Could it be that Whitman was writing about New York in 1855? How different was New York from Paris or London at the same time? One way to study this question is to look at the city street maps of these places.
New York of 1855 has the look of a well planned and new city; its streets and blocks are orderly and linear. The streets of New York stand in stark contrast to the meandering, unfolding, and twisting streets of Paris and London. The people of New York are forced to move through time and space differently than their counterparts in London and Paris. It is not hard to imagine that Americans face more than their physical space differently than the English and the French. These maps alone don't state this explicitly but give us a visual image we can start from as we try to understand the differences between these people and their environments.
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