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Special Dates:
Civil War(1861-1865)
Reconstruction Era(1865-1877)

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

Famous Authors & Works:
Mark Twain's "Huckleberry Finn"
Stephen Crane's "The Open Boat"

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Electric Literature's Editorial Director Halimah Marcus attended Friends' Central High School and has written a response to this article that contains corrections.

Friends' Central School in Wynnewood, Pennsylvania has just pulled Mark Twain's classic Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from its 11th-grade American Literature curriculum. A group of students reported they felt "uncomfortable" with the book's use of the n-word, and in response, the school held a forum for students and faculty over the issue, ultimately deciding that the book will be replaced by the memoir Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave.

"We have all come to the conclusion that the community costs of reading this book in 11th grade outweigh the literary benefits," Principal Art Hall wrote in a letter to parents of Friends' Central students.

This is certainly not Huckleberry Finn's only ban - in fact, it was first banned in 1885, just months after its release. According to the American Library Association, it was the fifth most challenged book in the 1990s, and the fourteenth most challenged in the 2000s.

This incessant banning of Huckleberry Finn paints an interesting portrait of how the American psyche has evolved. When it was first banned, censors protested its anti-slavery stance and the portrayal of a friendship between an escaped African-American slave and a white boy. Now, however, the tables have turned, and it is frequently under fire for its frequent use of the n-word.

The relationship between education and race is, understandably, an important and an often-disputed territory. For instance, this fall the children's book A Fine Dessert by Emily Jenkins was criticized for its racially insensitive depiction of a smiling slave, sparking a debate over how slavery should be handled and discussed, particularly in children's literature.

These two controversies ask similar questions about how to navigate race in education: Where is the line between comfort and ignorance?

About the Author

Electric Literature is a nonprofit publication committed to making literature more exciting, relevant, and inclusive.

More about the author

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Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Removed from School Curriculum - Electric Literature

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by Melissa Ragsdale Electric Literature's Editorial Director Halimah Marcus attended Friends' Central High School and has written a response to this article that contains corrections. Friends' Central School in Wynnewood, Pennsylvania has just pulled Mark Twain's classic Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from its 11th-grade American Literature curriculum.

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Facts:
1. An American writer that loved to write about thrillers and science fictions.
2. Was very private and individual, he didn't write about personal experiences and hardly stood in front of the public.
3. His original name is John, but he changed it to the name of his dead father.

Famous Works:
1. The Body Snatchers
2. Time and Again

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About Jack Finney: American novelist, short story writer (1911 - 1995) | Biography, Filmography, Bibliography, Facts, Career, Life

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Jack Finney: American novelist, short story writer (1911 - 1995), Writer, Novelist, Screenwriter, Author, Science fiction writer, From: United States of America

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Facts:
1. Her stories focused on African American culture.
2. She joined the civil rights movement after graduation.
3. She moved to many states. From Georgia to Mississippi, from Mississippi to New York, and then to California

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Alice Walker, in full Alice Malsenior Walker, (born February 9, 1944, Eatonton, Georgia, U.S.), American writer whose novels, short stories, and poems are noted for their insightful treatment of African American culture. Her novels, most notably The Color Purple (1982), focus particularly on women.

Walker was the eighth child of African American sharecroppers. While growing up she was accidentally blinded in one eye, and her mother gave her a typewriter, allowing her to write instead of doing chores. She received a scholarship to attend Spelman College, where she studied for two years before transferring to Sarah Lawrence College. After graduating in 1965, Walker moved to Mississippi and became involved in the civil rights movement. She also began teaching and publishing short stories and essays. She married in 1967, but the couple divorced in 1976.
(Read W.E.B. Du Bois' 1926 Britannica essay on African American literature.)
Walker's first book of poetry, Once, appeared in 1968, and her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970), a narrative that spans 60 years and three generations, followed two years later. A second volume of poetry, Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems, and her first collection of short stories, In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Woman, both appeared in 1973. The latter bears witness to sexist violence and abuse in the African American community. After moving to New York, Walker completed (1976), a novel describing the coming of age of several civil rights workers in the 1960s.

Walker later moved to California, where she wrote her most popular novel, The Color Purple (1982). An epistolary novel, it depicts the growing up and self-realization of an African American woman between 1909 and 1947 in a town in Georgia. The book won a Pulitzer Prize and was adapted into a film by Steven Spielberg in 1985. A musical version produced by Oprah Winfrey and Quincy Jones premiered in 2004.

