| 3256052 | Alexis de Tocqueville | person who openly declared that there was "no country in the world where the Christian religion retains a greater influence over the souls of men than in America" | |
| 3256053 | Thomas Paine | wrote a book that shockingly declared that all churches were "set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit"; promoted Deism | |
| 3256054 | The Age of Reason (1794) | book written by Thomas Paine that shockingly declared that all churches were "set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit" | |
| 3256055 | Deism | liberal belief that relied on reason rather than revelation, on science rather than the Bible; rejected the concept of original sin and denied Christ's divinity; believed in a Supreme Being who had created a knowable universe and endowed human beings with a capacity for moral behavior; followed by many Founding Fathers including Jefferson, Franklin, and Paine | |
| 3256056 | Unitarianism | belief that God existed in only one person (hence unitarian), and not in the orthodox Trinity; denied the divinity of Jesus; stressed the essential goodness of human nature rather than its vileness; believed in free will and the possibility of salvation through good works; God as a loving father rather than stern Creator; followed by Ralph Waldo Emerson; appealed to intellectuals whose rationalism and optimism naturally made them not support the hellfire doctrines of Calvinism (especially predestination and human depravity) | |
| 3256057 | Second Great Awakening | one of the most momentous episodes in the history of American religion; tidal wave of spiritual fervor that left in its wake countless converted souls, many shattered and reorganized churches, and numerous new sects; began on the southern frontier and rolled into the cities of the Northeast; affected more people than the First Great Awakening; brought support for prison reform, temperance, woman's rights, and abolitionism | |
| 3256058 | "camp meetings" | gatherings (with as many as 25,000 people) that spread the Second Great Awakening; would camp for several days and listen to hellfire gospel; people would engage in frenzies of rolling, dancing, barking, and jerking; many soon became sinful again, but these gatherings massively increased church membership and humanitarian reforms | |
| 3256059 | Methodism and Baptism | benefited the most from the revivalism; stressed personal conversion contrary to predestination, a democratic control of church affairs, and a rousing emotionalism | |
| 3256060 | Peter Cartwright | best known of the Methodist traveling frontier preachers; ill-educated, strong servant of the Lord who spent 50 years traveling from Tennessee to Illinois while calling upon sinners to repent; converted thousands with his bellowing voice and flailing arms; physically knocked out those who tried to break up his meetings | |
| 3256061 | Charles Grandison Finney | the greatest revival preacher; trained as a lawyer, stopped drinking and became an evangelist after a deeply moving conversion experience as a young man; held audiences spellbound; tall and athletic; led massive revivals in Rochester and New York City in 1830-31; preached old-time religion and was an innovator; devised the "anxious bench" where sinners stood and repented in front of the congregation; encouraged woman to pray aloud in public; promised a perfect Christian kingdom on earth and condemned alcohol and slavery; served as president of Oberlin College in Ohio which became a center for revivalist activity and abolitionism | |
| 3256062 | "Burned-Over District" | name given to western New York where many descendants of New England puritans had settled and where many preachers preached "hellfire and damnation" | |
| 3256063 | Millerites or Adventists | movement named after William Miller and which had several hundred thousand followers; rose from the Burned-Over District in the 1830s; interpreted the Bible to mean that Christ would return to earth on October 22, 1844; gathered in prayerful assemblies to greet Christ and were disappointed; were dampened by this but not destroyed | |
| 3256064 | Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians | three religions that split North/South over slavery, first two by 1844-1845, third by 1857; 'first the churches split, then the political parties split, then the Union split' | |
| 3256065 | Joseph Smith | a tall, powerful, wrestler from the Burned-Over District who claimed that he received some gold plates from an angel; started the Mormon religion; was murdered and mangled along with his brother by a mob in Carthage, Illinois and the movement seemed near collapse | |
| 3256066 | Book of Mormon | the text that the gold plates Joseph Smith reportedly received from an angel translated into | |
