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as we know it

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1. Oral literature: epic narratives, creation myths, stories, poems, songs.

2. Use stories to teach moral lessons and convey practical information about the natural world.

3. Deep respect for nature and animals.

4. Cyclical worldview.

5. Figurative language/parallelism.

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The literature of the Native Americans was handed down orally.

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Native Americans spoke more than 300 languages!

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Since time immemorial, Native Americans have lived on this continent, from the northern reaches of Alaska to the Gulf Coast of Florida. There are more than nine million Native Americans living in what is now the United States, representing hundreds of tribal nations with incredibly diverse languages, cultures and traditions. Here are just a few fascinating facts about the tribes and histories of Native Americans.

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9 Facts About Native American Tribes | HISTORY

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There are more than nine million Native Americans living in the United States, representing hundreds of tribal nation...

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In North America between the 16th and 19th centuries, the Northwest Coast culture area was characterized by traits such as salmon fishing, woodworking, large villages or towns, and hierarchical social organization.

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Native American, member of any of the aboriginal peoples of the Western Hemisphere, although the term often connotes only those groups whose original territories were in present-day Canada and the United States.

Pre-Columbian Americans used technology and material culture that included fire and the fire drill; the domesticated dog; stone implements of many kinds; the spear-thrower (atlatl), harpoon, and bow and arrow; and cordage, netting, basketry, and, in some places, pottery. Many indigenous American groups were hunting-and-gathering cultures, while others were agricultural peoples. American Indians domesticated a variety of plants and animals, including corn (maize), beans, squash, potatoes and other tubers, turkeys, llamas, and alpacas, as well as a variety of semidomesticated species of nut- and seed-bearing plants. These and other resources were used to support communities ranging from small hamlets to cities such as Cahokia, with an estimated population of 10,000 to 20,000 individuals, and Teotihuacán, with some 125,000 to 200,000 residents.

At the dawn of the 16th century ce, as the European conquest of the Americas began, indigenous peoples resided throughout the Western Hemisphere. They were soon decimated by the effects of epidemic disease, military conquest, and enslavement, and, as with other colonized peoples, they were subject to discriminatory political and legal policies well into the 20th, and even the 21st, century. Nonetheless, they have been among the most active and successful native peoples in effecting political change and regaining their autonomy in areas such as education, land ownership, religious freedom, the law, and the revitalization of traditional culture.

Culturally, the indigenous peoples of the Americas are usually recognized as constituting two broad groupings, American Indians and Arctic peoples. American Indians are often further grouped by area of residence: Northern America (present-day United States and Canada), Middle America (present-day Mexico and Central America; sometimes called Mesoamerica), and South America. This article is a survey of the culture areas, prehistories, histories, and recent developments of the indigenous peoples and cultures of the United States and Canada. Some of the terminology used in reference to indigenous Americans is explained in Sidebar: Tribal Nomenclature: American Indian, Native American, and First Nation; Sidebar: The Difference Between a Tribe and a Band; and Sidebar: Native American Self-Names. An overview of all the indigenous peoples of the Americas is presented in American Indian; discussions of various aspects of indigenous American cultures may also be found in the articles pre-Columbian civilizations; Middle American Indian; South American Indian; Arctic: The people; American Indian languages; Native American religions; and Native American arts.

Native American culture areas

Comparative studies are an essential component of all scholarly analyses, whether the topic under study is human society, fine art, paleontology, or chemistry; the similarities and differences found in the entities under consideration help to organize and direct research programs and exegeses. The comparative study of cultures falls largely in the domain of anthropology, which often uses a typology known as the culture area approach to organize comparisons across cultures.

The culture area approach was delineated at the turn of the 20th century and continued to frame discussions of peoples and cultures into the 21st century. A culture area is a geographic region where certain cultural traits have generally co-occurred; for instance, in North America between the 16th and 19th centuries, the Northwest Coast culture area was characterized by traits such as salmon fishing, woodworking, large villages or towns, and hierarchical social organization.

The specific number of culture areas delineated for Native America has been somewhat variable because regions are sometimes subdivided or conjoined. The 10 culture areas discussed below are among the most commonly used-the Arctic, the Subarctic, the Northeast, the Southeast, the Plains, the Southwest, the Great Basin, California, the Northwest Coast, and the Plateau. Notably, some scholars prefer to combine the Northeast and Southeast into one Eastern Woodlands culture area or the Plateau and Great Basin into a single Intermontane culture area. Each section below considers the location, climate, environment, languages, tribes, and common cultural characteristics of the area before it was heavily colonized. Prehistoric and post-Columbian Native American cultures are discussed in subsequent sections of this article. A discussion of the indigenous peoples of the Americas as a whole is found in American Indian.

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Native American | History, Art, Culture, & Facts

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Native American, member of any of the aboriginal peoples of the Western Hemisphere, although the term often connotes only those groups whose original territories were in present-day Canada and the United States. Learn more about the history and culture of Native Americans in this article.

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

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

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1. Wrote mostly diaries and histories, which expressed the connections between God and their everyday lives.
2. South to "purify" the Church of England by reforming to the simpler forms of worship and church organization described in the New Testament.
3. Saw religion as a personal, inner experience.
4. Believed in original sin and "elect" who would be saved.
5. Used a plain style of writing.

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Puritanism and Early Settlement  of First "American" colonies :Authors and Works

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Puritanism and Early Settlement  of First "American" colonies :Authors and Works

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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 : Fact 1 

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Puritanism and Early Settlement  of First "American" colonies : Fact 1 

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One fact about Puritanism is that Puritans became noted in the 17th century for a spirit of moral and religious earnestness that informed their whole way of life, and they sought through church reform to make their lifestyle the pattern for the whole nation.

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This article was most recently revised and updated by

Puritanism, a religious reform movement in the late 16th and 17th centuries that sought to "purify" the Church of England of remnants of the Roman Catholic "popery" that the Puritans claimed had been retained after the religious settlement reached early in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. Puritans became noted in the 17th century for a spirit of moral and religious earnestness that informed their whole way of life, and they sought through church reform to make their lifestyle the pattern for the whole nation. Their efforts to transform the nation contributed both to civil war in England and to the founding of colonies in America as working models of the Puritan way of life.

Theology

Puritanism may be defined primarily by the intensity of the religious experience that it fostered. Puritans believed that it was necessary to be in a covenant relationship with God in order to be redeemed from one's sinful condition, that God had chosen to reveal salvation through preaching, and that the Holy Spirit was the energizing instrument of salvation. Calvinist theology and polity proved to be major influences in the formation of Puritan teachings. This naturally led to the rejection of much that was characteristic of Anglican ritual at the time, these being viewed as "popish idolatry." In its place the Puritans emphasized preaching that drew on images from scripture and from everyday experience. Still, because of the importance of preaching, the Puritans placed a premium on a learned ministry. The moral and religious earnestness that was characteristic of Puritans was combined with the doctrine of predestination inherited from Calvinism to produce a "covenant theology," a sense of themselves as the elect chosen by God to live godly lives both as individuals and as a community.

History of Puritanism

Origins and development in England

King Henry VIII separated the Church of England from the Roman Catholic Church in 1534, and the cause of Protestantism advanced rapidly under Edward VI (reigned 1547-53). During the reign of Queen Mary (1553-58), however, England returned to Roman Catholicism, and many Protestants were forced into exile. Many of the exiles found their way to Geneva, where John Calvin's church provided a working model of a disciplined church. Out of this experience also came the two most popular books of Elizabethan England-the Geneva Bible and John Foxe's Book of Martyrs-which provided justification to English Protestants to view England as an elect nation chosen by God to complete the work of the Reformation. Thus, Elizabeth's accession in 1558 was enthusiastically welcomed by these Protestants; but her early actions while reestablishing Protestantism disappointed those who sought extensive reform, and this faction was unable to achieve its objectives in the Convocation, the primary governing body of the church.

Many of these Puritans-as they came to be known during a controversy over vestments in the 1560s-sought parliamentary support for an effort to institute a presbyterian form of polity for the Church of England. Other Puritans, concerned with the long delay in reform, decided upon a "reformation without tarrying for any." These "Separatists" repudiated the state church and formed voluntary congregations based on a covenant with God and among themselves. Both groups, but especially the Separatists, were repressed by the establishment. Denied the opportunity to reform the established church, English Puritanism turned to preaching, pamphlets, and a variety of experiments in religious expression and in social behaviour and organization. Its successful growth also owed much to patrons among the nobility and in Parliament and its control of colleges and professorships at Oxford and Cambridge.

