Download or read book Declarations of Independency in Eighteenth century American Autobiography written by Susan Clair Imbarrato and published by Univ. of Tennessee Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this ambitious work, Susan Clair Imbarrato examines the changes in the American autobiographical voice as it speaks through the transition from a colonial society to an independent republic.Imbarrato charts the development of early American autobiography from the self-examination mode of the Puritan journal and diary to the self-inventive modes of eighteenth-century writings, which in turn anticipate the more romantic voices of nineteenth-century American literature. She focuses especially on the ways in which first-person narrative displayed an ever-stronger awareness of its own subjectivity. The eighteenth century, she notes, remained closer in temper to its Puritan communal foundations than to its Romantic progeny, but there emerged, nevertheless, a sense of the individual voice that anticipated the democratic celebration of the self. Through acts of self-examination, this study shows, self-construction became possible.In tracing this development, the author focuses on six writers in three literary genres. She begins with the spiritual autobiographies of Jonathan Edwards and Elizabeth Ashbridge and then considers the travel narratives of Dr. Alexander Hamilton and Elizabeth House Trist. She concludes with an examination of political autobiography as exemplified in the writings of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. These authors, Imbarrato finds, were invigorated by their choices in a social-political climate that revered the individual in proper relationship to the republic. Their writings expressed a revolutionary spirit that was neither cynical nor despairing but one that evinced a shared conviction about the bond between self and community.
Download or read book Declarations of Independency written by Susan Clair Imbarrato and published by . This book was released on 1993 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Periodical Literature in Eighteenth century America written by Mark Kamrath and published by Univ. of Tennessee Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Similar to the "digital revolution" of the last century, the colonial and early national periods were a time of improved print technologies, exploding information, faster communications, and a fundamental reinventing of publishing and media processes. Between the early 1700s, when periodical publications struggled, and the late 1790s, when print media surged ahead, print culture was radically transformed by a liberal market economy, innovative printing and papermaking techniques, improved distribution processes, and higher literacy rates, meaning that information, particularly in the form of newspapers and magazines, was available more quickly and widely to people than ever before. These changes generated new literary genres and new relationships between authors and their audiences. The study of periodical literature and print culture in the eighteenth century has provided a more intimate view into the lives and tastes of early Americans, as well as enabled researchers to further investigate a plethora of subjects and discourses having to do with the Atlantic world and the formation of an American republic. Periodical Literature in Eighteenth-Century America is a collection of essays that delves into many of these unique magazines and newspapers and their intersections as print media, as well as into what these publications reveal about the cultural, ideological, and literary issues of the period; the resulting research is interdisciplinary, combining the fields of history, literature, and cultural studies. The essays explore many evolving issues in an emerging America: scientific inquiry, race, ethnicity, gender, and religious belief all found voice in various early periodicals. The differences between the pre- and post-Revolutionary periodicals and performativity are discussed, as are vital immigration, class, and settlement issues. Political topics, such as the emergence of democratic institutions and dissent, the formation of early parties, and the development of regional, national, and transnational cultural identities are also covered. Using digital databases and recent poststructural and cultural theories, this book returns us to the periodicals archive and regenerates the ideological and discursive landscape of early American literature in provocative ways; it will be of value to anyone interested in the crosscurrents of early American history, book history, and cultural studies. Mark L. Kamrath is associate professor of English at the University of Central Florida. Sharon M. Harris is Lorraine Sherley Professor of Literature at Texas Christian University.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Early American Literature written by Kevin J. Hayes and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2008-02-06 with total page 656 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of Early American Literature is a major new reference work that provides the best single-volume source of original scholarship on early American literature. Comprised of twenty-seven chapters written by experts in their fields, this work presents an authoritative, in-depth, and up-to-date assessment of a crucial area within literary studies. Organized primarily in terms of genre, the chapters include original research on key concepts, as well as analysis of interesting texts from throughout colonial America. Separate chapters are devoted to literary genres of great importance at the time of their composition that have been neglected in recent decades, such as histories, promotion literature, and scientific writing. New interpretations are offered on the works of Benjamin Franklin, Jonathan Edwards and Dr. Alexander Hamilton while lesser known figures are also brought to light. Newly vital areas like print culture and natural history are given full treatment. As with other Oxford Handbooks, the contributors cover the field in a comprehensive yet accessible way that is suitable for those wishing to gain a good working knowledge of an area of study and where it's headed.
