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These people had epic narratives, myths, stories, poems, & songs. They used stories to teach lessons and convey practical information about the world. They had a deep respect for nature and animals, a cyclical worldview, and figurative language/parallelism.

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Authors & works

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Native Americans:                More than 300 languages

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Native Americans:                More than 300 languages

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There used to be more than 300 languages spoken by the Native Americans, but many have faded out or disappeared entirely because of the government.

Cyca, M., & Cyca, M. (2023, July 12). 9 Facts about Native American Tribes. HISTORY. https://www.history.com/news/native-american-tribes-facts

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Native Americans:                 574 tribes

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Native Americans:                 574 tribes

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There are 574 recognized tribes in the United States, but many do not have federal recognition. This means they are ineligible for government support and programs.

Cyca, M., & Cyca, M. (2023, July 12). 9 Facts about Native American Tribes. HISTORY. https://www.history.com/news/native-american-tribes-facts

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2200 B.C.—Tower of Babel (Genesis 11:1-9)

1607—Early settlement at Jamestown

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Puritanism and Early Settlement  of First "American" colonies  1600-1800 A. D.

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Puritanism and Early Settlement  of First "American" colonies  1600-1800 A. D.

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These people wrote diaries and histories, which expressed the connections between God and their everyday lives. They used a plain style of writing. They wanted to "purify" the Church of England by reforming to the simpler forms of worship and church. They saw religion as a personal experience. They believed in original sin and "elect" who would be saved.

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Puritanism and Early Settlement  of First "American" colonies 

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Puritanism and Early Settlement  of First "American" colonies 

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William Bradford -"Of Plymouth Plantation"

Anne Bradstreet (poetry)

John Edwards -"Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God"

Edward Taylor -"Huswifery"

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Puritanism and Early Settlement  of First "American" colonies 

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Puritanism and Early Settlement  of First "American" colonies 

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Most Puritans had a sense that they were living in the last days and believed God's judgment was coming soon. They lived in expectation of the return of Christ.

Church. “10 Things You Should Know about the Puritans.” Sam Storms: Oklahoma City, OK, 2018, www.samstorms.org/enjoying-god-blog/post/10-things-you-should-know-about-the-puritans.

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Puritanism and Early Settlement  of First "American" colonies 

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Puritanism and Early Settlement  of First "American" colonies 

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The puritains placed an emphasis on the daily mortification of sin. They were very disciplined, and they kept diaries of their thoughts and actions. They would write what they thought and what they had done.

Church. “10 Things You Should Know about the Puritans.” Sam Storms: Oklahoma City, OK, 2018, www.samstorms.org/enjoying-god-blog/post/10-things-you-should-know-about-the-puritans.

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Puritanism and Early Settlement  of First "American" colonies 

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Puritanism and Early Settlement  of First "American" colonies 

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1507: Early Settlement of the first American colonies - Jamestown

1692: Salem Witch Trials

1741: Jonathan Edwards "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God"

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Mostly comprised of philosophers, scientists, writing speeches and pamphlets. Human beings can arrive at truth by using deductive reasoning, rather than relying on the authority of the past, on religious faith, or intuition.

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Benjamin Franklin —Autobiography

Patrick Henry —"Speech to the Virginia Convention"

Thomas Paine —"The Crisis"

Phyllis Wheatley —poetry

The Constitution

The Bill of Rights

The Declaration of Independence

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Reason was at the core of Enlightenment thought. Philosophers believed that through the use of reason and logic, human beings could gain a better understanding of the natural world.

Historian, The. “10 Facts about the Enlightenment.” Have Fun with History, 25 Nov. 2023, www.havefunwithhistory.com/facts-about-the-enlightenment/.

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The Encyclopédie (the Enlightenment’s Wikipedia) was a monumental publication edited by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert. It was published in many volumes between 1751 and 1772.

Historian, The. “10 Facts about the Enlightenment.” Have Fun with History, 25 Nov. 2023, www.havefunwithhistory.com/facts-about-the-enlightenment/.

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1607 Early Settlement—Jamestown

1775-1783 Revolutionary War

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The American Renaissance           1840-1860

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The American Renaissance           1840-1860

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Everything in the world, including human beings, is a reflection of the Divine Soul. People can use their intuition to behold God's spirit, which is revealed in nature or in their own souls. Self-reliance and individualism must outweigh external authority and link conformity to tradition. Important social and political movements include the Abolitionist, Utopian, and Women's Suffrage Movements.

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Ralph Waldo Emerson
—Nature
—"Self-Reliance"

Henry David Thoreau
—Walden
—Life in the Woods

Louisa May Alcott
—Little Women

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Transcendentalism grew out of theological disputes in the 1830s and became a force for innovation in education, a call for women’s rights, the abolition of slavery, and environmentalism.

“The American Renaissance - Eastern.” Www.easternct.edu, www.easternct.edu/speichera/understanding-literary-history-all/the-american-renaissance.html.

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Ralph Waldo Emerson is seen as the father of Transcendentalism. He published his book of essays in 1836. The book titled "Nature" marks the movement’s emergence on the national scene.