Puritan hopes were again raised when the Calvinist James VI of Scotland succeeded Elizabeth as James I of England in 1603. But at the Hampton Court Conference in 1604 he dismissed the Puritans' grievances with the phrase "no bishop, no king." Puritans remained under pressure. Some were deprived of their positions; others got by with minimal conformity; and still others, who could not accept compromise, fled England. The pressure for conformity increased under Charles I (1625-49) and his archbishop, William Laud. Nevertheless, the Puritan spirit continued to spread, and when civil war broke out between Parliament and Charles in the 1640s, Puritans seized the opportunity to urge Parliament and the nation to renew its covenant with God. Parliament called together a body of clergy to advise it on the government of the church, but this body-the Westminster Assembly-was so badly divided that it failed to achieve reform of church government and discipline. Meanwhile, the New Model Army, which had defeated the royalist forces, feared that the Assembly and Parliament would reach a compromise with King Charles that would destroy their gains for Puritanism, so it seized power and turned it over to its hero, Oliver Cromwell. The religious settlement under Cromwell's Commonwealth allowed for a limited pluralism that favoured the Puritans. A number of radical Puritan groups appeared, including the Levelers, the Diggers, the Fifth Monarchy Men, and the Quakers (the only one of lasting significance).

After Cromwell's death in 1658, conservative Puritans supported the restoration of King Charles II and a modified episcopal polity. However, they were outmaneuvered by those who reinstituted Laud's strict episcopal pattern. Thus, English Puritanism entered a period known as the Great Persecution. English Puritans made a final unsuccessful attempt to secure their ideal of a comprehensive church during the Glorious Revolution, but England's religious solution was defined in 1689 by the Toleration Act, which continued the established church as episcopal but also tolerated dissenting groups.

In the American colonies

The Puritan ideal of realizing the Holy Commonwealth by the establishment of a covenanted community was carried to the American colony of Virginia by Thomas Dale, but the greatest opportunity came in New England. The original pattern of church organization in the Massachusetts Bay colony was a "middle way" between presbyterianism and Separatism, yet in 1648 four New England Puritan colonies jointly adopted the Cambridge Platform, establishing a congregational form of church government.

The New England Puritans fashioned the civil commonwealth according to the framework of the church. Only the elect could vote and rule. When this raised problems for second-generation residents, they adopted the Half-Way Covenant, which permitted baptized, moral, and orthodox persons to share the privileges of church membership. Other variations of the Puritan experiment were established in Rhode Island by Roger Williams, who was banished from the Massachusetts Bay colony, and in Pennsylvania by the Quaker William Penn.
The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

Melissa Petruzzello.

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Puritanism | Definition, History, Beliefs, & Facts

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Puritanism, a religious reform movement in the late 16th and 17th centuries that was known for the intensity of the religious experience that it fostered. Puritans' efforts contributed to both civil war in England and the founding of colonies in America. Learn more about Puritanism, its history, and beliefs.

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Puritanism and Early Settlement  of First "American" colonies: Fact 2 

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Puritanism and Early Settlement  of First "American" colonies: Fact 2 

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The name “Puritans” was a term of contempt assigned to the movement by its enemies.

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One such faction was a group of separatist believers in the Yorkshire village of Scrooby, who, fearing for their safety, moved to Holland in 1608 and then, in 1620, to the place they called Plymouth in New England. We know them now as the Pilgrims of Plymouth Rock.

A decade later, a larger, better-financed group, mostly from East Anglia, migrated to Massachusetts Bay. There, they set up gathered churches on much the same model as the transplanted church at Plymouth (with deacons, preaching elders and, though not right away, a communion restricted to full church members, or "saints").

The main difference between the Pilgrims and the Puritans is that the Puritans did not consider themselves separatists. They called themselves "nonseparating congregationalists," by which they meant that they had not repudiated the Church of England as a false church. But in practice they acted-from the point of view of Episcopalians and even Presbyterians at home-exactly as the separatists were acting.

By the 1640s, their enterprise at Massachusetts Bay had grown to about 10,000 people. They soon outgrew the bounds of the original settlement and spread into what would become Connecticut, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Maine, and eventually beyond the limits of New England.

The Puritan migration was overwhelmingly a migration of families (unlike other migrations to early America, which were composed largely of young unattached men). The literacy rate was high, and the intensity of devotional life, as recorded in the many surviving diaries, sermon notes, poems and letters, was seldom to be matched in American life.

The Puritans' ecclesiastical order was as intolerant as the one they had fled. Yet, as a loosely confederated collection of gathered churches, Puritanism contained within itself the seed of its own fragmentation. Following hard upon the arrival in New England, dissident groups within the Puritan sect began to proliferate- Quakers, Antinomians, Baptists-fierce believers who carried the essential Puritan idea of the aloneness of each believer with an inscrutable God so far that even the ministry became an obstruction to faith.

Puritanism gave Americans a sense of history as a progressive drama under the direction of God, in which they played a role akin to, if not prophetically aligned with, that of the Old Testament Jews as a new chosen people.

Perhaps most important, as Max Weber profoundly understood, was the strength of Puritanism as a way of coping with the contradictory requirements of Christian ethics in a world on the verge of modernity. It supplied ethics that somehow balanced charity and self-discipline. It counseled moderation within psychology that saw worldly prosperity as a sign of divine favor. Such ethics were particularly urgent in a New World where opportunity was rich, but the source of moral authority was obscure.

By the beginning of the 18th century, Puritanism had both declined and shown its tenacity. Though "the New England Way" evolved into a relatively minor system of organizing religious experience within the broader American scene, its central themes recur in the related religious communities of Quakers, Baptists, Presbyterians, Methodists and a whole range of evangelical Protestants.

More recently, the word "Puritan" has once again become a pejorative epithet, meaning prudish, constricted and cold-as in H. L. Mencken's famous remark that a Puritan is one who suspects "somewhere someone is having a good time."

Puritanism, however, had a more significant persistence in American life than as the religion of black-frocked caricatures. It survived, perhaps most conspicuously, in the secular form of self-reliance, moral rigor and political localism that became, by the Age of Enlightenment, virtually the definition of Americanism.

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The Puritans - Definition, England & Beliefs | HISTORY

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The Puritans were members of a religious reform movement that arose in the late 16th century and held that the Church of England should eliminate ceremonies and practices not rooted in the Bible.

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1507: Early Settlement of the first American colonies - Jamestown

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1507: Early Settlement of the first American colonies - Jamestown

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

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

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1600s-1800s: Rationalism, "The Age of Reason", and "The Enlightenment"

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1600s-1800s: Rationalism, "The Age of Reason", and "The Enlightenment"

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1. Mostly comprised of philosophers, scientists, writing speeches and pamphlets

2. Human beings can arrive at truth (God's rules) by using deductive reasoning, rather than relying on the authority of the past, on religious faith, or intuition

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Rationalism, "The Age of Reason", and "The Enlightenment": Authors and Works 

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Rationalism, "The Age of Reason", and "The Enlightenment": Authors and Works 

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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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Rationalism,"The Age of Reason", and "The Enlightenment": Fact 1 

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Rationalism,"The Age of Reason", and "The Enlightenment": Fact 1 

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The American and French Revolutions were directly inspired by Enlightenment ideals and respectively marked the peak of its influence and the beginning of its decline

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Enlightenment Period: Thinkers & Ideas | HISTORY

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Enlightenment was a movement of politics, philosophy, science and communications in Europe during the 19th century.

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Rationalism,"The Age of Reason", and "The Enlightenment": Fact 2 

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Rationalism,"The Age of Reason", and "The Enlightenment": Fact 2 

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The age of reason was a period that questioned things such as religion, philosophy, social life, and other things to determine what was logical and what was not.

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The Age of Reason saw the rise of Descartes.

The Age of Reason refers to a period in history where countries such as France and England showed a critical thinking approach to life. Occurring in the 18 th century, the age was a period that questioned things such as religion, philosophy, social life, and other things to determine what was logical and what was not. This age is generally regarded as the beginning of modern philosophy and the end of a medieval approach to life. The Age of Reason came after the Renaissance and before the short-lived Age of Enlightenment. Prior to this period, logical people, for fear of being labeled as heretics or even being burned at the stake, could not question some beliefs, especially religious ones.