Walker's later fiction includes The Temple of My Familiar, an ambitious examination of racial and sexual tensions (1989); Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992), a narrative centred on female genital mutilation; By the Light of My Father's Smile (1998), the story of a family of anthropologists posing as missionaries in order to gain access to a Mexican tribe; and Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart (2005), about an older woman's quest for identity. Reviewers complained that these novels employed New Age abstractions and poorly conceived characters, though Walker continued to draw praise for championing racial and gender equality in her work. She also released the volume of short stories The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart (2000) and several other volumes of poetry, including Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth (2003), A Poem Traveled Down My Arm (2003), Hard Times Require Furious Dancing (2010), and Taking the Arrow Out of the Heart (2018). Her Blue Body Everything We Know: Earthling Poems (1991) collects poetry from 1965 to 1990.
(Read Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s Britannica essay on "Monuments of Hope.")
Walker's essays were compiled in In Search of Our Mother's Gardens: Womanist Prose (1983), Sent by Earth: A Message from the Grandmother Spirit After the Bombing of the World Trade Center and Pentagon (2001), We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For (2006), and The Cushion in the Road: Meditation and Wandering as the Whole World Awakens to Being in Harm's Way (2013). Walker also wrote juvenile fiction and critical essays on such female writers as Flannery O'Connor and Zora Neale Hurston. She cofounded a short-lived press in 1984. Throughout her career Walker occasionally attracted criticism. Notably, some African Americans strongly objected to the perceived negative portrayal of Black men in The Color Purple. In later years Walker, who often spoke out against Israel's policies toward Palestinians, was accused of being anti-Semitic, with her support of a Holocaust denier drawing particular attention.

In the unconventional memoir The Chicken Chronicles (2011), Walker discussed caring for a flock of chickens while also musing on her life. Gathering Blossoms Under Fire (2022) is a collection of her journals. The documentary Alice Walker: Beauty in Truth was released in 2013.

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Alice Walker | Biography, Books, The Color Purple, & Facts

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Alice Walker, in full Alice Malsenior Walker, (born February 9, 1944, Eatonton, Georgia, U.S.), American writer whose novels, short stories, and poems are noted for their insightful treatment of African American culture. Her novels, most notably The Color Purple (1982), focus particularly on women. Walker was the eighth child of African American sharecroppers.

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1. Sense of disillusionment and loss of faith in the American Dream.
2. Emphasis on bold experimentation in style and form over the traditional.
3. Interest in the inner workings of the human mind

Events:
World War I (1914-1918)
Great Depression (1929-1939)
World War II(1939-1945)

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American Modernism 1900-1950

March 11, 2015 by kellywalkerstudios

Last night at Samuel's Public Library in Front Royal I attended the first of several lectures on American Modernism by Ben Glenn II, an art historian and writer. This is a four-part series and last night he discussed 1900-1917 and spoke about many artists of that time period including John Marin, Arthur Dove, Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz.

We spent time looking at many pieces of art of that time period and he discussed the importance of Alfred Stieglitz and the gallery (291) that he helped establish. It's a fascinating time. Read more about Stieglitz here.

The next lecture is Tuesday, March 17th at 6:30. Check out the series here.

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Last night at Samuel's Public Library in Front Royal I attended the first of several lectures on American Modernism by Ben Glenn II, an art historian and writer. This is a four-part series and last night he discussed 1900-1917 and spoke about many artists of that time period including John Marin, Arthur Dove, Georgia O'Keeffe...

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1. The American dream went from having opportunities to the purchase of many possessions.
2. It focused on having many material things.
3. Too much greed led to problems
Events:
1. Roaring Twenties
2. Stock market crash of 1929
3. Great depression

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Has It Drifted From the Vision of Our Founding Fathers?

Before looking at what the American Dream is today, we need to look at its roots. The Declaration of Independence protects your opportunity to improve your life, no matter who you are. It boldly proclaims:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."

Our Founding Fathers introduced the revolutionary idea that each person's desire to pursue their idea of happiness was not self-indulgence, but a necessary driver of a prosperous society. They created a government to defend that right for everyone.

The pursuit of happiness became the driver of the entrepreneurial spirit that defines the American free market economy.

Of course, at that time "everyone" only meant white property-owners. Over time, Congress extended the right to slaves, women, and people without property. President Lincoln extended the American Dream to slaves with the Emancipation Proclamation. President Wilson extended it to women by supporting the 19th Amendment, giving women the right to vote.

President Johnson promoted Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. That extended the dream by protecting workers from discrimination by race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy), or national origin. In 1967, Congress extended those rights to those older than 40. President Obama established the right to the pursuit of happiness through marriage regardless of sexual orientation. The Supreme Court supported that right in 2015.

How the American Dream Changed

Throughout U.S. history, the definition of happiness changed as well. In the 1920s, it shifted from the Founders' dream of opportunity to the acquisition of material things. That was best exemplified by the novel, " The Great Gatsby." Its author, F. Scott Fitzgerald, defined the aspirations of the age. At the same time, he warned that a pursuit of happiness driven by greed was not attainable. That's because someone else always had more. This greed led to the Roaring Twenties, which ended with the stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression.

After the 1920s, many presidents supported the idea of the Dream as a pursuit of material benefits. President Roosevelt outlined an Economic Bill of Rights in his 1944 State of the Union address. He defined the pursuit of happiness as decent housing, a good job, education, and health care. FDR realized that people who were hungry, homeless, and sick were more likely to succumb to strong social forces. He worried about the fascism, Communism, and Socialism movements that were sweeping the world at that time.

FDR's Unfinished Second Bill of Rights was drawn up to address domestic security after WWII.

President Truman's Fair Deal expanded the Dream to include entitlement. If you worked hard and played by the rules, the government should provide you with financial security, education, health care and a home.