“The American Renaissance - Eastern.” Www.easternct.edu, www.easternct.edu/speichera/understanding-literary-history-all/the-american-renaissance.html.

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1840-1860 Transcendentalism

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Romanticism & Industrialization 1800 - 1860

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Romanticism & Industrialization 1800 - 1860

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People in this time valued feeling, intuition, idealism, and inductive reasoning. They placed faith in inner experience and the power of the imagination, shunned the artificiality of civilization, and sought unspoiled nature as a path to spirituality. People championed individual freedom and the worth of the individual and saw poetry as the highest expression of the imagination. In this time period dark romantics used supernatural and dark themes (Gothic styles).

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Washington Irving

—"Rip van Winkle"

Emily Dickinson

—poetry

Walt Whitman

—Leaves of Grass

Edgar Allan Poe

—"The Raven"

Nathaniel Hawthorne

—The Scarlet Letter

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During the Romanticism period, fantasy became a bigger thing. Artists used more of it in their artworks and authors began writing more fantasy novels.

https://1st-art-gallery.medium.com/12-interesting-facts-about-romanticism-art-f6e8d4231d07

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12 Interesting Facts About Romanticism Art

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Romanticism art spanned the 18th to mid-19th centuries and reached its peak from the beginning to the middle of the 1800s. It’s a unique…

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Industrialization caused more problems. A few of these problems were bad work conditions, child labor, and environmental harm.

https://owlcation.com/humanities/12-Facts-on-the-Industrial-Revolution

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Paul graduated from university in 1987. He has done a variety of jobs, including librarian and teacher. He currently resides in Florida.

The Industrial Revolution is the name given to the enormous changes that took place with technology, farming, mining, manufacturing, and transportation from the middle of the 18 th Century through to the middle of the 19 th Century.

These changes had a massive impact on people's social and cultural life, as well as their economic conditions.

I hope that you enjoy reading my 12 facts on the industrial revolution and find them interesting.

1. The Industrial Revolution began in Great Britain. It later spread to Western Europe, North America, and around the world.

2. The main thing that happened during the Industrial Revolution was that machines were developed that could perform many of the jobs and tasks that had previously been done by people (or in some cases, animals, such as horses).

3. Before the Industrial Revolution, societies were largely rural and people made things at home. Industrialization meant that more and more people lived in cities, and goods were mass produced in purpose-built factories.

4. The Industrial Revolution generally brought about much better economic conditions for most people, but the poor and working classes often suffered with grim jobs and terrible living conditions. Dissatisfaction and poverty sometimes resulted in social breakdown, protests, and rioting.

The Luddites

The industrial revolution meant that many artisans saw their traditional livelihoods wiped out by the new machines. The Luddites were a group of English textile artisans who protested against the introduction of labour-replacing machinery from 1811 to 1817 often through sabotage and other forms of resistance. Protests broke out in Nottinghamshire and Northern England and became violent in some instances, with fighting between the protesters and the British Army.

5. There are still some countries in Africa and Asia that have yet to experience industrialization. These countries are sometimes referred to as "Third World" or "Developing" nations.

6. Britain was the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution for three main reasons. Firstly, Britain had lots of coal and iron ore, which was needed to power and make the machines that were required by industrialization. Secondly, it helped that Britain was politically stable. Thirdly, Britain was a major colonial power at the time, with the colonies providing both the raw materials for manufacturing and the marketplaces for the manufactured goods to be sold after they had been made.

7. The Industrial Revolution was the most important thing to happen in human history since the time when animals and plants were domesticated.

8. Before the Industrial Revolution happened, each generation of people produced a roughly similar amount of products to their predecessors and overall economic wealth was fairly stagnant. After industrialization, production began to grow quickly and it generally continued to grow each year.

9. The Industrial Revolution effectively created a new economic system, known as: "Capitalism".

10. Although the overall effects of industrialization were positive, there were many bad sides too, including all the pollution and waste that was created as a side effect by the machines. Working practices also became more regimented and many people worked long hours in factories performing repetitive, and sometimes dangerous or unhealthy jobs.

11. The production of textiles was one of the things that was totally transformed by the Industrial Revolution. Before industrialization, people generally made clothes at home. Merchants would often give the clothes makers the raw materials and essential equipment, and then collect and sell the finished products for them.

Industrialization meant that machines took over most of the work, with humans becoming less and less involved. On top of that, those that did work had to go to a factory each day, where their time and effort was closely monitored for efficiency. In effect, production increased, but not everyone's lives got better.

12. The steam engine was one of the most important inventions of the Industrial Revolution. The first practical steam engine was a machine made to pump water out of mines by the English inventor, Thomas Newcomen in 1712. The steam engine design was later improved upon by the Scotsman, James Watt. As well as powering the machines used in factories and mines, steam engines were also used in ships and locomotives, which improved transportation dramatically.

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Paul graduated from university in 1987. He has done a variety of jobs, including librarian and teacher. He currently resides in Florida. The Industrial Revolution is the name given to the enormous changes that took place with technology, farming, mining, manufacturing, and transportation from the middle of the 18 th Century through to the middle of the 19 th Century.