Download or read book The Enlightenment written by Paul Hyland and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 494 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This oustanding sourcebook brings together the work of major Enlightenment thinkers to illustrate the full importance and achievements of this great period of change.
Download or read book Jack Tar s Story written by Myra C. Glenn and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-08-31 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jack Tar's Story examines the autobiographies and memoirs of antebellum American sailors to explore contested meanings of manhood and nationalism in the early republic. It is the first study to use various kinds of institutional sources, including crew lists, ships' logs, impressment records, to document the stories sailors told. It focuses on how mariner authors remembered/interpreted various events and experiences, including the War of 1812, the Haitian Revolution, South America's wars of independence, British impressment, flogging on the high seas, roistering, and religious conversion. This book straddles different fields of scholarship and suggests how their concerns intersect or resonate with each other: the history of print culture, the study of autobiographical writing, and the historiography of seafaring life and of masculinity in antebellum America.
Download or read book Dr Alexander Hamilton and Provincial America written by Elaine G. Breslaw and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2008-01-01 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this sweeping biography, Elaine G. Breslaw examines the life of Dr. Alexander Hamilton (1712--1756), a highly educated Scottish physician who immigrated to Maryland in 1738. From an elite European family, Hamilton was immediately confronted with the relatively primitive social milieu of the New World. He faced unfamiliar and challenging social institutions: the labor system that relied on black slaves, extraordinarily fluid social statuses, distasteful business methods, unpleasant conversational quirks, as well as variant habits of dress, food, and drink that required accommodation and, when possible, acceptance. Paradoxically, the more acclimated he became to Maryland ways, the greater his impulse to change that society and make it more satisfying for himself both emotionally and intellectually. Breslaw perceptively describes the ways in which Hamilton tried to transform the society around him, attempting to re-create the world he had left behind and thereby justify his continued residence in such an unsophisticated place.Hamilton, best known as the author of the Itinerarium -- a shrewd and insightful account of his journey through the colonies in 1744 -- also founded the Tuesday Club of Annapolis, promoted a local musical culture, and in his letters and essays, provided witty commentary on the American social experience. In addition to practicing medicine, Hamilton participated in local affairs, transporting to Maryland some of the rationalist ideas about politics, religion, and learning that were germinating in Scotland's early Enlightenment. As Breslaw explains, Hamilton's writings tell us that those adopted ideas were given substance and vitality in the New World long before the revolutionary crises. Throughout her narrative, Breslaw usefully sets Hamilton's life in both Scotland and America against the background of the major political, military, religious, social, and economic events of his time. The largely forgotten story of a fascinating, cosmopolitan, and complex Scotsman, Dr. Alexander Hamilton and Provincial America illuminates our understanding of elites as they navigated their eighteenth-century world.
Download or read book The Claims of Experience written by Nolan Bennett and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-08-21 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why have so many figures throughout American history proclaimed their life stories when confronted by great political problems? The Claims of Experience provides a new theory for what makes autobiography political throughout the history of the United States and today. Across five chapters, Nolan Bennett examines the democratic challenges that encouraged a diverse cast of figures to bear their stories: Benjamin Franklin amid the revolutionary era, Frederick Douglass in the antebellum and abolitionist movements, Henry Adams in the Gilded Age and its anxieties of industrial change, Emma Goldman among the first Red Scare and state opposition to radical speech, and Whittaker Chambers amid the second Red Scare that initiated the anticommunist turn of modern conservatism. These historical figures made what Bennett calls a "claim of experience." By proclaiming their life stories, these authors took back authority over their experiences from prevailing political powers, and called to new community among their audiences. Their claims sought to restore to readers the power to remake and make meaning of their own lives. Whereas political theorists and activists have often seen autobiography to be too individualist or a mere documentary source of evidence, this theory reveals the democratic power that life narratives have offered those on the margins and in the mainstream. If they are successful, claims of experience summon new popular authority to surpass what their authors see as the injustices of prevailing American institutions and identity. Bennett shows through historical study and theorization how this renewed appreciation for the politics of life writing elevates these authors' distinct democratic visions while drawing common themes across them. This book offers both a method for understanding the politics of life narrative and a call to anticipate claims of experience as they appear today.