| 3256067 | Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormon) | the religion that was started by Joseph Smith as a result of his gold plates; almost collapsed when Smith was killed; moved to Utah and made the desert bloom by using irrigation; had their crops of 1848 nearly destroyed by crickets, only to be saved by a flock of gulls; | |
| 3256068 | Mormons | followers of the Mormon religion who functioned under a religious oligarchy and were under serious opposition from non-Mormon neighbors in Ohio, then Missouri, then Illinois; hated for voting as a unit, drilling their own militia, and supposedly supporting polygamy (Smith reportedly had several wives); a few moved to Utah pulling two-wheeled carts; moved to Utah and became a prosperous theocracy and commonwealth; had followers in Europe, many of which moved to Utah; were threatened in 1857 when a federal army marched against the Mormons, who promised to fight to the death, but were eased after little bloodshed; argued against polygamy laws of 1862 and 1882 and therefore didn't make Utah a state until 1896 | |
| 3256069 | Brigham Young | took over the Mormons and saved the movement after Smith's death; stern compared to charming Smith; only had 11 days of formal schooling; an aggressive leader, eloquent preacher, and gifted administrator; led the Mormons to Utah 1846-1847 to escape oppression; made the Mormon settlement successful; married as many as 27 women and had 56 children; crisis developed when the Washington couldn't control his hierarchy after he was made territorial governor in 1850 | |
| 3256070 | Deseret; Mormon Corridor | name for the areas the Mormons rapidly took over and held after the US acquired the Mexican Cession in 1848; the main area through which the Mormons spread after 1848 | |
| 3256071 | little red schoolhouses | where most of the public education took place at this time period; had one room, one stove, one teacher, 8 grades, etc.; stayed open only a few months a year; teachers (mostly men) were ill trained, ill tempered, ill paid, often punished more than taught and often knew not much more than their best students; taught the "three R's" | |
| 3256072 | Horace Mann | a brilliant and idealistic graduate of Brown University; secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education who campaigned for 1.) better and more schoolhouses, 2.) longer school terms, 3.) higher pay for teachers, 4.) expanded curriculum; his ideas spread but many communities still remained uneducated; by 1860 there were as many as 1,000,000 uneducated whites (blacks weren't aloud to learn to read or write in the south, North didn't allow blacks in schools) | |
| 3256073 | Noah Webster | a Yale-educated Connecticut Yankee; the "Schoolmaster of the Republic" who designed "reading lessons" that educated millions of children and were partly designed to increase patriotism; spent 20 years creating a dictionary, which was published in 1828 and helped standardize English | |
| 3256074 | William H. McGuffey | a teacher-preacher who created grade-school readers first published in the 1830s | |
| 3256075 | McGuffey's Readers | what McGuffey's readers were called (easy); first published in the 1830s; sold 122 million copies the following decades; taught lessons of morality, patriotism, and idealism | |
| 3256076 | new, small, mostly Southern and Western liberal arts colleges | (not a term) appeared as a result of the Second Great Awakening; were mostly made to satisfy local pride rather than spread education; like the older higher education schools, they taught 1.) Latin, 2.) Greek, 3.) mathematics, 4.) moral philosophy; were less intellectual and more bored | |
| 3256077 | University of Virginia | one of the earliest state-supported universities, founded in 1819; founded by Thomas Jefferson, who designed its architecture and separated it from religion and politics; focused on modern languages and the sciences | |
| 3256078 | higher education for women | higher education for women? what's that? woman belonged at home at this time although there were some exceptions (see below) | |
| 3256079 | Emma Willard; Troy Female Seminary | gained respect for higher women education in the 1820s; was founded by this person in 1821 | |
| 3256080 | Oberlin College | already considered crazy for educating blacks, this school in Ohio began educating women in 1837; (see the section on Finney for more info) | |
| 3256081 | Mary Lyon; Mount Holyoke Seminary (later College) | established an outstanding women's school in South Hadley, Massachusetts; the name of this school | |
| 3256082 | lyceum lecture associations | groups, about 3,000 in 1835, through which traveling lecturers spread information; spoke of science, literature (eew), and moral philosophy | |
