Longfellow's Evangeline was hailed as a great and distinctively American work when it appeared in 1847, and the poem's use of North American history was a key element in its favourable reception. This use of history, however, is ambiguous and complex. The epic continues, first of all, in a long tradition of romanticized retellings of the heart-rending story of the Acadians. But the work also engages in a dual-level dialogue with both the mid-eighteenth-century history of the Acadians, who are pitied, without inciting indignation, and the contemporary history of mid-nineteenth-century America, whose expansionism it both implicitly celebrates and criticizes.