Reason

Philosophy defines this concept as the ability to make a decision and conclusions without the use of emotion. In the Age of Reason, this was crucial to humankind. Logically, humankind deemed things such as miracles and religious rites as mere superstition. Instead, through reason, humanity's new code of belief became the earth and nature.

The Age of Reason and Christianity

As stated earlier, the Age of Reason came with humankind questioning almost every belief and way of life including the dominant Christianity. From a Christian perspective, this was a period where many people attacked the religion in the guise of logical questioning. In addition, Christians deemed it a period where people came out and openly rejected God and all of his teachings. Instead of worshipping and fearing the one true God, humanity began the worship of new gods such as clear thinking, intellect, logical thinking, and reason. This abandonment was quite interesting in that it was a shift from one extreme to another. In medieval times, people leaned on the extreme that religion was absolute and that questioning it was wrong. In the Age of Reason, the other extreme humanity embraced was the ridiculousness of religion and the perfection of humankind. Any gray area in between the two extremes was completely ignored. Humankind believed that nature and everything around him were enough to know God if he existed at all.

New Schools of Thought

This period also saw the rise of philosophers and critical thinkers such as Descartes and Baruch Spinoza who had some interesting thoughts on religion. Descartes introduced a form of thinking known as dualism, which states that man and God are two distinct beings. Dualism advocates that humankind represents nature while God represents the mind. Spinoza came up with a form of thinking known as pantheism, which states that the universe and God are one. Pantheism also believes that God was merely a substance with an uncountable number of qualities.

In addition to these two philosophies, there was another one known as deism. Deism is the belief that there is a supreme being in the universe who is mysterious and beyond the reach of humanity. Unlike other forms of religion where God is perceived as a being that intervenes in the running of the universe, deists believe that God lets the universe run itself. The running of the universe is under the guidance of laws that can be seen through reason and in nature.

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2. World Facts

3. What Was the Age of Reason?

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The Age of Reason refers to a period in history where countries such as France and England showed a critical thinking approach to life. Occurring in the 18 th century, the age was a period that questioned things such as religion, philosophy, social life, and other things to determine what was logical and what was not.

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1800s: Transcendentalism and The American Renaissance

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1800s: Transcendentalism and The American Renaissance

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1. Everything in the world, including human beings, is a reflection of the Divine Soul.

2. People can use their intuition to behold God's spirit revealed in nature or in their own souls.

3. Self-reliance and individualism must outweigh external authority and link conformity to tradition.

4. Important social and political movements include the Abolitionist, Utopian, and Women's Suffrage Movements

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Transcendentalism and The American Renaissance: Authors and Works 

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Transcendentalism and The American Renaissance: Authors and Works 

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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 and The American Renaissance: Fact 1 

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Transcendentalism and The American Renaissance: Fact 1 

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Transcendentalism was a visionary way of thinking that was widespread in 19th-century American art and thinking.

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The American Renaissance and Transcendentalism - Song of America

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Engraving: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Digital ID; pga 01425

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Transcendentalism and The American Renaissance: Fact 2 

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Transcendentalism and The American Renaissance: Fact 2 

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The Transcendentalists contributed to the founding of a new national culture based on native elements.

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American Renaissance, period from the 1830s roughly until the end of the American Civil War in which American literature, in the wake of the Romantic movement, came of age as an expression of a national spirit.

The literary scene of the period was dominated by a group of New England writers, the " Brahmins," notably Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and James Russell Lowell. They were aristocrats, steeped in foreign culture, active as professors at Harvard College, and interested in creating a genteel American literature based on foreign models. Longfellow adapted European methods of storytelling and versifying to narrative poems dealing with American history. Holmes, in his occasional poems and his "Breakfast-Table" series (1858-91), brought touches of urbanity and jocosity to polite literature. Lowell put much of his homeland's outlook and values into verse, especially in his satirical Biglow Papers (1848-67).

One of the most important influences in the period was that of the Transcendentalists ( see Transcendentalism), centred in the village of Concord, Massachusetts, and including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Bronson Alcott, George Ripley, and Margaret Fuller. The Transcendentalists contributed to the founding of a new national culture based on native elements. They advocated reforms in church, state, and society, contributing to the rise of free religion and the abolition movement and to the formation of various utopian communities, such as Brook Farm. The abolition movement was also bolstered by other New England writers, including the Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier and the novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) dramatized the plight of the black slave.

Apart from the Transcendentalists, there emerged during this period great imaginative writers- Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman-whose novels and poetry left a permanent imprint on American literature. Contemporary with these writers but outside the New England circle was the Southern genius Edgar Allan Poe, who later in the century had a strong impact on European literature.

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American Renaissance, period from the 1830s roughly until the end of the American Civil War in which American literature, in the wake of the Romantic movement, came of age as an expression of a national spirit.

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Modern Day example "Taking a Stand": Why France is now taking a stand on Palestinian statehood: Fact 1 

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Modern Day example "Taking a Stand": Why France is now taking a stand on Palestinian statehood: Fact 1 

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For decades, most UN member states have long supported the creation of an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel.

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‘Enough was enough’: Why France is now taking a stand on Palestinian statehood

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After pledging to recognise a Palestinian state in September, France is co-chairing a UN conference in New York this week in a push to rally other countries behind its lead. A far cry from the “unconditional”…

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France joins wave of countries recognizing a Palestinian state: Fact 2 

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France joins wave of countries recognizing a Palestinian state: Fact 2 

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French President Emmanuel Macron said "We can no longer wait," as he announced that France was joining countries including the UK, Canada and Australia in formally recognising a Palestinian state.

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France poised to join UK, Canada and Australia in recognising Palestinian state

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President Emmanuel Macron will soon make the announcement at the UN. Israel says it amounts to a “huge reward to terrorism”.

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1. Valued feeling, intuition, idealism, and inductive reasoning.

2. Placed faith in inner experience and the power of the imagination.

3. Shunned the artificiality of civilization and sought unspoiled nature as a path to spirituality.

4. Championed individual freedom and the worth of the individual

5. Saw poetry as the highest expression of the imagination

6. Dark Romantics: used dark and supernatural themes/settings (Gothic style)

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Romanticism and Industrialization: Famous Authors and Works

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Romanticism and Industrialization: Famous Authors and Works

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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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Romanticism and Industrialization: Fact 1 

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Romanticism and Industrialization: Fact 1 

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Romanticism was said to be a revolt against the aristocratic social and political norms of the Age of Enlightenment. It was also a reaction against the scientific rationalization of nature.

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Romanticism, fueled by the French Revolution, was a reaction to the scientific rationalism and classicism of the Age of Enlightenment.

Overview

Romanticism was an artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in Europe toward the end of the 18th century. In most areas the movement was at its peak in the approximate period from 1800 CE to 1840 CE. Romanticism reached beyond the rational and Classicist ideal models to elevate a revived medievalism.

The Influence of the French Revolution

Though influenced by other artistic and intellectual movements, the ideologies and events of the French Revolution created the primary context from which both Romanticism and the Counter-Enlightenment emerged. Upholding the ideals of the Revolution, Romanticism was a revolt against the aristocratic social and political norms of the Age of Enlightenment and also a reaction against the scientific rationalization of nature. Romanticism elevated the achievements of what it perceived as heroic individualists and artists, whose pioneering examples would elevate society. It also legitimized the individual imagination as a critical authority, which permitted freedom from classical notions of form in art.

Romanticism in Europe had two major strains: Orientalism and the Gothic. Earlier in the 18 th century novels like The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole published in 1764, or The Monk by Matthew Gregory Lewis, published in 1796, created an audience for entertainments that appealed to the imagination and the senses. Dark visions and portrayals of nightmares were gaining popularity in Germany as evidenced by Goethe's possession and admiration of paintings by Fuseli, which were said to be capable of "giving the viewer a good fright." Notable artists included Joseph Vernet, Caspar Wolf, Philip James de Loutherbourg, and Henry Fuseli who often turned to the supernatural subjects in Shakespeare's plays as material.

The Industrial Revolution also had an influence on Romanticism, which was in part an escape from modern realities of population growth, urban sprawl, and industrialism. Indeed, in the second half of the 19th century, "Realism" was offered as a polarized opposite to Romanticism.