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1812-1815 The War of 1812

Started January 24, 1848: California Gold Rush

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The Puritans used the 10 commandments as the foundation of the rules they lived by. They take the Old Testament teachings very literally and fully follow the commandments given by God.

https://www.samstorms.org/enjoying-god-blog/post/10-things-you-should-know-about-the-puritans

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Nathaniel Hawthorne changed his last name. His great-great-grandfather was named John Hathorne and he was a leading judge of the Salem witch trials. Hawthorne was haunted by his ancestor’s past and decided to change his last name.

https://www.history.com/news/10-things-you-may-not-know-about-nathaniel-hawthorne

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1. He was the college classmate of another famous writer-and a president.

In addition to meeting future president Franklin Pierce while attending Maine's Bowdoin College, Hawthorne was a fellow member of the class of 1825 with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The pair remained lifelong friends. Longfellow served as a pallbearer at Hawthorne's funeral and later penned the poem "The Bells of Lynn" in his honor.

2. He changed his last name in part to hide his family's dark past.

The novelist's great-great-grandfather, John Hathorne, was a leading judge of the Salem witch trials, and Hawthorne was haunted by his ancestor's shameful past. Some believe that shortly after graduating from Bowdoin, the author added a "w" to his last name in part to make the spelling match the pronunciation and also to disassociate himself from a figure of whom he wrote was "so conspicuous in the martyrdom of the witches, that their blood may fairly be said to have left a stain upon him."

3. Hawthorne was the founding member of a utopian commune.

In 1841, Hawthorne became a charter member of Brook Farm, an agricultural collective founded by Unitarian minister George Ripley near Boston. The author expected that farm life would free up more time for him to write, but he quickly soured on the Transcendental commune as he laboriously cut straw, milked cows and shoveled a hill of manure that Ripley called the "gold mine." Hawthorne's blistered hands hampered his writing, and he wondered how anyone could "expect pretty stories from a man who feeds pigs." Disillusioned, he left after just a few months at the commune, which later inspired his 1852 novel The Blithedale Romance.

4. He lived in the same houses as two other famed Transcendental authors.

In 1842, Hawthorne and his newlywed wife, Sophia, moved into the Old Manse in Concord, Massachusetts, a homestead in which Ralph Waldo Emerson had previously composed the first draft of "Nature," the essay that launched the Transcendental movement. Another Transcendental leader, Henry David Thoreau, planted an heirloom vegetable garden for the Hawthornes when they moved into the Old Manse. A decade later, the Hawthornes moved into another Concord house with a literary past-the Wayside, the childhood home of author Louisa May Alcott.

5. Zachary Taylor's election led to the publication of The Scarlet Letter.

Struggling financially as a writer, Hawthorne through his connections with the Democratic Party procured a political appointment in 1846 to be a Custom House surveyor in his hometown of Salem, Massachusetts. Following the 1849 inauguration of Zachary Taylor, the president's fellow Whig Party members accused Hawthorne of "corruption, iniquity and fraud." Hawthorne's fierce fight to retain his government job was covered by partisan newspapers around the country, but he was ultimately let go in June 1849. After his dismissal, the novelist immersed himself for months in writing The Scarlet Letter, considered by many to be his best work.

6. The Scarlet Letter was an instant bestseller-but not for the reason you think.

When The Scarlet Letter was published in the spring of 1850, the initial print run of 2,500 copies sold out in only 10 days. However, given the publicity that had surrounded Hawthorne's firing the year before, readers were initially less interested in the tale of Hester Prynne than they were in the novel's introduction, "The Custom-House," in which Hawthorne's barbed pen skewered his political enemies.

7. He served as an American diplomat.

Shortly after Hawthorne completed writing Tanglewood Tales in 1853, the Senate approved his nomination by the newly inaugurated Pierce to be a United States consul in Liverpool, England, among the most lucrative of diplomatic positions. During his four years in the diplomatic corps, Hawthorne did not publish any major works.

8. Hawthorne's youngest daughter has been proposed for sainthood.

Rose Hawthorne, who initially pursued a literary career like her father, converted to Roman Catholicism with her husband. Following the death of her 5-year-old boy and her husband, she moved into a tenement in an impoverished New York City neighborhood and began nursing incurable cancer patients. She then joined a religious order and became a nun, Mother Mary Alphonsa. In 1900, she co-founded the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne to continue her work with impoverished cancer patients. In 2003, she was nominated for sainthood.

9. Hawthorne was separated from his wife for 142 years.

Seven years after Sophia Hawthorne buried her husband in Concord's Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, she passed away in London. She was interred an ocean away from her husband along with their daughter Una when she died in 1877. In 2006, the bodies of Hawthorne's wife and daughter were unearthed from London's Kensal Green Cemetery and reinterred next to his side.

