embassy

Abstract

What can the historical study of early American legations in Europe tell us about how the United States approaches its embassies in the world today? Embassy buildings today represent over two hundred years of American trial and error in constantly shifting foreign political environments. They are, by their nature, intended to straddle multiple modalities: public and private; political and personal; global and local. It was because of their deliberately fluid representational states that the first American diplomatic missions to Europe could attempt to bridge the paradigm of aristocratic and democratic approaches to embassy curation abroad. As the first modern post-colonial democracy, the diplomatic agents of the US experimented with the placement, decoration and occupation of their ministerial spaces. In doing so, they innovated strategies of fluidity still seen in American embassies today.