Winner 2023 Rhetoric Society of America Book Award Winner 2022 Marie Hochmuth Nichols Award from the National Communication Association At a moment in US politics when racially motivated nationalism shifting relations with Latin America and anxiety over national futures intertwine understanding the long history of American preoccupation with magnitude and how it underpins national identity is vitally important. In American Magnitude Christa J. Olson tracks the visual history of US appeals to grandeur import and consequence megethos focusing on images that use the wider Americas to establish US character. Her sourcesincluding lithographs from the USMexican War preCivil War paintings of the Andes photo essays of Machu Picchu and WWIIera films promoting hemispheric unityspan from 1845 to 1950 but resonate into the present.ampampnbsp Olson demonstrates how those crafting the appeals that feed the US national imaginaryartists scientists journalists diplomats and othershave invited US audiences to view Latin America as a foil for the greatness of their own nation and encouraged white US publics in particular to see themselves as especially American among Americans. She reveals how each instance of visual rhetoric relies upon the eyes of others to instantiate its magnitudeand falters as some viewers look askance instead. The result is the possibility of a postmagnitude United States neither great nor failed but modest partial and imperfect. ampampnbsp