10. A former president of the United States discovered Hawthorne dead.

With the author's health failing in the spring of 1864 as a likely result of gastrointestinal cancer, Hawthorne's old college friend, former president Franklin Pierce traveled with him to New Hampshire's White Mountains with the hope that the region's rarified air could be an elixir. On the evening of May 18 inside the Pemigewasset House hotel in Plymouth, New Hampshire, Hawthorne retired early after a dinner of toast and tea. During the night, Pierce awoke to check on his friend in the adjoining room. The former president placed his hand upon Hawthorne's forehead and found that he was dead. Pierce's presence fulfilled a passage in Hawthorne's novel The Blithedale Romance: "Happy the man that has such a friend beside him, when he comes to die!"

Fact Check

We strive for accuracy and fairness. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! HISTORY reviews and updates its content regularly to ensure it is complete and accurate.

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10 Things You May Not Know About Nathaniel Hawthorne | HISTORY

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Explore 10 surprising facts about the famed American novelist.

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The political repression and persecution of left-wing individuals and a campaign spreading fear of communist and Soviet influence on American institutions and of Soviet espionage in the United States during the late 1940s through the 1950s.

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Arthur Miller - The crucible

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Government employees began to lose their jobs due to the spread of McCarthyism. More than 2,000 government employees lost their jobs.

https://owlcation.com/humanities/Facts-About-McCarthyism

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The fear of communism lead to McCarthy's rise in power. As communism spread in China and Eastern Europe, Americans got more and more scared of losing their freedom. This led to the the rise of McCarthyism.

https://owlcation.com/humanities/Facts-About-McCarthyism

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Investigations of alleged communists

Hearings conducted by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).

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As a boy, Cummings wrote a poem every day. The practice and experience from his childhood made him into the poet he became.

https://newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/seven-fun-facts-about-e-e-cummings/

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Cummings first published poem came out in 1910. It was published in the Cambridge Review, a monthly magazine written by high school students.

https://newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/seven-fun-facts-about-e-e-cummings/

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Many school kids have a special affinity for e.e. cummings, who wrote about the circus and got away with funky punctuation, made-up words and no capitalization in his poetry. Young ladies, too, are drawn to his lyrical love poems, some of the best in the English language.

He loved to mangle language as the cartoon character Krazy Kat did. He even wrote an introduction to the first collection of the Krazy Kat comic strips.

Yet Cummings' experimental poems weren't just kid stuff.

When he died in 1962, critics acknowledged him as an important 20 th century poet. "No one else has ever made avant-garde, experimental poems so attractive to the general and the special reader," wrote critic Randall Jarrell.

E.E. Cummings

He was born into a prosperous, intellectual Unitarian family in Cambridge, Mass. Like another New England poet, Robert Frost, he had a farm in New Hampshire. Throughout his life he found refuge at Joy Farm in Madison, near Mount Chocorua.

He earned a B.A. and an M.A. from Harvard, signed up to drive an ambulance during World War I and then wrote a critically acclaimed novel, The Enormous Room.

In 1923 his first book of poetry, Tulips and Chimneys, came out. He wrote more books of poetry in the 20s that established his reputation as an avant-garde poet. Over his lifetime he also wrote 2,900 poems, four plays, two novels and essays. He also painted and drew.

For most of his life he lived in a small apartment at 4 Patchin Place in Greenwich Village. "the topfloorback room at 4 Patchin Place ... meant Safety & Peace & the truth of Dreaming & the bliss of Work."

He had two short marriages as a young man, then fell in love with a model, Marion Morehouse. They lived together for 30 years, until his death.

He died on Sept. 3, 1962 and is buried at the Forest Hills Cemetery in the Jamaica Plain section of Boston.

Here are seven fun facts about e.e. cummings, or E.E. Cummings, if you prefer. He used both.

1. Cummings had Cambridge roots

His childhood home in Cambridge at 104 Irving Street was across the street from the house Julia Child would later live in. Cummings' home was the first in Cambridge to have a telephone (a hand-cranked version, that is).

He was born Edward Estlin Cummings, named after his father, on Oct. 14, 1894. Everyone called him Estlin. His loving, well-to-do family encouraged his creativity as a child and supported him financially as an adult. He had a happy childhood, capturing its essence in his most famous poem, [in Just-].

When the world is puddle-wonderful

The little lame baloon-man whistles

Far and wee,

And Betty and Is'bel come dancing...

And the goat-footed baloon-man

Whistles

Far

And

Wee.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and James Russell Lowell, two Fireside poets, had also lived in the city and died within a decade of Cummings' birth. Before TV and radio, people read poetry for entertainment in family settings - hence "fireside." - and schoolchildren memorized poems in school.

Poets were celebrities, rock stars even, back then. Estlin Cummings wanted to be one from his early childhood.

2. He had a beloved African-American teacher

He attended the Agassiz School, a public school run by Maria Baldwin, the African American principal and early civil rights leader. The school now bears her name. About Baldwin, he wrote, "From her I marvelingly learned that the truest power is gentleness." She called him a most loveable little boy.

As a boy, E.E. Cummings wrote a poem every day. His trademark: no space after a comma, began at the age of 14.