| 3256083 | Ralph Waldo Emerson | a member of a lyceum; a talented talker who journeyed thousands of miles | |
| 3256084 | North American Review | magazine founded in 1815 that existed for a long time (most magazines didn't at this time) and was for intellectuals | |
| 3256085 | Godey's Lady's Book | magazine founded in 1830 that survived until 1898 and 150,000 subscribers (enormous at the time); read by countless millions of women (they shared) | |
| 3256086 | Sylvester Graham | founder of the Graham cracker; emphasized a whole-wheat bread and cracker diet | |
| 3256087 | reforms | (not a term) were abundant at this time period; fought for women's rights, miracle medicines, communal living, polygamy, celibacy, rule by prophets, fad diets, whole-wheat bread and crackers, and guidance by spirits, and against alcohol, tobacco, profanity, transit of mail on Sabbath, and most importantly, slavery | |
| 3256088 | treatment of debtors | (not a term) as late as 1830s, hundreds of poor people were imprisoned, some for owing a single dollar; the poorer classes were most hurt by this; state legislatures gradually abolished this | |
| 3256089 | treatment of criminals | (not a term) criminal codes were softened; number of acts deserving capital punishment decreased; types of brutal punishment used was reduced; states started reforming as well as punishing; "reformatories", "houses of correction", and "penitentiaries" developed | |
| 3256090 | treatment of the insane | (not a term) insane people were treated terribly; old concepts concluded that they had unclean spirits; the 1800s idea was that they chose to be the way they are, and should be treated like beasts; many were jailed with sane people | |
| 3256091 | Dorothea Dix | New England teacher-author; physically frail woman afflicted with persistent lung trouble who possessed infinite compassion and willpower and never raised her voice; traveled 60,000 miles in 8 years to establish reports on insanity from her observations; improved jail conditions and helped established that the demented weren't willfully perverse but mentally ill; had a classic petition in 1843 that she submitted to the Massachusetts legislature that described the bad situation of jails and improved conditions | |
| 3256092 | American Peace Society | anti-war society formed in 1828 that declared war on war | |
| 3256093 | William Ladd | man with badly ulcerated legs; had ideas that helped in the international organizations for collective security of the twentieth century that worked with other nations until the Crimean War and Civil War | |
| 3256094 | American Temperance Society | organization formed at Boston in 1826; (about a thousand local similar groups sprang up within a few year); implored drinkers to sign the temperance pledge and organized children's clubs known as the "Cold Water Army"; made use of pictures, pamphlets, and lectures | |
| 3256095 | T.S. Arthur; Ten Nights in a Barroom and What I Saw There (1854) | man against alcohol; a book written by this man that described in shocking detail how a once-happy village was ruined by Sam Slade's Tavern, was only second to Uncle Tom's Cabin in the 1850s, was successful onstage | |
| 3256096 | temperance | (not a term) had two major lines of attack: 1.) increasing the public's will to resist drinking, convincing people to drink rarely, rather than not at all, 2.) creating a law that would prohibit drinking at all | |
| 3256097 | Neal S. Dow | blue-nosed reformer, mayor of Portland, employer of labor, "Father of Prohibition"; was from Maine and witnessed the effects of alcohol; sponsored a law in Maine that prohibited the manufacture and sale of alcohol | |
| 3256098 | Maine Law of 1851 | a statue supported by Dow that went into effect and prohibited the manufacture and sale of alcohol; was copied by other states that created similar statues; by 1857 about a dozen states had similar laws, all which were repealed or declared unconstitutional after a decade | |
| 3256099 | women's role in America | (not a term) women were subordinate to God and their husbands; could not vote and could be beaten (to a reasonable extent) like black slaves; could not own property after marriage; were better off than European women because women were scarce on American frontiers; unlike colonial times, women now married less, about 10% were unmarried by the Civil War; gender differences were emphasized by the new market economy; women were considered emotionally and physically weak but artistic and refined; they were responsible for teaching children morals and guiding their husbands away from a bad life; women were active in other reform movements, like temperance | |
