Download or read book American Letters written by Jackson Pollock and published by Polity. This book was released on 2011-04-11 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents letters written by the American painter and his brothers and parents from the late 1920s to the late 1940s.
Download or read book Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in British America written by David S. Shields and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2012-12-01 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In cities from Boston to Charleston, elite men and women of eighteenth-century British America came together in private venues to script a polite culture. By examining their various 'texts'--conversations, letters, newspapers, and privately circulated manuscripts--David Shields reconstructs the discourse of civility that flourished in and further shaped elite society in British America.
Download or read book The Letters of the Republic written by Michael Warner and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-01 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The subject of Michael Warner's book is the rise of a nation. America, he shows, became a nation by developing a new kind of reading public, where one becomes a citizen by taking one's place as writer or reader. At heart, the United States is a republic of letters, and its birth can be dated from changes in the culture of printing in the early eighteenth century. The new and widespread use of print media transformed the relations between people and power in a way that set in motion the republican structure of government we have inherited. Examining books, pamphlets, and circulars, he merges theory and concrete analysis to provide a multilayered view of American cultural development.
Download or read book Letters and People of the Spanish Indies written by James Lockhart and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1976-03-26 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume presents a selection of translated public and private letters, written by Spanish officials, merchants, and ordinary settlers, aiming to illuminate the panorama of sixteenth-century Spanish American settler society and its genres of correspondence. Letters written by Native Americans, a few of whom at this time were beginning to practice European-style letter-writing, are also included. It is hoped that readers will feel the colorful humanity of the letter-writers, and also see the wide array of social types and functions during this era in the United States' Southwest.
Download or read book A Is for American written by Jill Lepore and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2003-02-04 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What ties Americans to one another? What unifies a nation of citizens with different racial, religious and ethnic backgrounds? These were the dilemmas faced by Americans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as they sought ways to bind the newly United States together. In A is for American, award-winning historian Jill Lepore portrays seven men who turned to language to help shape a new nation’s character and boundaries. From Noah Webster’s attempts to standardize American spelling, to Alexander Graham Bell’s use of “Visible Speech” to help teach the deaf to talk, to Sequoyah’s development of a Cherokee syllabary as a means of preserving his people’s independence, these stories form a compelling portrait of a developing nation’s struggles. Lepore brilliantly explores the personalities, work, and influence of these figures, seven men driven by radically different aims and temperaments. Through these superbly told stories, she chronicles the challenges faced by a young country trying to unify its diverse people.
Download or read book Letters I Never Mailed written by Alec Wilder and published by University Rochester Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Letters I Never Mailed: Clues to a Life, by Alec Wilder, in a new, annotated edition with introduction and supplementary material by David Demsey, foreword by jazz pianist Marian McPartland, and photographs by Louis Ouzer. Letters I Never Mailed: Clues to a Life, by Alec Wilder, in a new, annotated edition with introduction and supplementary material by David Demsey, foreword by jazz pianist Marian McPartland, and photographs by Louis Ouzer. Alec Wilder is a rare example of a composer who established a reputation both as a prolific composer of concertos, sonatas, and operas, and as a popular songwriter [including the hit "I'll Be Around"]. He was fearsomely articulate and had a wide and varied circle of friends ranging from Graham Greene to Frank Sinatra and Stan Getz. Letters I Never Mailed, hailed at its first publication [in 1975, by Little, Brown], tells the story of Wilder's musical and personal life through unsent "letters" addressed to various friends. In it, he shares his insights -- and sometimes salty opinions -- on composing, musical life, and the tension between art and commercialism. Thisnew, scholarly edition leaves Wilder's original text intact but decodes the mysteries of the original through an annotated index that identifies the letters' addressees, a biographical essay by David Demsey, and photographs by renowned photographer and lifelong friend of Wilder, Louis Ouzer. David Demsey is Professor of Music and coordinator of jazz studies at William Paterson University and an active jazz and classical saxophonist. He is co-author of Alec Wilder: A Bio-Bibliography [Greenwood Press] and has contributed to The Oxford Companion to Jazz.