His first published poem appeared in 1910 in the Cambridge Review, a monthly magazine by the city's high school students. The last line, about the retirement of his teacher, read,

"Than that which fits you best-our faithful friend." But the printer left off 'you.' From then on, Cummings had an inordinate distrust of typesetters. "Later in his life he would become the bane of printers, insisting on galley after galley that he would examine with extreme care, correcting the most minute mistakes," wrote his biographer, Christopher Sawyer-Laucanno.

3. He spent time in a French military prison

E.E. Cummings spent 3-1/2 months in a French military prison. He had joined the French ambulance corps during World War I. A bureaucratic mix-up left him in Paris for five weeks, and he fell in love with a French prostitute.

Cummings and his friend, William Slater Brown, wrote letters home that included comments opposing the war. The French military arrested him in 1917 and incarcerated him in a large room. His father protested vigorously and got him out of prison.

From that experience he wrote The Enormous Room, published in 1922, to critical acclaim.

4. He had Daddy issues

His father worked as the pastor of the South Congregational Church and as a lecturer at Harvard. He also served as secretary of the Boston Mayor's Advisory Committee on Penal Aspects of Drunkenness and a supporter of the Watch and Ward Society.

His father was a large, powerful man, athletic and aggressive. Estlin, on the other hand, was small, uncoordinated and as a teenager had bad acne. His father often said, "I'd never give a penny to a son of mine who drank." Estlin drank, but he got more than a penny over the years.

His daddy issues caused him to start rebelling against his father while at Harvard. He drank whiskey sours, visited burlesque shows and wrote erotic love poems. Once he parked his father's car in front of a bordello.

5. Cummings was a Republican

Though he wrote avant-garde poetry and lived a Bohemian lifestyle in Greenwich Village, he registered as a Republican and supported the anti-Communist U.S. senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy.

Cummings visited the Soviet Union in 1931, and criticized the poverty and squalor under Stalin. Susan Cheever wrote, "He lost friends, and people crossed the street to avoid him. Malcolm Cowley and Edmund Wilson were horrified at what seemed to them, accurately, to be a sudden veering into right-wing conservatism..." He hated the Kennedys and refused an invitation to the White House from First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy.

6. He grew estranged from his daughter

His first wife, Elaine Orr, abducted their daughter and he didn't see her for more than 20 years. Cummings had an affair with Elaine while she was married to Scofield Thayer. She had Cummings' child, Nancy, in 1919, but her husband was okay with it. Thayer gave Nancy his name and supported her.

Elaine divorced Thayer to marry Cummings in 1924. They stayed together all of two months and divorced after nine.

Elaine told Nancy that Thayer was her father, that he was dead (he wasn't), that he was crazy (he was).

Elaine shuttled Nancy across the Atlantic and around Europe, putting her in the care of nurses, governesses and boarding schools. Nancy on her own she discovered the poetry of E.E. Cummings. During World War II she worked in Washington, D.C., as a typist and a linguist, and met and married Willard Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt's grandson.

Nancy's mother-in-law invited her to stay during the summer at her summer home near Mount Chocorua. Cummings, nearby at Joy Farm, invited her for tea but didn't disclose their relationship. She agreed to meet him again in Greenwich Village to have her portrait painted, and felt herself falling in love with him. Finally he told her the truth.

7. He loved dirty dancing

He admitted his addiction to striptease and burlesque while delivering the Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard. When living in Greenwich Village he frequented the burlesque show at Minsky's National Winter Garden to see his favorite stripper, Cleo. As a Harvard undergraduate, he went to the burlesque show at the Old Howard Theater in Boston's Scollay Square. In Paris, he dated a prostitute named Marie-Louise. He wrote articles for Vanity Fair in 1925 and 1926 defending burlesque as "art which is alive."
We relied on several fine biographies of E.E. Cummings, including E.E. Cummings A Biography By Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno; E.E. Cummings By Catherine Reef; Dreams in the Mirror: A Biography of E.E. Cummings By Richard S. Kennedy; e.e. cummings: a life by Susan Cheever. Image: e.e. cummings house in Cambridge By User:Magicpiano - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=22922253. This story was updated in 2024.

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Seven Fun Facts About E.E. Cummings - New England Historical Society

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Here are seven surprising facts about E.E. Cummings, along with one about the way he spelled his name (not always lowercase).

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Cumming had joined the French ambulance corps during World War I. He spent three and a half months in a French military prison.

https://newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/seven-fun-facts-about-e-e-cummings/

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Li-Young Lee attended the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Arizona, as well as the State University of New York at Brockport.

https://poets.org/poet/li-young-lee

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Li-Young Lee has taught at many universities. Some of these include Northwestern University and the University of Iowa.

https://poets.org/poet/li-young-lee

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In 1998, Li-Young Lee received the honorary degree of doctor of humane letters. He received it from the State University of New York at Brockport.

https://poets.org/poet/li-young-lee

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Ezra Pound’s first published poem was a limerick. It appeared in his local paper in 1896, when he was just eleven years old.

https://interestingliterature.com/2015/05/five-fascinating-facts-about-ezra-pound/

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1. Ezra Pound's middle name was Loomis. Or rather, one of his middle names. Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was born in Idaho in 1885; a childhood friend was Hilda Doolittle, who would become known as an imagist poet under the initials 'H. D.' (the initialism was Pound's own PR idea) and, later, as a novelist. Pound even asked Doolittle to marry him in 1907; she declined (as he was reportedly seeing two other women at the time, it's not hard to see why!).