Many national leaders continued the shift set in place by FDR and Truman. Both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush supported homeownership as part of the Dream. While running for president in 2008, Hillary Clinton proposed her American Dream Plan. It included homeownership, college, retirement, and health insurance for children. Obama extended the right to health care with the Affordable Care Act.

Did the Great Recession Create a New American Dream?

Some people think the Great Recession and rising income inequality spelled the end of the American Dream for many. But it only damaged the materialistic American Dream, which isn't achievable anyway.

Instead, many are turning to a new definition of the American Dream that better reflects the values of the country for which it was named. For example, the Center for a New American Dream envisions

"... a focus on more of what really matters, such as creating a meaningful life, contributing to community and society, valuing nature, and spending time with family and friends."

Financial adviser Suze Orman described the new American Dream as one

"... where you actually get more pleasure out of saving than you do spending. It's a dream where you live below your means but within your needs. You are not spending every penny, you are not impressing people. You are living a life where you can sleep at night and you are actually happy."

Is the New Dream Really New?

Both of these new visions reject the American Dream based on materialism. But perhaps there is no need to create a New American Dream from scratch. Instead, let's return to our Founding Fathers' vision. All people have an equal and inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of their own happiness. Federal law protects this right.

The Declaration of Independence says nothing about any type of lifestyle. It does not define what that happiness should look like. Instead, it seeks to ensure that everyone has equal opportunity to pursue a personal vision. It also promotes faith in private free enterprise as a way to pursue that happiness.

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New Dream | The Balance: What Is the American Dream Today?

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Before looking at what the American Dream is today, we need to look at its roots. The Declaration of Independence protects your opportunity to improve your life, no matter who you are.

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Facts:
1. The American dream was not about success in the 1930s. The American dream consisted of freedom, equality and mutual respect.
2. The American dream was about stability, wealth and safe jobs in the 1940s.

Sources:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/04/upshot/the-transformation-of-the-american-dream.html

https://www.lovemoney.com/gallerylist/84477/what-the-american-dream-looked-like-the-decade-you-were-born#:~:text=The%20American%20Dream%20in%20the,consumption%20began%20to%20gain%20traction.

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1. Finally the "real" American dream. Focused on buying houses and starting families.
2. Housing boom + Baby boom
3. Houses were more affordable

Source:
https://www.achrnews.com/articles/87033-the-1950s-pursuing-the-american-dream

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1. Black cultural movement in Harlem
2. The origin of Jazz, blues and etc.
3. "New Negro Movement"(1919-1925)

Image:
https://www.history.com/topics/roaring-twenties/harlem-renaissance

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1. The American dream had a huge drift and now its meaning was in a national scale, the civil rights of the people.
2. After gaining more rights, people now focused back to having better lives and having a higher quality life.
3. Martin Luther King Jr. era.

Cite:
https://transformationoftheamericandream.weebly.com/1960s.html

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1. The American dream was more commonly seen in advertisements and etc.
2. It influenced buying houses to be a "true" citizen.

https://www.rd.com/list/how-the-american-dream-has-changed/

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The American Dream

Everybody dreams of something, whether it is to one day become financially independent, buy their very first house, become their own boss, or start a family. That's why one of the most prominent, well-known, and revolutionary catchphrases of the United States, for close to 90 years, has been the idea of living the "American Dream."

While the phrase has grown and expanded to mean many different things to many different people, its rise to popularity started in 1931, when famed historian and writer James Truslow Adams wrote in his book The Epic of America about "the American dream, that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for every man, with opportunity for each according to his ability or achievement." Read on for a closer look at the American Dream through the years.

1930s

In the 1930s, the American Dream was simple and didn't involve waiting in long lines to score the newest iPhone on the day it came out or being able to get the latest credit card with a slew of perks. Adams even clarified to say that "it is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of a social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position." Check out these fascinating facts about America that you never learned in school.

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Here's How the American Dream Has Changed over the Years

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Everybody dreams of something, whether it is to one day become financially independent, buy their very first house, become their own boss, or start a family. That's why one of the most prominent, well-known, and revolutionary catchphrases of the United States, for close to 90 years, has been the idea of living the "American Dream."

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1. The American dream was more developed and common than before, people were chasing for money, reputation and fame.
2. The American dream peaked in the 2000s because it is mostly achieved by the people. Most of the people have houses and jobs, now they want more than the American dream.
3. However, the American dream is now declining do to the new generation that are not disposed to marry  and have children, which are heavily correlated with house buying.

Cites:
https://www.businessinsider.com/the-american-dream-peaked-in-the-early-2000s-2015-1

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Contemporary "Postmodernism" 1950–present     

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Contemporary "Postmodernism" 1950–present     

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

Special Dates:
1. Korean War 1950-1953
2. Vietnam War 1954-1975

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Modern Literature: "A visit from the Goon Squad"

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Modern Literature: "A visit from the Goon Squad"

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This story is set in the present time(2010s) and has frequent flashbacks from older times up unto the 1970s. This story has lots of characters that all are related to our protagonists, Bennie Salazar, a record company executive and Sasha, his assistant. The story depicts how many people from different ages go through different journeys in life, sometimes very unforeseen and unusual.