Download or read book Law and Letters in American Culture written by Robert A. Ferguson and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1984 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The role of religion in early American literature has been endlessly studied; the role of the law has been virtually ignored. Robert A. Ferguson's book seeks to correct this imbalance. With the Revolution, Ferguson demonstrates, the lawyer replaced the clergyman as the dominant intellectual force in the new nation. Lawyers wrote the first important plays, novels, and poems; as gentlemen of letters they controlled many of the journals and literary societies; and their education in the law led to a controlling aesthetic that shaped both the civic and the imaginative literature of the early republic. An awareness of this aesthetic enables us to see works as diverse as Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia and Irving's burlesque History of New York as unified texts, products of the legal mind of the time. The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the great political orations were written by lawyers, and so too were the literary works of Trumbull, Tyler, Brackenridge, Charles Brockden Brown, William Cullen Bryant, Richard Henry Dana, Jr., and a dozen other important writers. To recover the original meaning and context of these writings is to gain new understanding of a whole era of American culture. The nexus of law and letters persisted for more than a half-century. Ferguson explores a range of factors that contributed to its gradual dissolution: the yielding of neoclassicism to romanticism; the changing role of the writer; the shift in the lawyer's stance from generalist to specialist and from ideological spokesman to tactician of compromise; the onslaught of Jacksonian democracy and the problems of a country torn by sectional strife. At the same time, he demonstrates continuities with the American Renaissance. And in Abraham Lincoln he sees a memorable late flowering of the earlier tradition.
Download or read book Letters from America written by Alexis de Tocqueville and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alexis de Tocqueville arrived in the United States for the first time in May 1831, commissioned by the French government to study the American prison system. For the next nine months he and his companion, Gustave de Beaumont, traveled and observed not only prisons but also the political, economic, and social systems of the early republic. Along the way, they frequently reported back to friends and family members in France. This book presents the first translation of the complete letters Tocqueville wrote during that seminal journey, accompanied by excerpts from Beaumont's correspondence that provide details or different perspectives on the places, people, and American life and attitudes the travelers encountered. --from publisher description.
Download or read book Initial Studies in American Letters written by Henry Augustin Beers and published by New York : Chautauqua Press. This book was released on 1891 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Edinburgh Companion to Nineteenth Century American Letters and Letter Writing written by Celeste-Marie Bernier and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2016-02-15 with total page 752 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This comprehensive study by leading scholars in an important new field-the history of letters and letter writing-is essential reading for anyone interested in nineteenth-century American politics, history or literature. Because of its mass literacy, population mobility, and extensive postal system, nineteenth-century America is a crucial site for the exploration of letters and their meanings, whether they be written by presidents and statesmen, scientists and philosophers, novelists and poets, feminists and reformers, immigrants, Native Americans, or African Americans. This book breaks new ground by mapping the voluminous correspondence of these figures and other important American writers and thinkers. Rather than treating the letter as a spontaneous private document, the contributors understand it as a self-conscious artefact, circulating between friends and strangers and across multiple genres in ways that both make and break social ties.
Download or read book Men of Letters in the Early Republic written by Catherine O'Donnell Kaplan and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2012-12-01 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the aftermath of the Revolutionary War, after decades of intense upheaval and debate, the role of the citizen was seen as largely political. But as Catherine O'Donnell Kaplan reveals, some Americans saw a need for a realm of public men outside politics. They believed that neither the nation nor they themselves could achieve virtue and happiness through politics alone. Imagining a different kind of citizenship, they founded periodicals, circulated manuscripts, and conversed about poetry, art, and the nature of man. They pondered William Godwin and Edmund Burke more carefully than they did candidates for local elections and insisted other Americans should do so as well. Kaplan looks at three groups in particular: the Friendly Club in New York City, which revolved around Elihu Hubbard Smith, with collaborators such as William Dunlap and Charles Brockden Brown; the circle around Joseph Dennie, editor of two highly successful periodicals; and the Anthologists of the Boston Athenaeum. Through these groups, Kaplan demonstrates, an enduring and influential model of the man of letters emerged in the first decade of the nineteenth century.
Download or read book A Grand Army of Black Men written by Edwin S. Redkey and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1992-11-27 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Civil War stands vivid in the collective memory of the American public. There has always been a profound interest in the subject, and specifically the participation of black Americans in and reactions to the war and the war's outcome. Almost 200,000 African-American soldiers fought for the Union in the Civil War. Although most were illiterate ex-slaves, several thousand were well-educated, free black men from the northern states. The 176 letters in this collection were written by black soldiers in the Union army during the Civil War to black and abolitionist newspapers. They provide a unique expression of the black voice that was meant for a public forum. The letters tell of the men's experiences, their fears and their hopes. They describe in detail their army days - the excitement of combat and the drudgery of digging trenches. Some letters give vivid descriptions of battle; others protest against racism; still others call eloquently for civil rights. Many describe their conviction that they are fighting not only to free the slaves but to earn equal rights as citizens. These letters give an extraordinary picture of the war and also reveal the bright expectations, hopes, and ultimately the demands that black soldiers had for the future - for themselves and for their race. As first-person documents of the Civil War, the letters are strong statements of the American dream of justice and equality, and of the human spirit.