Pound would be the driving force behind the literary movement known as imagism in the years 1913-15, and would also contribute to modernist poetry himself with a number of famous poems, among them the two-line imagist masterpiece 'In a Station of the Metro', the long poem Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920), and the very long poem The Cantos (Pound's life's work, and over 800 pages in full). The Cantos is a vast work, described by Hugh Kenner as the chronicle of Pound's own life, and written over a period of nearly half a century. (It was described by Pound, in an early draft, as a 'rag-bag'.)

2. Ezra Pound's first published poem was a limerick which appeared in his local paper in 1896, when he was 11 years old. Unlike his friend and fellow modernist poet T. S. Eliot, Pound was possessed of a swaggering confidence from an early age: he was apparently bad at playing the piano (and had little musical talent in general) but would do so nevertheless, a sign of his overwhelming self-belief. He liked to play tennis, even though his friend Ford Madox Ford describes him playing like 'an inebriated kangaroo'. Few young writers have possessed more self-confidence than Pound.

3. Ezra Pound coined the word 'logopœia', which he defined as 'the dance of the intellect among words'. He also coined the word 'periplum' for a tour or voyage which ends with you returning to where you started out from. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word 'whoops' is first recorded in a 1937 letter written by Ezra Pound.

4. His fashion sense - or lack of - got him into trouble. At the University of Pennsylvania, where he went to study in 1901, Ezra Pound contravened college convention by wearing flashy socks, something freshmen were forbidden to do; he was promptly thrown into a lily pond by second-year students (this earned him the nickname 'Lily Pound').

And yet for all his outward confidence and vivacity, Pound was a lonely youth who was shunned by his peers at Hamilton, the New York college where he completed his university education: one of his professors later recalled that he only ever saw Pound walking about alone on campus, never with friends. In a sense he would always be a loner or outsider: at college in his own country, and then abroad in London, in Paris, in Italy, and then - following his arrest in 1945 - in a psychiatric hospital. (He was arrested for charges of treason against the United States and later declared insane; in the 1930s, Pound had become a vocal supporter of Italian fascism.) Shortly after Pound arrived in London in the early twentieth century, Ford Madox Ford described the young poet's clothes: he 'had trousers made of green billiard cloth, a pink coat, a blue shirt, a tie hand-painted by a Japanese friend and an immense sombrero. All this was accompanied by a flaming beard cut to a point and a single, large blue earring'.

5. In 1945, one American newspaper asked, 'Should Ezra Pound be shot?' Because of his support of European fascism, Pound became increasingly controversial as the first half of the twentieth century wore on. His outspoken anti-Semitism in the 1930s and 1940s is undoubtedly one reason why his work is not as widely read as, say, Eliot's (that, and his poetry is more difficult even than Eliot's - with less to reward the reader for their efforts, some anti-Pound critics would add). He was also a supporter of Italian fascism and met Mussolini in the 1930s; during WWII he made some radio broadcasts against America and Jewish people while living in Italy. Needless to say, this didn't go down too well back home in the land of the free, and Pound was charged with treason shortly after the end of WWII and incarcerated in St Elizabeths Hospital, a psychiatric institution in Washington D. C. He would later be released, dying in 1972 with few supporters. However, his central place in literary modernism is assured, and he was championed by influential critic Hugh Kenner, whose detailed study, The Pound Era , puts Pound (rather than T. S. Eliot) at the centre of modernist poetry.

If you enjoyed these interesting Ezra Pound facts, check out our interesting T. S. Eliot facts (and, for more detail, our short history of T. S. Eliot's life).
Image: Ezra Pound photographed in Kensington, London, October 22, 1913. Photograph by Alvin Langdon Coburn, first published in Coburn's More Men of Mark (New York: Knopf, 1922); Wikimedia Commons; public domain.

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Fun Ezra Pound facts, including his unusual middle name and his even weirder fashion sense 1. Ezra Pound's middle name was Loomis. Or rather, one of his middle names. Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was born in Idaho in 1885; a childhood friend was Hilda Doolittle, who would become known as an imagist poet under the initials...

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According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word ‘whoops’ is first recorded in a letter written by Ezra Pound.

https://interestingliterature.com/2015/05/five-fascinating-facts-about-ezra-pound/

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In 1907, Ezra Pound became professor of Romance Languages at Wabash Presbyterian College.

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ezra-Pound

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Feelings of disillusionment. Common subjects: slums of rapidly growing cities, factories replacing farmlands, poor factory workers, and corrupt politicians. Represented the manner and environment of everyday life and ordinary people as realistically as possible (Regionalism). Sought to explain behavior (psychologically/socially).