Painting in the Romantic Period

Romanticism was a prevalent artistic movement in Europe during the 18th and 19th centuries.

Romanticism

While the arrival of Romanticism in French art was delayed by the hold of Neoclassicism on the academies, it became increasingly popular during the Napoleonic period. Its initial form was the history paintings that acted as propaganda for the new regime. The key generation of French Romantics born between 1795-1805, in the words of Alfred de Vigny, had been "conceived between battles, attended school to the rolling of drums." The French Revolution (1789-1799) followed by the Napoleonic Wars until 1815, meant that war, and the attending political and social turmoil that went along with them, served as the background for Romanticism.

History Painting

Since the Renaissance, history painting was considered among the highest and most difficult forms of art. History painting is defined by its subject matter rather than artistic style. History paintings usually depict a moment in a narrative story rather than a specific and static subject. In the Romantic period, history painting was extremely popular and increasingly came to refer to the depiction of historical scenes, rather than those from religion or mythology.

French Romanticism

This generation of the French school developed personal Romantic styles while still concentrating on history painting with a political message. Théodore Géricault's The Raft of the Medusa of 1821 remains the greatest achievement of the Romantic history painting, which in its day had a powerful anti-government message. The subject was one of contemporary horror depicting shipwrecked men who had reportedly resorted to cannibalism to survive.

Ingres

Profoundly respectful of the past, Ingres assumed the role of a guardian of academic orthodoxy against the ascendant Romantic style represented by his nemesis Eugène Delacroix. He described himself as a "conservator of good doctrine, and not an innovator." Nevertheless, modern opinion has tended to regard Ingres and the other Neoclassicists of his era as embodying the Romantic spirit of his time, while his expressive distortions of form and space make him an important precursor of modern art.

Delacroix

Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863) had great success at the Salon with works like The Barque of Dante (1822), The Massacre at Chios (1824) and Death of Sardanapalus (1827). Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People (1830) remains, with The Medusa, one of the best known works of French Romantic painting. Both of these works reflected current events and appealed to public sentiment.

Goya

Spanish painter Francisco Goya is today generally regarded as the greatest painter of the Romantic period. However, in many ways he remained wedded to the classicism and realism of his training. More than any other artist of the period, Goya exemplified the Romantic expression of the artist's feelings and his personal imaginative world. He also shared with many of the Romantic painters a more free handling of paint, emphasized in the new prominence of the brushstroke and impasto, which tended to be repressed in neoclassicism under a self-effacing finish. Goya's work is renowned for its expressive line, color, and brushwork as well as its distinct subversive commentary. His Third of May, 1808, pictured an incident from the French Peninsular War in which civilians were slaughtered at the hands of Napoleon's mercenaries. The terror it invokes is part of the Gothic mindset of the Romantic period, but with real-world subject matter.

The Hudson River School

In the United States, a similar movement, called the Hudson River School, emerged in the 19th century and quickly became one of the most distinctive worldwide purveyors of landscape pieces. American painters in this movement created works of mammoth scale in an attempt to capture the epic size and scope of the landscapes that inspired them. The work of Thomas Cole, the school's generally acknowledged founder, seemed to emanate from a similar philosophical position as that of European landscape artists. Both championed, from a position of secular faith, the spiritual benefits that could be gained from contemplating nature. Some of the later Hudson River School artists, such as Albert Bierstadt, created less comforting works that placed a greater emphasis (with a great deal of Romantic exaggeration) on the raw, terrifying power of nature.

The Gothic Revival

The Gothic strain of Romanticism was also seen in architecture. The Gothic Revival, as it was called, was an architectural movement beginning in England during the 1740s that sought to revive medieval forms.

The Gothic Revival was primarily an architectural movement that began in 1740s England. The style sought to revive medieval forms, much as the Neoclassical style sought to revive works from classical antiquity. During the 18th century, the ruins of medieval Gothic architecture began to receive newfound appreciation after having been relatively dismissed in the overall history of architecture. Some critics believe there was a kind of nostalgia for an enchanted, less rational world that was linked to the perceived superstitions of medieval Catholicism.

In England, the center of the Gothic revival, the movement was intertwined with philosophical trends associated with a reawakening of Christian traditions in response to the growth of religious nonconformism. Ultimately, the Gothic style became widespread in the third quarter of the 19th century. While the Neoclassical style of the 18th century was associated with "radical" and liberal perspectives, the Gothic Revival was associated with "traditional" sensibilities, such as conservatism and the monarchy. As industrialization progressed, there was an increasing reaction against the use of machinery and factory production. Supporters of medievalism criticized industrial society, believing the pre-industrial model to be a golden age.

The Gothic Revival style is characterized by its stone and brick structures, many of which are religious in nature, as well as heavy decoration. The most fundamental element of the Gothic style of architecture is the pointed arch. Columns that support arches are smaller in Gothic buildings, and continue all the way to the roof, where they become part of the vault. In the vault, the pointed arch can be seen in three dimensions where the ribbed vaulting meets in the center of the ceiling of each bay. This ribbed vaulting is another distinguishing feature of Gothic architecture. The slender columns and lighter systems of thrust allowed for larger windows and more light in Gothic structures. The windows, tracery, carvings, and ribs make up a bewildering display of decoration where almost every surface is decorated with a profusion of shapes and patterns. Gothic revival cottages and smaller buildings also became popular and are referred to as "Carpenter Gothic." These structures are defined by their use of Gothic elements such as pointed arches and steep gables.

A. W. N. Pugin was a prominent architect, designer, artist, and critic who was deeply involved in the Gothic Revival. The height of his work is seen in the interior design of the Palace of Westminster. Pugin designed many churches in England during his career and published a series of volumes of architectural drawings entitled Examples of Gothic Architecture and Specimens of Gothic Architecture that remained in print and were the standards for the Gothic Revival for the next century.

Orientalism

Especially in France which had political and economic interests in overseas colonies, protectorates and mandate territories that came under French rule from the 16th century onward, the picturing of the "Oriental Other" became popular. France began with the conquest of Algiers in 1830 and would hold it until the 1960s.. The paintings that came out of this period are, as Linda Nochlin and others have pointed out, not a true record of the life of the people of these areas, but a romantic and essentially racist characterization of them as exotic, brutal, highly sexualized and essentially uncivilized compared to the French.

Eugene Delacroix was the leading painter of the French Romantic movement and had made a trip to North Africa in 1832 to gain visual material for paintings. The results were romantic fantasies like The Women of Algiers from 1834. The idea of a harem - women who were sexually available to a single man - the Sultan - was part of the exotic appeal.

As opposed to the smooth, academic "licked surface" of Neoclassicism, Romantic paintings like those of Delacroix are characterized by more painterly brushstrokes, softer edges or contours, and areas of impasto paint (thicker paint).

Romantic Landscape in England

In England, landscapes had initially only been painted as the backgrounds for portraits, and typically portrayed the parks or estates of a landowner. This changed as a result of Anthony van Dyck, who, along with other Flemish artists living in England, began a national tradition. In the 18th century, watercolor painting, mostly of landscapes, became an English speciality. The nation had both a buoyant market for professional works of this variety, and a large number of amateur painters. By the beginning of the 19th century, the most highly regarded English artists were all, for the most part, dedicated landscapists, including John Constable, J.M.W. Turner, and Samuel Palmer.

The Hay Wain by John Constable, 1821: Constable was a popular English Romantic Painter.

In Europe, as John Ruskin noted, and Sir Kenneth Clark confirmed, landscape painting was the "chief artistic creation of the 19th century," and "the dominant art." As a result, in the times that followed, it became common for people to "assume that the appreciation of natural beauty and the painting of landscape was a normal and enduring part of our spiritual activity."

William Gilpin was an English clergyman whose walks and sketches in the countryside resulted in a formula for the creation of pleasant views. His ideas resulted in more constrained landscapes with the sorts of restrained subjects young ladies of good breeding would feel comfortable, the culture thought, recreating. Jane Austin's heroine in Pride and Prejudice remarks upon being asked, belatedly, to join Darcy, Mrs. Hurst, and Miss Bingley on a walk she replies:

"No, no; stay where you are. You are charmingly group'd, and appear to uncommon, advantage. The picturesque would be spoilt by admitting a fourth. Good bye."