| 3256100 | Alexis de Tocqueville (again) | French visitor who noted that rape in France was lightly punished whereas in America it was one of the few crimes punishable by death | |
| 3256101 | Lucretia Mott | a Quaker who was angered when she and her fellow female delegates were rejected from a London antislavery convention | |
| 3256102 | Elizabeth Cady Stanton | a mother of seven who left "obey" out of her marriage ceremony and advocated suffrage for women | |
| 3256103 | Susan B. Anthony | grew up as a Quaker; a militant lecturer for woman's rights who fought so tirelessly for women's rights that women who fought for their rights were called "Susan Bs" | |
| 3256104 | Elizabeth Blackwell | a pioneer in a previously forbidden profession for women (medicine) who was the first female graduate from a medical college | |
| 3256105 | Margaret Fuller; The Dial | took part in the struggle to bring unity and republican government to Italy, died in a shipwreck off New York's Fire Island while returning to the US in 1850; the transcendentalist journal that she edited | |
| 3256106 | Sarah and Angelina Grimké | two women who fought for antislavery and women's suffrage | |
| 3256107 | Lucy Stone | woman who maintained her maiden name after marriage; was extremely important to woman's suffrage | |
| 3256108 | Amelia Bloomer | revolted against the uncomfortable "street sweeping" attire of woman by creating and promoting semi-masculine, short skirts with Trousers, an attire known as "bloomers" | |
| 3256109 | Seneca Falls Convention/Women's Rights Convention | meeting that launched the women's rights movement in America; where Stanton read her Declaration of Sentiments, which asserted that "all men and women are created equal"; was the first step towards women's suffrage | |
| 3256110 | Robert Owen | a wealthy and idealistic Scottish textile manufacturer who in 1825 founded a communal society of about a thousand people where little harmony prevailed and radicals and scoundrels existed and sank the colony into contradiction and confusion | |
| 3256111 | New Harmony, Indiana | the unsuccessful community that Owen created where about 1000 people lived | |
| 3256112 | Brook Farm, Massachusetts | an community started in 1841 by the brotherly and sisterly cooperation of about 20 intellectuals; prospered reasonably until 1846 when a new communal building was lost to fire shortly after completion, collapsing the venture in debt; believed in "plain living and high thinking"; inspired Nathaniel Hawthorne to write a book | |
| 3256113 | The Blithedale Romance | book by Nathaniel Hawthorne that was inspired by Brook Farm and whose main character was modeled on Margaret Fuller (see above) | |
| 3256114 | Oneida Colony | community founded in New York in 1848; practiced free love ("complex marriage"), birth control, and eugenic selection of parents for superior offspring; the leader fled to Canada to escape persecution for adultery; flourished for more than 30 years because its artisans made superior steel traps and Oneida Community (silver) Plate; embraced monogamy and abandoned communism in 1879-1880 | |
| 3256115 | Shakers | among the longest-lived sects; bean in the 1770s to set up the first of a score or so of religious communities; attained about 6,000 members in 1840, but were virtually extinct by 1940 because they prohibited marriage and sexual relations | |
| 3256116 | Mother Ann Lee | founder of the Shakers sect | |
| 3256117 | Thomas Jefferson | a gifted amateur inventor who won a gold metal for a new type of plow | |
| 3256118 | Nathaniel Bowditch | mathematician who wrote about practical navigation | |
| 3256119 | Matthew F. Maury | oceanography who wrote about ocean winds and currents | |
| 3256120 | Benjamin Silliman | the most influential American scientist 1800-1850; a pioneer chemist and geologist who taught and wrote brilliantly at Yale College for over 50 years | |
| 3256121 | Louis Agassiz | a distinguished French-Swiss immigrant who served for 25 years at Harvard College; student of biology who sometimes carried snakes in his pockets; insisted on original research and hated overemphasis on memory work | |
| 3256122 | Asa Gray | the "Columbus of American botany" who taught at Harvard College and published over 350 books, monographs and papers; his textbooks set new standards for clarity and interest | |
| 3256123 | John J. Audubon | French-descended naturalist who painted wild fowl in their natural habitat; painted a popular painting and had a society named after him; shot many birds for sport as a young man | |
| 3256124 | Birds of America | a magnificent painting by Audubon that attained considerable popularity | |