Download or read book Encyclopedia of Life Writing written by Margaretta Jolly and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-12-04 with total page 1141 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 2001. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Download or read book Author in Chief written by Craig Fehrman and published by Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster. This book was released on 2021-02-16 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “One of the best books on the American presidency to appear in recent years” (The Wall Street Journal) and based on a decade of research and reporting—a delightful new window into the public and private lives America’s presidents as authors. Most Americans are familiar with Abraham Lincoln’s famous words in the Gettysburg Address and the Emancipation Proclamation. Yet few can name the work that helped him win the presidency: his published collection of speeches entitled Political Debates between Hon. Abraham Lincoln and Hon. Stephen A. Douglas. Lincoln labored in secret to get his book ready for the 1860 election, tracking down newspaper transcripts, editing them carefully for fairness, and hunting for a printer who would meet his specifications. Political Debates sold fifty thousand copies—the rough equivalent of half a million books in today’s market—and it reveals something about Lincoln’s presidential ambitions. But it also reveals something about his heart and mind. When voters asked about his beliefs, Lincoln liked to point them to his book. In Craig Fehrman’s “original, illuminating, and entertaining” (Jon Meacham) work of history, the story of America’s presidents and their books opens a rich new window into presidential biography. From volumes lost to history—Calvin Coolidge’s Autobiography, which was one of the most widely discussed titles of 1929—to ones we know and love—Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father, which was very nearly never published—Fehrman unearths countless insights about the presidents through their literary works. Presidential books have made an enormous impact on American history, catapulting their authors to the national stage and even turning key elections. Beginning with Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, the first presidential book to influence a campaign, and John Adams’s Autobiography, the first score-settling presidential memoir, Author in Chief draws on newly uncovered information—including never-before-published letters from Andrew Jackson, John F. Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan—to cast fresh light on the private drives and self-doubts that fueled our nation’s leaders. We see Teddy Roosevelt as a vulnerable first-time author, struggling to write the book that would become a classic of American history. We see Reagan painstakingly revising Where’s the Rest of Me?, and Donald Trump negotiating the deal for The Art of the Deal, the volume that made him synonymous with business savvy. Alongside each of these authors, we also glimpse the everyday Americans who read them. “If you’re a history buff, a presidential trivia aficionado, or just a lover of American literary history, this book will transfix you, inform you, and surprise you” (The Seattle Review of Books).
Download or read book Encyclopedia of the American Enlightenment written by Mark G. Spencer and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2015-01-01 with total page 1257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first reference work on one of the key subjects in American history, filling an important gap in the literature, with over 500 original essays.
Download or read book The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of the American Enlightenment written by Mark G. Spencer and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2015-02-26 with total page 1257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first reference work on one of the key subjects in American history, filling an important gap in the literature, with over 500 original essays.
Download or read book Feeling Singular written by Ben Bascom and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-04-23 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Much of U.S. cultural production since the twentieth century has celebrated the figure of the singular individual, from the lonesome Huckleberry Finn to the cinematic loners John Wayne and Clint Eastwood, but that tradition casts a backward shadow that prohibits seeing how the singular in America was previously marked as unwanted, outcast, excessive, or weird. Feeling Singular: Queer Masculinities in the Early United States examines the paradoxical nature of masculine self-promotion and individuality in the early United States. Through a collection of singular life narratives, author Ben Bascom draws on a queer studies approach that uncovers how fraught private desires shaped a public masculinity increasingly at odds with the disinterested norms of republican public culture. In telling the stories of excessive American masculinities, Feeling Singular presents the Early Republic of the United States as a queer and messy world of social outcasts and eccentric personalities all vying--and in spectacular ways failing--for public attention. These figures include John Fitch (1743-1798), a struggling working-class mechanic; Jeffrey Brace (1742-1827), a formerly enslaved Black Revolutionary War veteran; Timothy Dexter (1747-1806), a self-declared "Lord" who secured a fortune through a risky venture in bedpans and whalebone corsets; Jonathan Plummer (1761-1819), an itinerant peddler and preacher; and William "Amos" Wilson (1762-1821), a reclusive stonecutter who became popularly known as "the Pennsylvania Hermit." Despite leaving behind copious manuscripts and printed autobiographies, they dwindled instead into cultural insignificance, failing to achieve what scholars have called the hallmarks of "republican masculinity." Through closely reading a range of texts--from manuscripts to hastily printed books, and from phonetically spelled pamphlets to sexually explicit broadsides--Bascom uses the language of queer studies to understand what made someone singular in the early United States and how that singularity points at the ruptures in social codes that get normalized through historical analysis. Departing from the likes of Benjamin Franklin, whom tradition positions as a paragon of self-production, this book offers instead typologies of the failed inventor, the tragic outsider, the flamboyant pretender, the farcical exhorter, and the disaffected exile.
