In the 1830s and early 1840s, the American geological community was struggling to define itself and its place in both the American context and the context of international science. That American context included explicit and self-conscious attempts to define and defend “American” culture and re-define America’s social structure. American geologists found themselves negotiating appropriate patterns of deference and authority in both the American and the international contexts. American experiences with two British geologists in particular provide insight into these tensions and the ways in which they were—or were not—resolved. George William Featherstonhaugh (1780-1866) and Charles Lyell (1797-1875) visited the United States in the 1830s and 1840s, and their activities generated telling conflicts. Henry Darwin Rogers (1804-1882) provides a useful case study of an American who made the geological journey across the Atlantic in the opposite direction at approximately the same time.