| 3256125 | Audubon Society | society named after Audubon (easy) that worked for the protection of birds | |
| 3256126 | medicine | still primitive by modern standards regardless of a steady growth in medical schools; bleeding was a common remedy; smallpox was dreaded; the yellow fever epidemic of 1793 in Philadelphia took several thousand lives; illness often resulted from improper diet, hurried eating, perspiring and cooling off too rapidly, and ignorance of germs and sanitation; life expectancy was 40 years for a white person born in 1850, less for blacks; tooth operation were done by blacksmiths; self-prescribed patent medicines were common; tumors were rubbed with dead toads; the use of medicine was often harmful; operations were performed by tying the person down; laughing gas and other anesthetics were later used in the 1840s | |
| 3256127 | Robertson's Infallible Worm Destroying Lozenges | a type of self-prescribed patent medicine that was commonly used | |
| 3256128 | Oliver Wendell Holmes | declared in 1860 that if the medicines were thrown into the sea, humans would be better off and the fish worse off | |
| 3256129 | Thomas Jefferson | architect of revolution; probably the ablest American architect of his generation; brought a classical design to his hilltop home, perhaps the most stately mansion of the nation | |
| 3256130 | Monticello | Jefferson's Virginia hilltop home that he designed and gave a classical design, making it one of the most stately mansions of the nation | |
| 3256131 | University of Virginia at Charlottesville | school that Jefferson designed and gave a quadrangle that remains one of the finest examples of classical architecture in America | |
| 3256132 | Edward Everett | the eminent Boston scholar and orator who placed a statue of Apollo in his home and had its naked limbs draped | |
| 3256133 | Gilbert Stuart | a spendthrift Rhode Islander and one of the most gifted of the early competent painters; painted in England and was comparable with the best painters; produced several portraits of Washington, all which were somewhat idealized and dehumanized | |
| 3256134 | Charles Willson Peale | painter from Maryland who painted about 60 portraits of Washington, who patiently sat for about 14 of them | |
| 3256135 | John Trumbull | fought in the Revolutionary War and recaptured its scenes and spirit on canvas | |
| 3256136 | Hudson River school | school that excelled at mirroring of local landscapes through paintings | |
| 3256137 | daguerreotype | a crude photograph that that brought competition to portrait painters | |
| 3256138 | Louis Daguerre | perfected a crude type of photograph mentioned above | |
| 3256139 | "minstrel shows" | featured white actors with blackened faces | |
| 3256140 | Dixie | song written in 1856 ironically in New York City by an Ohioan that was adopted by the Confederates as their battle hymn | |
| 3256141 | Stephen C. Foster | white Pennsylvanian who wrote the most famous black songs; went to the south one time in 1852; contributed to American folk music by capturing the painful spirit of slaves; lost his art and popularity and died in a charity ward as a drunkard | |
| 3256142 | "Old Folks at Home" | song published by Foster | |
| 3256143 | Hamilton, Jay, Madison | three authors of The Federalist | |
| 3256144 | Common Sense | written by Thomas Paine | |
| 3256145 | Daniel Webster | wrote masterpiece public orations | |
| 3256146 | Autobiography (1818) | book by Benjamin Franklin that is one of the few to achieve genuine distinction as a nonreligious book published before 1820; a classic in its simplicity, clarity, and inspirational quality; recorded only a fragment of Franklin's life | |
| 3256147 | Knickerbocker Group | group in New York that wrote literature and enabled America to boast for the first time of a literature that matched its magnificent landscapes | |
| 3256148 | Washington Irving | member of the Knickerbocker Group (1); born in New York City, the first American general writer to win international recognition as a literary figure; forced to write when the family business failed; used English as well as American themes; did much to interpret America to Europe and Europe to America; "the first ambassador whom the New World of letters sent to the Old"; knew about Dutch traditions | |
| 3256149 | Knickerbocker's History of New York (1809) | book written by Irving that has amusing caricatures of the Dutch | |
| 3256150 | "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" | two immortal Dutch-American tales written by Irving | |