She then ran gaily off ...

As several critics have noted, the "subtext" here is Gilpin's appendix on his prints, where he explains in technical jargon that there are problems in "forming two into a group," while " four introduce a new difficulty in grouping." But with three you "are almost sure of a good group." Elizabeth shows herself to be a good student of Gilpin, like her creator; but the cause for her gay laugh is the little joke she shares with those of us who have read Gilpin, since what Gilpin is actually talking about is "the doctrine of grouping larger cattle."

John Constable's landscapes never moved far from his childhood home on the River Stour in Suffolk. His father was a successful landowner and farmer, and Constable recorded the life of the rural gentry in the traditional English countryside that was rapidly giving way to the factories and choking coal smoke of the Industrial Revolution. He studied the old masters including Claude Lorrain and the Dutch landscapists of the Baroque, but his subject matter was always what he saw as the truth of what he knew best. He refused to travel on the continent, but ironically his work became well-known and admired in France and was influential to the Barbizon School which would, in turn, inspire the Impressionists. Constable, like Turner, was a Romantic at heart in that his work sometimes suggested the themes of Burke's Sublime. Turner was more dramatic in his subjects, but Constable's emphasis on the nostalgia of the English countryside as it disappeared was also in the Romantic tradition.

J.M.W. Turner looked to subjects of a more Sublime character including those of his own imagination. Unlike Constable, Turner traveled widely in Europe and incorporated elements of landscape, weather, sea travel and other subjects into the work. Some of his most awe-inspiring, or horror-inducing and therefore Sublime, subjects were the shipwrecks and especially the politically inspired The Slave Ship, of 1840. You can see a good analysis of that work at https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/ap-art-history/later-europe-and-americas/enlightenment-revolution/v/turner-slave-ship-slavers-throwing-overboard-the-dead-and-dying-typhoon-coming-on-1840 .

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Romanticism, fueled by the French Revolution, was a reaction to the scientific rationalism and classicism of the Age of Enlightenment. Romanticism was an artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in Europe toward the end of the 18th century. In most areas the movement was at its peak in the approximate period from 1800 CE to 1840 CE.

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Romanticism and Industrialization: Fact 2

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Romanticism and Industrialization: Fact 2

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The nature that has taken over one of the newly invented symbols of industrialism is called the steamship. The steamship is an almost abstract painting that has a dramatic contrast between light and shadow.

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In the 19th century, natural philosophy branched out into the specialised sciences, Darwin's theory of evolution created uproar and great progress was made in technology.
At the so-called world exhibitions that were very popular in the 19th century, curiosities from distant lands were on display, as well as advances in science and technology. The Great Exhibition in London in 1851, in particular, attracted a great deal of attention - here the exhibition was gathered in the Crystal Palace, a colossal building of glass and cast iron. The building style was innovative, and the Crystal Palace became a symbol of England as the flagship of industrialism. The Industrial Revolution began in Great Britain from about 1760, and reached the rest of Europe during the 19th century.

"It is certainly correct to describe the rampant nervousness as one of the greatest curses of modern society. Not only does it testify to the increasing frequency of mental illness and suicide, but it contributes considerably to mark our time with its singular character. The greater speed, which nowadays has come into existence, the unrest and haste that characterises all circumstances, is the expression for an intensive internal life; but the greater the demands made on the nervous system, the easier it is drained of its power, the sooner it loses its resistance. (...) Herein we may also search for one of the reasons that we, despite all of our triumphs in the sciences and the sphere of practical inventions, have far from achieved a golden age of health, happiness or satisfaction."

This is how the Danish physician (and brother of the author Henrik Pontoppidan), Knud Pontoppidan, described the psychological consequences of life in the modern city. Quote from Neurasthenia, A contribution to the description of the nervousness of our age, 1886.

While the Crystal Palace signaled a new era, it can also be seen as a continuation of the rationalism of the Enlightenment - the light that shone through the entire building could reference the unexplored elements that were illuminated, systematised and passed on. The photograph shows part of the exhibition in the greenhouse-like Crystal Palace.

Technology brought many changes: The steam engine was introduced, and the railroad quickly spread. The telegraph, the photograph and the automobile were invented, and people flocked to the cities with the advent of industrialisation. The appearance of nervous disorders was traced to the hectic city life, where horse-drawn carriages, automobiles and people were fighting for space and people wondered whether the human body would be damaged by travel in a train pulled by a steam locomotive at a speed that was not natural for the body.

Turner and the Industrial Revolution

In Rain, Steam and Speed - the Great Western Railway (1844) by Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851), a steam locomotive approaches from a distance. The image can be interpreted as a reflection of industrialisation - the steam locomotive passes over The Great Western Railway Bridge - an innovative construction, the safety of which was in doubt, but which is still in use today. The river is the Thames and the view looks east, in the direction of London.

One critic remarked that one should hurry to see the painting before the locomotive had driven out of the canvas. Out of the gentle tones of the landscape, the locomotive and the dark nuances of the bridge stand out clearly and the diagonal lines of the linear perspective indicate the speed of the train - Turner shows not only the change that society underwent, but also the increased speed of life in Turner's time.

Where the train and the bridge can be said to represent culture, human constructions, it is surrounded by the natural environment - the river, the rain and the sky. The closer one gets to the horizon line, the harder it is to distinguish between rain, steam, landscape, bridge and machine - culture and nature, which are traditionally set up as opposites, blend together.

Nature and culture

In Turner's Snow Storm - Steam-boat off a Harbour's Mouth (1842), on the other hand, it is nature that has overtaken one of the newly invented symbols of industrialism - the steamship. The painting depicts a violent storm where a ship is just barely discernable. In the almost abstract painting, the dramatic contrast between light and shadow, the diagonal lines and the fact that it is almost impossible to distinguish between sky and sea contribute to the viewer being left with a sense of chaos.

Turner was one of the painters who were occupied by natural phenomena such as volcanic eruptions, storms and towering mountains, and can thus be associated with Romanticism. In art, Romanticism can be seen as a reaction against the rationalism that had been dominant in the 18th century, and Neoclassicism's more straightforward design. The Romantics were concerned with feeling, individual expression, genius and going beyond.

The romantic philosophy of nature

It was not only in art that Romanticism had its time. In the romantic philosophy of nature, which primarily had followers in Germany, England and Scandinavia, no distinction was made between art and science - art was seen as a science and an important foundation for scientific progress.

The romantic natural philosophy, where one sought to raise morality, science and art to a higher level, can be seen as a further development of science and the Enlightenment belief in the future. Nature romantics promoted the idea of the brilliant scientist, who by seeing science as a part of a larger whole, could discover previously unknown relationships in nature.

One of those who spoke in favour of the romantic philosophy of nature was the Danish physicist, chemist and pharmacist Hans Christian Ørsted (1777-1851), who discovered that electric currents produce magnetic fields. For Ørsted science was a means of linking the true, the good and the beautiful and Ørsted was certainly not without influence in scientific circles in Denmark.

However, by the time of Ørsted's death, the romantic philosophy of nature began to slip into the background in favour of positivism, which emphasised knowledge through experience.

Charles Darwin and evolution

For Ørsted, as for many others, faith and science complemented each other as parts of a larger whole. The relationship between science and religion was changed drastically by Charles Darwin's (1809-82) publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859. Here Darwin laid out his theory of evolution, which showed that human evolution was due to natural selection, rather than a result of creation in six days.

The conflict between the Christian creation story and Darwin's theory of evolution created controversy in Darwin's home country as well as internationally. Darwin was soon the victim of a number of cartoons. It is said that a picture is worth more than a 1000 words. Caricatures like this can be effective arguments - here Darwin's credibility as a researcher, as well as his theory, are pushed to extremes and ridiculed.

In the caricature, the characteristics of a person or a situation are exaggerated so that the pictured is set in a humorous or satirical light. Darwin's theory of the relationship between man and ape resulted in drawings like this, which was published in Hornet Magazine in 1871, where Darwin's head is placed on a monkey's body.

"When we look at the plants and bushes clothing an entangled bank, we are tempted to attribute their proportional numbers and kinds to what we call chance. But how false a view is this! (...) What a struggle between the several kinds of trees must here have gone on during long centuries, each annually scattering its seeds by the thousand; what war between insect and insect - between insects, snails, and other animals with birds and beasts of prey - all striving to increase, and all feeding on each other or on the trees or their seeds and seedlings, or on the other plants which first clothed the ground and thus checked the growth of the trees!"