Download or read book First Lady of Letters written by Sheila L. Skemp and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2011-08-24 with total page 508 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Judith Sargent Murray (1751-1820), poet, essayist, playwright, and one of the most thoroughgoing advocates of women's rights in early America, was as well known in her own day as Abigail Adams or Martha Washington. Her name, though, has virtually disappeared from the public consciousness. Thanks to the recent discovery of Murray's papers—including some 2,500 personal letters—historian Sheila L. Skemp has documented the compelling story of this talented and most unusual eighteenth-century woman. Born in Gloucester, Massachussetts, Murray moved to Boston in 1793 with her second husband, Universalist minister John Murray. There she became part of the city's literary scene. Two of her plays were performed at Federal Street Theater, making her the first American woman to have a play produced in Boston. There as well she wrote and published her magnum opus, The Gleaner, a three-volume "miscellany" that included poems, essays, and the novel-like story "Margaretta." After 1800, Murray's output diminished and her hopes for literary renown faded. Suffering from the backlash against women's rights that had begun to permeate American society, struggling with economic difficulties, and concerned about providing the best possible education for her daughter, she devoted little time to writing. But while her efforts diminished, they never ceased. Murray was determined to transcend the boundaries that limited women of her era and worked tirelessly to have women granted the same right to the "pursuit of happiness" immortalized in the Declaration of Independence. She questioned the meaning of gender itself, emphasizing the human qualities men and women shared, arguing that the apparent distinctions were the consequence of nurture, not nature. Although she was disappointed in the results of her efforts, Murray nevertheless left a rich intellectual and literary legacy, in which she challenged the new nation to fulfill its promise of equality to all citizens.
Download or read book Privacy written by Patricia Meyer Spacks and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2011-04-15 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today we consider privacy a right to be protected. But in eighteenth-century England, privacy was seen as a problem, even a threat. Women reading alone and people hiding their true thoughts from one another in conversation generated fears of uncontrollable fantasies and profound anxieties about insincerity. In Privacy, Patricia Meyer Spacks explores eighteenth-century concerns about privacy and the strategies people developed to avoid public scrutiny and social pressure. She examines, for instance, the way people hid behind common rules of etiquette to mask their innermost feelings and how, in fact, people were taught to employ such devices. She considers the erotic overtones that privacy aroused in its suppression of deeper desires. And perhaps most important, she explores the idea of privacy as a societal threat—one that bred pretense and hypocrisy in its practitioners. Through inspired readings of novels by Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, and Sterne, along with a penetrating glimpse into diaries, autobiographies, poems, and works of pornography written during the period, Spacks ultimately shows how writers charted the imaginative possibilities of privacy and its social repercussions. Finely nuanced and elegantly conceived, Spacks's new work will fascinate anyone who has relished concealment or mourned its recent demise.
Download or read book Liberty s Captives written by Daniel E. Williams and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An astonishing variety of captivity narratives emerged in the fifty years following the American Revolution; however, discussions about them have usually focused on accounts of Native American captivities. To most readers, then, captivity narratives are synonymous with "godless savages," the vast frontier, and the trials of kidnapped settlers. This anthology, the first to bring together various types of captivity narratives in a comparative way, broadens our view of the form as it shows how the captivity narrative, in the nation-building years from 1770 to 1820, helped to shape national debates about American liberty and self-determination. Included here are accounts by Indian captives, but also prisoners of war, slaves, victims of pirates and Barbary corsairs, impressed sailors, and shipwreck survivors. The volume's seventeen selections have been culled from hundreds of such texts, edited according to scholarly standards, and reproduced with the highest possible degree of fidelity to the originals. Some selections are fictional or borrow heavily from other, true narratives; all are sensational. Immensely popular with American readers, they were also a lucrative commodity that helped to catalyze the explosion of print culture in the early Republic. As Americans began to personalize the rhetoric of their recent revolution, captivity narratives textually enacted graphic scenes of defiance toward deprivation, confinement, and coercion. At a critical point in American history they helped make the ideals of nationhood real to common citizens.
Download or read book Gale Researcher Guide for Elizabeth Ashbridge and the Quaker Voice of a Colonial Woman written by Emily B. Todd and published by Gale, Cengage Learning . This book was released on with total page 12 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gale Researcher Guide for: Elizabeth Ashbridge and the Quaker Voice of a Colonial Woman is selected from Gale's academic platform Gale Researcher. These study guides provide peer-reviewed articles that allow students early success in finding scholarly materials and to gain the confidence and vocabulary needed to pursue deeper research.