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Mark Twain
-Huckleberry Finn

Jack London
-Call of the Wild
-"To Build a Fire"

Stephen Crane
-"The Open Boat"

Ambrose Bierce
-"An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge"

Kate Chopin
-"Story of an Hour"
-The Awakening

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Thomas Cole instigated the rise of America's first school of landscapists. The school followed the idea of the sublime power of nature.

https://www.theartstory.org/movement/american-realism/

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Thomas Eakins was one of the founders and teachers of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Arts. Eakins was fascinated with photography. He made photographic studies of humans and animals in motion.

https://www.theartstory.org/movement/american-realism/

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Civil War

1861-1865

Reconstruction Era

1865-1877

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Jack was given the name John Finney at birth. When he was three years old he was renamed Walter Braden Finney in honour of his father. Throughout his life, he was known as "Jack".

https://kids.kiddle.co/Jack_Finney

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Finney's first article was titled "Someone Who Knows Told Me …". It was published in the December 1943 issue of Cosmopolitan. The article reflects the message of the Office of War Information's "Loose Lips Sink Ships" campaign of World War Two.

https://kids.kiddle.co/Jack_Finney

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One of Jack Finney's most popular pieces is his science fiction novel Time and Again. It involves time travel to the past, a theme that he had used in a few of his short stories.

https://english.netmassimo.com/2012/07/16/time-and-again-by-jack-finney/

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Susan Glaspell was an American dramatist and novelist who founded the Provincetown Players with her husband in 1915.

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Susan-Glaspell

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Glaspell graduated from Drake University in 1899. During college, she published a few short stories and worked as a college correspondent for a local newspaper. After graduating she became a reporter for the Des Moines Daily News.

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Susan-Glaspell

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Glaspell published her first novel in 1909. The novel was titled The Glory of the Conquered. It was a romance story that had some success.

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Susan-Glaspell

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Sense of disillusionment and loss of faith in the "American Dream": the independent, self-reliant, individual will triumph.

Emphasis on bold experimentation in style and form over the traditional. Interest in the inner workings of the human mind.

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Modernism                      (Authors and Works)

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Modernism                      (Authors and Works)

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Lorraine Hansberry
-A Raisin in the Sun

F. Scott Fitzgerald
-The Great Gatsby

William Faulkner
-"A Rose for Emily"

Eudora Welty
-"A Worn Path"

Robert Frost
-poetry

T. S. Eliot
-The Waste Land
-"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

John Steinbeck
-Of Mice and Men
-The Grapes of Wrath

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Modernism                     Architecture and Design

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Modernism                     Architecture and Design

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Modern buildings started focusing on simplicity and functionality instead of fancy decorations. Many modernist buildings began to use more materials like glass and steel, giving them a sleek look.

https://www.astrosafe.co/article/modernism

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Modernism                   Artists and Works

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Modernism                   Artists and Works

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Art and works saw a dramatic change during this period. New art styles began forming as people started experimenting and expressing themselves through art. One of the most influential artists during this time was Pablo Picasso.

https://www.astrosafe.co/article/modernism

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Modernism                     (Special Dates)

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Modernism                     (Special Dates)

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World War I
1914-1918

The Great Depression
1929-1939

World War II
1939-1945

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The 20s                                The age of Jazz

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The 20s                                The age of Jazz

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The most notable creator of the new style of music was Louis Armstrong. Jazz became the music of choice in the popular speakeasies. The older generation saw the Jazz genre as a representation of the sinful new era of the Twenties.

https://blog.genealogybank.com/1920s-facts-interesting-important-historical-events.html

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The 20s                                Invention of the TV

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The 20s                                Invention of the TV

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This decade saw the invention of the television. TV sets were bulky, blurry, and expensive. It took until the 1950s for TVs to become popular across the U.S.

https://blog.genealogybank.com/1920s-facts-interesting-important-historical-events.html

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The 30s                            Snow White Released

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The 30s                            Snow White Released

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In the midst of the great depression, Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was created. Released in 1937, this film would be the first of many Disney films to be released.

https://kids.kiddle.co/1930s

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The  40s                                  The US Enters WWII

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The  40s                                  The US Enters WWII

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Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 brought the United States into the war. The day following the attack, the United States Congress officially declared war on Imperial Japan.

https://facts.uk/facts-about-the-1940s/

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Harlem Renaissance             1920-1940

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Harlem Renaissance             1920-1940

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Black cultural movement in Harlem, New York
Some poetry rhythms based on spirituals and jazz, lyrics on the blues, and diction from the street talk of the ghettos. Other poetry used conventional lyrical forms

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James Weldon Johnson

Claude McKay

Countee Cullen

Langston Hughes (poetry)

Zora Neale Hurston

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In 1914, about 50,000 African Americans lived in Harlem. By 1930, Harlem had grown to a population of 200,000 African Americans. This event is called the 'Great Migration'.

https://www.softschools.com/facts/world_history/harlem_renaissance_facts/2890/

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African American sports became popular during the Harlem Renaissance. Leagues were founded because white people did not allow African Americans to play in their leagues. In 1927, the New York Harlem Globetrotters were founded.