From On the Origins of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life by Charles Darwin

However, Darwin's theory eventually became widely accepted and in addition to revolutionising the philosophy of man and nature, it contributed to the controversy that followed the publication of On the Origin of Species, to a division between science and religion.

Read more >>

The art of the 19th century saw everything from romance to the cult of technology and the modern condition and a number of artistic styles and movements. Art academies, salons and critics were dominant in defining tasteful art, but were often challenged by the avant-garde, who experimented, broke with bourgeois values and went against the prevailing taste.

The avant-garde experiments led to movements such as realism, impressionism and symbolism. The realists sought to reproduce reality without idealisation. For the Impressionists (from the French impression) everything could be the motive - not just lofty, classic tales, but also a train station or a boulevard on a rainy day. The Symbolists filled their pictures with symbols, like the Madonna or the union of opposites, but also symbols that are not readily deciphered - many Symbolists drew inspiration from the spiritual, and a painting's signs could thus be seen as being drawn from a higher consciousness.

In the Late 19th century, Art Nouveau began gaining ground. In Paris, the style's curving, organic shapes framed the entrances to the metro, which opened in 1900.

The Illustration shows Skrik ( The Scream) by Edvard Munch (1863-1944) from 1893, which can be seen as an example of the play with form and content that characterised the art world in the 19th century. Munch was a forerunner of Expressionism.

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The Industrial Revolution and Romanticism

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In the 19th century, natural philosophy branched out into the specialised sciences, Darwin's theory of evolution created uproar and great progress was made in technology.

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Nathaniel Hawthorne is known as one of the greatest fiction writers of 19th-century American literature. He is said to be a master of the allegorical and symbolic tale and is still best known for the novels "The Scarlet Letter" (1850) and "The House of the Seven Gables" (1851).

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Nathaniel Hawthorne (born July 4, 1804, Salem, Massachusetts, U.S.-died May 19, 1864, Plymouth, New Hampshire) is one of the greatest fiction writers of 19th-century American literature. A master of the allegorical and symbolic tale, he remains best known for the novels The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The House of the Seven Gables (1851).

Ancestry and early years

Hawthorne's ancestors had lived in Salem, Massachusetts, since the 17th century. His earliest American ancestor was William Hathorne, a magistrate who was a staunch defender of Puritan orthodoxy, with its zealous advocacy of a "pure," unaffected form of religious worship, its rigid adherence to a simple, almost severe, mode of life, and its conviction of the "natural depravity" of "fallen" humankind. (Hawthorne added a w to his surname when he began to write.) Among Hathorne's actions as magistrate was sentencing a Quaker woman to public whipping.

Hawthorne was later to wonder whether the decline of his family's prosperity and prominence during the 18th century, while other Salem families were growing wealthy from the lucrative shipping trade, might not be a retribution for this act and for the role of William Hathorne's son John as one of three judges in the Salem witchcraft trials that began in 1692.

When Nathaniel's father-a ship's captain-died during one of his voyages, he left his young widow without means to care for her two girls and Nathaniel, who was four years old. She moved in with her affluent brothers, the Mannings. Hawthorne grew up in their house in Salem and, for extensive periods during his teens, in Raymond, Maine, on the shores of Sebago Lake.

He returned to Salem in 1825 after four years at Bowdoin College, in Brunswick, Maine. Hawthorne did not distinguish himself as a young man. Instead, he spent nearly a dozen years reading and trying to master the art of writing fiction.

First works and the Transcendentalists

In college Hawthorne had excelled only in composition and had decided to become a writer. Upon graduation, he wrote Fanshawe, a novel that he published at his own expense-and then tried to destroy all copies after deciding it was unworthy of him.

Hawthorne, however, soon found his own voice, style, and subjects, and within five years of his graduation he had published "The Hollow of the Three Hills" and "An Old Woman's Tale", both notable short stories. By 1832, "My Kinsman, Major Molineux" and "Roger Malvin's Burial," considered two of his greatest tales, had been published. "Young Goodman Brown," a gripping tale of witchcraft, appeared in 1835.

His increasing success in placing his stories brought him a little fame. Unwilling to depend any longer on his uncles' generosity, he turned to a job in the Boston Custom House, which he held from 1839 to 1840, and for six months in 1841 he was a resident at the agricultural cooperative Brook Farm, a utopian experiment in West Roxbury, Massachusetts. Even when the first book to be published under his name, Twice-Told Tales, was released in 1837, he gained gratifying recognition but no dependable income.

By 1842, however, Hawthorne's writing had brought him a sufficient income to allow him to marry Sophia Peabody. The couple rented a house called the Old Manse in Concord, Massachusetts, and they began a happy three-year period that Hawthorne would later record in his essay "The Old Manse."

The presence in Concord of some of the leading social thinkers and philosophers of his day, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Thoreau, and Bronson Alcott, made the village the center of the philosophy of Transcendentalism, which encouraged individuals to transcend the materialistic world of experience and facts and become conscious of the pervading spirit of the universe and the potentialities for human freedom. Hawthorne welcomed the companionship of his Transcendentalist neighbors, but he had little to say to them. Artists and intellectuals never inspired his full confidence, but he thoroughly enjoyed the visit of his old college friend and classmate Franklin Pierce, later to become president of the United States.

At the Old Manse, Hawthorne continued to write stories, with the same result as before: literary success, monetary failure. His new short-story collection, Mosses from an Old Manse, appeared in 1846.

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Nathaniel Hawthorne | Biography, Books, Short Stories, & Analysis

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Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-64) is one of the greatest fiction writers of 19th-century America. A novelist and short-story writer, he was a master of the allegorical and symbolic tale. Hawthorne is best known for the novels The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The House of the Seven Gables (1851).

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Nathaniel Hawthorne grew up with his mother and uncles in Salem and Raymond, Maine. His father was a ship’s captain, but he passed away and the cause of his death in 1808 was the yellow fever. Many of Hawthorne’s childhood poems and stories were actually concerned with sailing and the sea for this reason.

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Nathaniel Hawthorne was born on July 4, 1804, in Salem, Massachusetts. His family, the Hathornes, had lived in Salem since the seventeenth century. A descendent of the Puritan judges William Hathorne and John Hathorne, a judge who oversaw the Salem Witch Trials, Hawthorne chose to add the “w” to his name when he was in his early twenties. Hawthorne grew up with his mother and uncles in Salem and Raymond, Maine. His father, a ship’s captain, died of yellow fever in 1808. Many of Hawthorne’s childhood poems and stories were concerned with sailing and the sea.

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It resulted in the deaths of 20 innocent people accused of witchcraft and the vilification of over 200 other.

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The Salem Witch Trials were a series of legal proceedings in Salem, Massachusetts in 1692-1693 resulting in the deaths of 20 innocent people accused of witchcraft and the vilification of over 200 others based, initially, on the reports of young girls who claimed to have been harmed by the spells of certain women they accused of witchcraft.

The initial accusers were Betty Parris (age 9) and her cousin Abigail Williams (age 11) who were supported in their claims by Ann Putnam the Younger (age 12) and Elisabeth Hubbard (age 17), but once those accusations were made, many others not only supported the girls but brought charges against their fellow citizens, sparking a witch hunt in Salem and the surrounding communities.

At the heart of the trials and later executions were religion and superstition in Colonial America. The Bible, in the Book of Exodus 22:18, states "Thou shalt not suffer a witch live," and this was adhered to as closely as any other biblical injunction and encouraged by the Salem Village minister of the time, the Reverend Samuel Parris (l. 1653-1720). Parris was the fourth minister called by the Salem Village congregation. Earlier ministers had left after relatively brief stays, and Parris was faring little better in his ability to mediate disputes between neighbors until he managed to focus their energies on accusing each other of witchcraft. The underlying tensions of the community found expression in the persecution of marginalized members - and then those well-respected - in the community which resulted in the execution of 20, self-exile, loss of status, or death in jail while awaiting a court appearance.