| 3256151 | James Fenimore Cooper | member of the Knickerbocker Group (2); the first American novelist to win international recognition and make New World themes respectable; married into a wealthy family and settled on the frontiers of New York; boasted to his wife that he could write a better book than the one he was reading and took her challenge to do so and succeeded; had an initial failure until his second novel; explored the viability and destiny of America's republican experiment, by contrasting the values of "natural men", children of the wooded wilderness, with the artificiality of modern civilization | |
| 3256152 | The Spy | Cooper's second novel that recovered him from his initial failure; an absorbing tale of the American Revolution | |
| 3256153 | Leatherstocking Tales | Cooper's most famous book | |
| 3256154 | The Last of the Mohicans | Cooper's novel in which a deadeye rifleman named Natty Bumppo, one of nature's noblemen, meets with Indians | |
| 3256155 | William Cullen Bryant | member of the Knickerbocker Group (3); writer from Massachusetts who wrote one of the first high quality poems produced in the US (see below); was forced to make his living by editing an influential New York newspaper (see below); set a model for journalism that was dignified, liberal, and high-minded | |
| 3256156 | "Thanatopsis" | written by Bryant; one of the first high-quality poems produced in the US; critics could hardly believe it was written on "this side of the water" | |
| 3256157 | Evening Post | newspaper that Bryant made a living by editing | |
| 3256158 | transcendentalism | one of the mainsprings of the literary flowering that took place 1825-1850, especially around Boston; resulted in part from the liberalizing of the straight-jacket Puritan theology; came partly from the German romantic philosophers and the religions of Asia; rejected the theory of John Locke that all knowledge comes to the mind from the senses; believed that truth "transcends" the senses and cannot be found by observation alone; every person possesses an inner light that can illuminate the highest truth and put him or her in direct touch with God, or the "Oversoul"; 1.) religious and social individualism, 2.) commitment to self-reliance, self-culture, and self-discipline (developed into hostility to authority and formal institutions of any kind, as well as to all conventional wisdom), 3.) exaltation of the dignity of the individual, whether black or white | |
| 3256159 | Ralph Waldo Emerson | the best-known transcendentalist; serene, tall, slender, intensely blue-eyed, trained as a Unitarian minister; excellent writer; a lyceum lecturer who took a western tour every winter for 20 years; | |
| 3256160 | "The American Scholar" | Emerson's Phi Beta Kappa address at Harvard College in 1837 that was a brilliant intellectual Declaration of Independence that urged Americans to throw off European traditions and create their own; stressed self-reliance, self-improvement, self-confidence, optimism, and freedom; ideals reflected those of an expanding America; outspoken critic of slavery; supporter the Union | |
| 3256161 | Henry David Thoreau | Emerson's close associate; a poet, mystic, transcendentalist, and nonconformist who condemned the government for supporting slavery and was jailed for a night for not paying his Massachusetts poll tax; stiff-necked individualist that believed he should reduce his bodily wants so as to gain time for a pursuit of truth through study and meditation; writings later encouraged Mahatma Gandhi to resist British rule in India and Martin Luther King, Jr. thinking of nonviolence | |
| 3256162 | Walden: Or Life in the Woods (1854) | book that Thoreau is well-known for; a record of his two years of simple existence in a hut that he built on the edge of Walden Pond near Concord, Massachusetts | |
| 3256163 | On the Duty of Civil Disobedience | essay by Thoreau that exercised a strong influence in furthering idealistic thought in America and abroad | |
| 3256164 | Walt Whitman | transcendentalist writer from Brooklyn who wrote a famous collection of poems (see below); gained the informal title "Poet Laureate of Democracy"; was an example of a writer who was caught in the enthusiasm of an expanding America that turned its back on the Old World | |
| 3256165 | Leaves of Grass (1855) | a collection of poems written by Whitman; highly romantic, emotional, and unconventional; handled sex with frankness; was banned in Boston; was a financial failure at first and had only three reviews secretly by Whitman himself; later revived and honored in America and Europe | |
| 3256166 | Henry Wadsworth Longfellow | taught modern languages at Harvard for many years; one of the most popular poets ever produced in America; not a transcendentalist; lived a serene life except for the death of his two wives, second of which he saw die when her dress caught fire; wrote for upper classes, adopted by lower classes; had wide knowledge of European literature, which supplied him with themes; wrote some famous poems based on American themes; only American to be honored with a bust in the Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey | |
| 3256167 | "Evangeline," "Hiawatha," "The courtship of Miles Standish" | three admired poems by Longfellow that were based on American themes | |
| 3256168 | John Greenleaf Whittier | Quaker poet; poet laureate of the antislavery crusade; important in influencing social action; cried out against inhumanity, injustice, and intolerance; was undeterred by insults and stoning; aroused America over slavery; poet of human freedom | |
| 3256169 | James Russell Lowell | succeeded Longfellow at Harvard; one of America's better poets; distinguished essayist, literary critic (eew), editor, and diplomat; remembered as a political satirist | |
| 3256170 | Biglow Papers | papers in which Lowell was a political satirist, especially in 1846 dealing with the Mexican War; partly poetry in the Yankee dialect; condemned the alleged slavery-expansion designs of Polk | |
| 3256171 | Oliver Wendell Holmes | prominent poet, essayist, novelist, lecturer, and wit who taught anatomy at Harvard Medical School; nonconformist and conversationalist; among a group of literary lights who regarded Boston as the "hub of the universe"; died at the age of 85, the last among his distinguished contemporaries | |
| 3256172 | "The Last Leaf" | poem by Holmes that honors the last "white Indian" of the Boston Tea Party, applies to Holmes himself, who died as the "last leaf" among his contemporaries | |
| 3256173 | William Gilmore Simms | the most noteworthy literary figure produced by the South (with possible exception of Poe); wrote 82 books; became the "Cooper of the South"; wrote about the southern frontier of colonial days and the South of the Revolutionary War; neglected by the southern planter aristocracy which never accepted him because he was born to a poor Charleston storekeeper, even if he married into the social elite and became a slaveowner | |
| 3256174 | Edgar Allan Poe | gifted lyric writer; master stylist; excelled in short stories, especially horror ones, in which he shared his alcoholic nightmares; invented the modern detective novel; had a morbidity contradictory to American optimism, and therefore appealed more to Europeans; an unhealthy orphan who married a child who died of tuberculosis; suffered hunger, cold, poverty and debt; attempted suicide; fascinated by the ghostly and ghastly; found drunk in a Baltimore gutter and died | |
| 3256175 | "The Raven," "The Gold Bug," "The Fall of the House of Usher" | three poems by Poe: a lyric poem; a tale that set new high standards; ghostly and ghastly | |
| 3256176 | Nathaniel Hawthorne | reflected the Calvinist obsession with original sin and the struggle between good and evil; grew up as a Puritan in Salem | |
| 3256177 | The Scarlet Letter (1850) | novel by Hawthorne that describes an adulteress who was forced to wear a scarlet A on her chest as punishment and to deal with her sin | |
| 3256178 | The Marble Faun (1860) | novel by Hawthorne about a group of young American artists who witnessed a mysterious murder in Rome; explores concepts of the omnipresence of evil and the dead hand of the past weighing on the present | |
| 3256179 | Herman Melville | orphaned and ill-educated writer from New York; went to sea as a youth and served as a whaler; escaped cannibals; wrote about the South Seas; was not given immediate recognition because of his complicated writing; wrote unprofitably for years and worked as a customs inspector; died in relative obscurity and poverty; his writings gained popularity in the 1900s | |
| 3256180 | Moby Dick (1851) | Melville's masterpiece; complex allegory of good and evil about a whaling captain named Ahab who sought revenge against a whale named Moby Dick for removing his leg; Moby Dick eventually sunk Ahab's ship; widely ignored at the time of its publication before of it's complexity | |
| 3256181 | George Bancroft | "Father of American History" who helped found the Naval Academy at Annapolis in 1845 as secretary of the navy; published a superpatriotic history of the US to 1789 that grew out of vast research in Europe and America | |
| 3256182 | William H. Prescott | historian who accidentally lost sight in one eye while in college; published classic accounts of the conquest of Mexico (1843) and Peru (1847) | |
| 3256183 | Francis Parkman | historian with defective eyes that forced him to write in darkness with the aid of a guiding machine; chronicled the struggle between France and England in colonial times for mastery of North America | |