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 Society Manners and Politics in the United States written by Michel Chevalier and published by . This book was released on 1839 with total page 502 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Illuminating Letters written by Paul C. Gutjahr and published by Univ of Massachusetts Press. This book was released on 2010-02-04 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What do we read when we read a text? The author's words, of course, but is that all? The prevailing publishing ethic has insisted that typography?the selection and arrangement of type and other visual elements on a page?should be an invisible, silent, and deferential servant to the text it conveys. This book contests that conventional point of view. Looking at texts ranging from the King James Bible to contemporary comic strips, the contributors to Illuminating Letters examine the seldom considered but richly revealing relationships between a text's typography and its literary interpretation. The essays assume no previous typographic knowledge or expertise; instead they invite readers primarily concerned with literary and cultural meanings to turn a more curious eye to the visual and physical forms of a specific text or genre. As the contributors show, closer inspection of those forms can yield fresh insights into the significance of a text's material presentation, leading readers to appreciate better how presentation shapes understandings of the text's meanings and values. The case studies included in the volume amplify its two overarching themes: one set explores the roles of printers and publishers in manipulating, willingly or not, the meaning and reception of texts through typographic choices; the other group examines the efforts of authors to circumvent or subvert such mediation by directly controlling the typographic presentation of their texts. Together these essays demonstrate that choices about type selection and arrangement do indeed help to orchestrate textual meaning. In addition to the editors, contributors include Sarah A. Kelen, Beth McCoy, Steven R. Price, Leon Jackson, and Gene Kannenberg Jr.
Download or read book Letters to Martin written by Randal Maurice Jelks and published by Chicago Review Press. This book was released on 2022-01-11 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "You'll find hope in these pages. " —Jonathan Eig, author of Ali: A Life Letters to Martin contains twelve meditations on contemporary political struggles for our oxygen-deprived society. Evoking Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail," these meditations, written in the form of letters to King, speak specifically to the many public issues we presently confront in the United States—economic inequality, freedom of assembly, police brutality, ongoing social class conflicts, and geopolitics. Award-winning author Randal Maurice Jelks invites readers to reflect on US history by centering on questions of democracy that we must grapple with as a society. Hearkening to the era when James Baldwin, Dorothy Day, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Richard Wright used their writing to address the internal and external conflicts that the United States faced, this book is a contemporary revival of the literary tradition of meditative social analysis. These meditations on democracy provide spiritual oxygen to help readers endure the struggles of rebranding, rebuilding, and reforming our democratic institutions so that we can all breathe.
Download or read book Letters from the Lost Generation written by Linda Patterson Miller and published by . This book was released on 1991 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Excellent. This is a fine, and unusual, collection of literary Americana."--Atlantic "Fine comic moments of truth."--New York Times Book Review "An invaluable source of literary history."--Publishers Weekly This is the story of one of the most famous literary "sets" of the twentieth century. Gerald and Sara Murphy were at the center of a group including Ernest Hemingway and his wives, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, Archibald MacLeish, Dorothy Parker, Alexander Woollcott, Robert Benchley, Phillip Barry, and many others. They personified the jazz age and the lost generation. The Murphys have been viewed primarily as cult/pop figures. In this book Miller shows, through a sequential interweaving of letters from several correspondents, that they actually were the nucleus without which the group as we know it would not have stayed together. Miller allows the individual correspondents to tell their own stories, providing new insights into their lives and this era. It is the best sort of eavesdropping. Gerald and Sara Murphy married on December 30, 1915. Both families were moneyed and cosmopolitan. Their attraction to each other was in part based on their desire to escape the routine and predictable social rounds in which their families were immersed. Against their families' wishes, they and their three children left for Europe in 1921. They remained in France for over a decade, and quite naturally socialized with the expatriate set. They were, in part, models for Dick and Nicole Diver in Tender Is the Night. MacLeish wrote poems about them, their friends paid tribute to them and relied on them day to day and in correspondence, and their own letters are worth reading for their liveliness and because they so well preserve a record of the twenties and thirties. Miller provides nearly every extant letter between the Murphys and their friends during those decades. Most of them have not been published previously, and of course, they have never been presented collectively. Together, they constitute an epistolary "novel" of peculiar power and authenticity about a remarkable era. Linda Patterson Miller is associate professor of English at Pennsylvania State University at Ogontz.