As early as 1695, criticism was leveled against the magistrates of Salem for the deaths and persecution of the innocent and this opinion only gained ground afterwards. Between 1700-1703, petitions were filed to have the convictions reversed and the accused exonerated, and in 1711, compensation was authorized for the families of those unjustly executed. Since that time, the Salem Witch Trials have been referenced simply as "witch trials" or "witch hunts" in connection with any unfounded, unfair, and baseless claim against a person or the ideals that person stands for and the event has been given iconic status in the USA and elsewhere.

Colonial Belief in Witchcraft

Legal documents and testimonies of the time establish that there were a number of citizens who did not believe in witchcraft, but the majority - in the New England Colonies as well as the Middle and Southern English Colonies - certainly did. This belief was encouraged by the Bible through stories such as the Witch of Endor (I Samuel 28:3-25) and the line from the Book of Exodus mentioned above. The Bible was understood as the inerrant word of God and made clear that witches were as much of a reality as anything else; questioning the existence of witches meant questioning the divine authority of the Bible.

A belief in witchcraft was further encouraged by the need to explain the seemingly unexplainable.

A belief in witchcraft was further encouraged by the need to explain the seemingly unexplainable. If a pious person or a child or young bride should suddenly fall ill or die, it might be attributed to God's mysterious will but could as easily be explained by witchcraft and the workings of the devil. Although it may seem strange and irrational to a modern-day audience, the belief was also supported by colonists' interpretation of everyday experience. If Neighbor A asked to borrow some candles from Neighbor B and Neighbor B refused the request, and if Neighbor B later became ill or their house caught fire or their horse died for no apparent reason, Neighbor A might be accused of having cast a spell to cause the otherwise inexplicable misfortune.

A belief in witches did not originate in the colonies, however, as England - and Europe overall - had been persecuting those accused of witchcraft for centuries. One of the most famous witch trials in English history was that of the Pendle Witches in 1612 in Lancashire which resulted in the execution by hanging of ten people convicted of witchcraft. The records of the proceedings were published in 1613 and widely read, and the case was popularized again in 1634 when one of the accusers was herself accused of witchcraft. The 1634 case was further popularized by the melodrama The Late Lancashire Witches by Thomas Heywood (l. c. 1570-1641) and Richard Brome (l. c. 1590-1652), which ends with a supposition of the guilt of the accused.

This was almost always the foregone conclusion of an accusation of witchcraft since it was understood that no one would bring such a serious charge against another without good reason. Accusers seem to always have believed that their word and anecdotal evidence was all the proof a court needed to convict, and while this may have been true of popular opinion, courts did try to weigh objective evidence before handing down a conviction, even if the paradigm of guilty-until-proven-innocent was largely adhered to. This was certainly the case with the Salem Witch Trials of 1692-1693 during which over 200 people were accused of witchcraft in Salem Village, Salem Town, Andover, Ipswich, and Topsfield; 30 were found guilty and 20 executed, most by hanging.

Social & Religious Context

Tensions were already high in both Salem Town and Salem Village in 1692 and had been for some time. The citizens of Salem Village resented the greater affluence of Salem Town as well as its presumption in controlling the village's affairs. Salem Village had no civil government of its own and was under the jurisdiction of Salem Town. All citizens of both were required to attend Sunday worship services, but Salem Town refused to allow Salem Village to have its own meeting house and so villagers had to travel to the town on Sundays, no matter the weather, which they came to resent.

Salem Village eventually hired their own minister but refused to pay him and so he left. The second minister, George Burroughs, experienced the same problems and resigned but remained in the village. A third minister also resigned, and this contributed to Salem Village's reputation, as held by Salem Town, as contentious and petty. The fourth minister was Samuel Parris, a failed merchant who had attended Harvard University but never completed his course of study. He seems to have become a minister as a second career choice. In 1689, Salem Village was allowed to form its own church with Parris as their pastor. Scholar Brian P. Levack comments:

Parris proved to be an unfortunate choice: a failed and bitter merchant who resented those who succeeded in the world of commerce, he fueled local hostilities. Parris gave a series of inflammatory sermons that translated faction division into a cosmic struggle between the forces of good and evil. In the minds of his supporters, Salem Town became the symbol of an alien, corrupt, and even diabolical world that threatened the welfare of Salem Village. Because supporters of Samuel Parris perceived their enemies as nothing less than evil, it was but a short step for them to become convinced that those aligned with the town and its interests were servants of Satan. (403)

Tensions increased further with the arrival of immigrants in the area who were members of minority Christian sects, such as the Quakers, who were considered threats to the Puritan vision of the Salem community. Perpetual fear of unseen and unexpected danger had been present in the communities since the outbreak of King Philip's War (1675-1678) when King Philip (also known as Metacomet, l. 1638-1676) of the Native American Wampanoag Confederacy launched an assault on the settlements of New England that killed hundreds and destroyed a number of settlements.

In the midst of these various tensions, in February 1692, Samuel Parris' daughter Betty and his niece Abigail Williams, began exhibiting strange behavior - crawling around the floor, hiding under furniture, contorting themselves, screaming, and hurling objects - which, lacking any other explanation after they were examined by a physician, was blamed on witchcraft. Shortly afterwards, Ann Putnam the Younger and Elizabeth Hubbard, then Mary Walcott, Mercy Lewis, and Mary Warren - all friends of Betty Parris and Abigail Williams - began exhibiting the same signs. When Samuel Parris asked his daughter and niece who had cast the spell that was tormenting them, they named three women - Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne, and the Parris' house-slave Tituba - and Salem Village was plunged into a witch-hunting frenzy.

Salem Witch Trials

Sarah Good was a homeless woman who often begged for charity and had been taken in by Samuel Parris for a short time until he threw her out for "malicious behavior" and ingratitude. Sarah Osborne was a wealthy landowner who had not attended church in over three years, claiming a recurring illness, making her as much of an outcast as Good. Tituba was possibly an Arawak of Caribbean origin who was kidnapped, enslaved, and sold to Samuel Parris in Barbados, where his family had a plantation. She was the family's house-slave and looked after the children, often entertaining them with ghost stories and tales of demons and magic.

The use of 'spectral evidence' was admissible in court as the concept had been addressed by the well-respected Puritan theologian Cotton Mather.

Tituba confessed (later revealing Samuel Parris had beaten the confession out of her) and supported the girls' accusation of Good and Osborne. Good, as noted, was already despised by the Parris family and Osborne, due to her land deals, had adversely affected the finances of Ann Putnam the Younger's father. Tituba popularized the concept of witches riding on broomsticks and conversing with 'familiars' - spirits in animal form - as well as associating with demonic figures and casting malicious spells. Osborne was hanged as a witch in May and Good in July of 1692, maintaining their innocence to the end; Tituba, since she had confessed, was left in jail because Parris refused to pay the fees which would have released her. She was finally sold for the price of the jail fees and disappears from history.

The accusations against the three marginalized women in February 1692 were only the beginning, however, as more people were accused in March. Two of them, Martha Corey and Rebecca Nurse, were members in good standing in the church. Corey had questioned the validity of the girls' accusations, insinuating they were lying for personal reasons, and so was charged as a witch for denying the existence of witches. Nurse was accused by the Putnams who claimed her 'specter' was harassing them. The use of 'spectral evidence' was admissible in court as the concept had been addressed by the well-respected Puritan theologian Cotton Mather (l. 1663-1728) whose works were especially popular among the citizens of Massachusetts.

Spectral evidence was simply accepting the word of an accuser over that of the accused as in the case of Martha Corey where the girls cried out in court that her specter was tormenting them and a yellow bird, invisible to everyone but them, was feeding at her hand. Nurse and Corey, both in their early 70s, were hanged. Their convictions heightened the hysteria further in that, if two elderly church-going women in good standing could be witches, anyone could. Corey's husband, Giles, was accused when he defended her. He refused to stand trial and was executed by pressing - crushed to death by weights - in order to extract a confession of guilt. As he never confessed and was never convicted, his last will was honored and his lands went to his heirs, as he intended, instead of being taken by the Putnam family who had accused him.