https://www.softschools.com/facts/world_history/harlem_renaissance_facts/2890/

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"The New Negro Movement"
1919-1925

Prohibition
1920-1933

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The 50s                                Rock and Roll was introduced 

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The 50s                                Rock and Roll was introduced 

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In the 1950s, Rock and roll was formed. The term was first coined by Cleveland DJ Alan Freed, and teens across the country quickly began using it. The new music often used themes like love and freedom from oppression.

https://blog.genealogybank.com/1950s-fun-facts-pop-culture-historical-usa-trivia.html

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The 50s                                    Step towards Civil Rights

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The 50s                                    Step towards Civil Rights

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One of the most critical events of the 1950s was the progress made by the civil rights movement. One of the highlights is the Supreme Court's 1954 ruling on the landmark Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka case. This case stated that the racial segregation of blacks and whites into separate schools was unconstitutional.

https://blog.genealogybank.com/1950s-fun-facts-pop-culture-historical-usa-trivia.html

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On 20 July 1969, Neil Armstrong stepped foot on the moon. This gave the American people hope that the future would be brighter because their country had achieved this so-called impossible feat.

https://blog.genealogybank.com/1960s-facts-fun-interesting-historical-usa-trivia.html

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The Civil Rights Movement gained more rights for African-Americans, and the US withdrew from the war in Vietnam. Life in the States began to look more positive. However, the Cold War continued.

https://transformationoftheamericandream.weebly.com/1970s.html#:~:text=Consequently%2C%20a%20part%20of%20the,cellphone%20was%20invented%20in%201969.

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The economy was booming in the 80s, and everybody seemed to be making more and more money. The American dream was more popular than every because of the amount of opportunity.

https://prezi.com/6er_-og3lxtu/american-dream-in-the-80s/

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American movies became more popular worldwide. Many people watched American films, and the American dream became more widespread through them. Movies like Back to the Future, Top Gun, and the Rocky series spread worldwide and gave people a taste of America.

https://www.imdb.com/list/ls043407506/

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The economy began to fall and the American dream seemed to be fading away. People began to put their hope on the next generation to do better and have a brighter future.

https://www.socialistalternative.org/why-we-need-a-labor-party/end-american-dream/

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Between 2007 and 2009 the American economy crashed. It was the longest economic downturn since the Great Depression. The set the American Dream back and people began to lose hope.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/g/great-recession.asp

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Contemporary "Postmodernism"              1950 - Present

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Contemporary "Postmodernism"              1950 - Present

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Influenced by studies of media, language, and information technology. Sense that little is unique; culture endlessly duplicates itself. New literary forms and techniques: works composed of only dialogue, or combining fiction and nonfiction, experimenting with physical appearance of their work.

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Alice Walker

Wallace Stevens

e.e. cummings

Maya Angelou

Anne Sexton

James Baldwin

Richard Wright

Sandra Cisneros

Amy Tan

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Postmodernism was a reaction against modernism. Modernism was based on idealism and reason, and postmodernism was born of scepticism and a suspicion of reason.

https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/p/postmodernism

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Jacques Lacan was a French psychoanalyst and theorist. His ideas had a large impact on critical theory in the twentieth century. They were very influential on the development of postmodernism. He questioned the conventional boundaries between the rational and irrational.

https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/p/postmodernism

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Korean War
1950-1953

Vietnam War
1954-1975

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Modern Day                            - Taking a stand

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Modern Day                            - Taking a stand

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In modern times there are many different ways of taking a stand. Some ways are new because technology has made them possible, but other ways have stayed the same throughout history.

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On the Freedom Side - Wesley Hogan

Separate is Never Equal - Duncan Tonatiuh

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Women's rights groups protest in Poland. Women stand together to fight the abortion law passed by the Polish government.

“Women’s Rights Groups Protest against Abortion Law in Poland.” Euronews, Euronews.com, 24 July 2024, www.euronews.com/health/2024/07/24/womens-rights-groups-protest-against-abortion-law-in-poland. Accessed 7 Oct. 2024.

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Worldwide protests against Israel demand an end to the war in Palestine, Lebanon. People gather together to protest and take a stand against Israel.

Hassan, Rashid. “Worldwide Protests against Israel Demand End to War in Palestine, Lebanon.” Arab News, Arabnews, 6 Oct. 2024, www.arabnews.com/node/2574203/middle-east.

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Feminism - 1850 to present day

Black Lives Matter - 2014 to present day

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The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides is a psychological thriller centered around a successful painter who murders her husband, and after committing the crime, she stops speaking entirely. A criminal psychotherapist is determined to uncover the motive behind her silence. He digs into her past and becomes increasingly obsessed with her case. Through their meetings, he discovers dark secrets about her past. This story explores the themes of identity, truth, and trust.

https://www.litcharts.com/lit/the-silent-patient/summary

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Through his timeline journey, I have seen how much literature has impacted our history. I have traveled from 2200 B.C. all the way to the present day and seen how man has formed history through stories and writing. Literature has caused revolution and peace. Writing is a powerful tool that has been used to shape the modern era into what it has become.