Although spectral evidence was allowed in court primarily on the weight of Mather's reputation, even he began to recognize that it was going too far and wrote to one of the judges in May of 1692 that they should not give more credence to spectral evidence than was reasonable. In accordance with the biblical book of I John 4:1, all spirits needed to be tested to see whether they were of God or the devil and it was possible that evil spirits were influencing accusers to convict innocent Christians. Many who were accused confessed to being witches in hopes of leniency in accordance with James 5:16, "Confess your sins to one another and pray for each other that you may be healed," but those who were not hanged or did not die in jail later recanted, explaining they had only confessed for this purpose and had never really been witches. Levack notes:

Once spectral testimony came under attack and once confessors began to recant, the court found itself in an extremely awkward position...As the eagerness of the court to convict collided with a growing chorus of opposition to its proceedings, the governor felt that he had no choice but to suspend the trials and reassess the situation. (407)

The trials were stopped and pardons issued for those still in jail in May 1693. Although it is well-documented that 19 people were hanged and Giles Corey crushed to death, others died in jail awaiting trial, and over 200 had their reputations damaged if not irreparably ruined. The accusers were never called to account because no one involved doubted the reality of witches and their power to harm nor of Satan and his ability to deceive in order to destroy. After the hysteria died down, the accusers went on with their lives as before.

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Conclusion

Those who had been accused and pardoned, as noted, were not as lucky and lived on with the stigma of the event or moved elsewhere. Three years later, in 1696, the General Court mandated a day of fasting and repentance for the trials on 14 January 1697. Judges who had taken part in the trials publicly repented and asked forgiveness of the community. Beginning in 1700, petitions were filed by family members with the colonial government of Massachusetts to have the convictions overturned, and in 1711, 22 people were exonerated and financial compensation authorized. This pattern continued over the next ten years but not all who had been convicted were cleared even then. The names of all the people convicted were not cleared, in fact, until 2001.

The Salem Witch Trials, as the most infamous event of its kind, has generated a number of myths from the time people began writing about it c. 1700 to the present. Among the most persistent is that "witches" were burned at Salem even though there is no evidence to support this claim. No "witches" were burned at Salem; they were all hanged. Until recently, those convicted were thought to have been hanged on Gallows Hill, conjuring images of a somber death march up the hill to the place of execution, but the Gallows Hill Project of 2017 debunked this myth, establishing that the hangings took place at the bottom of the hill at the far less dramatic area known as Proctor's Ledge.

It has also been claimed that the majority of those accused were poor, marginalized women, but this has also been challenged and debunked. People of all social classes were accused and convicted, women and men - and, actually, two dogs - for any reason at all. George Burroughs, the second minister to resign at Salem Village, was accused and convicted because he seemed to possess unnatural strength, another woman was convicted because she was able to walk the dusty streets of Salem Village without dirtying her clothing, and Martha Corey, as noted, was executed as a witch for denying witchcraft even existed.

Over the years, many theories have been suggested to explain the Salem witch hysteria and trials. One theory, popularized in the 1970s, is that the colonists were poisoned by ergot fungus on their rye crop in 1692 which caused them to hallucinate, but this does not explain the continuing hysteria throughout 1693 nor the fact that there were many who still believed in witches and the justice of the trials afterwards. Witch trials had been conducted prior to 1692 and would be afterwards throughout the colonies. Class frictions between Salem Village and Salem Town have also been cited as a possible cause, but, although these added to the tensions of the time, they did not actually cause the hysteria. Of the first people accused, only Osborne had connections to Salem Town, the other two were firmly of Salem Village.

The most likely cause of the witch hysteria of 1692-1693 at Salem was religious belief coupled with societal tensions. No one will ever know what caused the girls to make the accusations which started the panic, but once made, they confirmed what was already believed by the colonists. American playwright Arthur Miller's The Crucible cast the Salem Witch Trials as an allegory of the McCarthy hearings of the 1950s which sought to root out communism in the United States. In this play, Miller was drawing attention to the dangers of ideologies which depend on confirmation bias in order to thrive. In both cases, the accusers were operating on a belief in threatening agents in their midst they needed to defend themselves against. The people of Massachusetts already believed in witches because religion in Colonial America encouraged it - they did not need ergot or anything else - all that was required was a physical manifestation of what they feared to confirm what they already knew to be true and act upon it.

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The Salem Witch Trials were a series of legal proceedings in Salem, Massachusetts in 1692-1693 resulting in the deaths of 20 innocent people accused of witchcraft and the vilification of over 200 others...

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Senator McCarthy had subsequent exile from politics which coincided with a conversion of his name into a modern English noun and that was "McCarthyism".

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McCarthyism / The “Red Scare” | Eisenhower Presidential Library

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Senator Joseph R. McCarthy was a little-known junior senator from Wisconsin until February 1950 when he claimed to possess a list of 205 card-carrying Communists employed in the U.S. Department of State. From that moment Senator McCarthy became a tireless crusader against Communism in the early 1950…

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One of the perspectives of what McCarthyism is would be that it is the practice of making accusations of subversion or treason without proper regard for evidence.

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Walt Whitman was born into a family that settled in North America in the first half of the 17th century.

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Walt Whitman, in full Walter Whitman, (born May 31, 1819, West Hills, Long Island, New York, U.S.-died March 26, 1892, Camden, New Jersey), American poet, journalist, and essayist whose verse collection Leaves of Grass, first published in 1855, is a landmark in the history of American literature.

Early life

Walt Whitman was born into a family that settled in North America in the first half of the 17th century. His ancestry was typical of the region: his mother, Louisa Van Velsor, was Dutch, and his father, Walter Whitman, was of English descent. They were farm people with little formal education. The Whitman family had at one time owned a large tract of land, but it was so diminished by the time Walt was born that his father had taken up carpentering, though the family still lived on a small section of the ancestral estate. In 1823 Walter Whitman, Sr., moved his growing family to Brooklyn, which was enjoying a boom. There he speculated in real estate and built cheap houses for artisans, but he was a poor manager and had difficulty in providing for his family, which increased to nine children.

Walt, the second child, attended public school in Brooklyn, began working at the age of 12, and learned the printing trade. He was employed as a printer in Brooklyn and New York City, taught in country schools on Long Island, and became a journalist. At the age of 23 he edited a daily newspaper in New York, and in 1846 he became editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, a fairly important newspaper of the time. Discharged from the Eagle early in 1848 because of his support for the antislavery Free Soil faction of the Democratic Party, he went to New Orleans, Louisiana, where he worked for three months on the Crescent before returning to New York via the Mississippi River and the Great Lakes. After another abortive attempt at Free Soil journalism, he built houses and dabbled in real estate in New York from about 1850 until 1855.

Whitman had spent a great deal of his 36 years walking and observing in New York City and Long Island. He had visited the theatre frequently and seen many plays of William Shakespeare, and he had developed a strong love of music, especially opera. During these years, he had also read extensively at home and in the New York libraries, and he began experimenting with a new style of poetry. While a schoolteacher, printer, and journalist, he had published sentimental stories and poems in newspapers and popular magazines, but they showed almost no literary promise.

By the spring of 1855 Whitman had enough poems in his new style for a thin volume. Unable to find a publisher, he sold a house and printed the first edition of Leaves of Grass at his own expense. No publisher's name and no author's name appeared on the first edition in 1855. But the cover had a portrait of Walt Whitman, "broad-shouldered, rouge-fleshed, Bacchus-browed, bearded like a satyr," as Bronson Alcott described him in a journal entry in 1856. Though little appreciated upon its appearance, Leaves of Grass was warmly praised by the poet and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson, who wrote to Whitman on receiving the poems that it was "the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom" America had yet contributed.

Whitman continued practicing his new style of writing in his private notebooks, and in 1856 the second edition of Leaves of Grass appeared. This collection contained revisions of the poems of the first edition and a new one, the "Sun-down Poem" (later to become "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry"). The second edition was also a financial failure, and once again Whitman edited a daily newspaper, the Brooklyn Times, but was unemployed by the summer of 1859. In 1860 a Boston publisher brought out the third edition of Leaves of Grass, greatly enlarged and rearranged, but the outbreak of the American Civil War bankrupted the firm. The 1860 volume contained the "Calamus" poems, which record a personal crisis of some intensity in Whitman's life, an apparent homosexual love affair (whether imagined or real is unknown), and "Premonition" (later entitled "Starting from Paumanok"), which records the violent emotions that often drained the poet's strength. "A Word out of the Sea" (later entitled "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking") evoked some sombre feelings, as did "As I Ebb'd with the Ocean of Life," "Chants Democratic," "Enfans d'Adam," "Messenger Leaves," and "Thoughts" were more in the poet's earlier vein.

After the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, Whitman's brother was wounded at Fredericksburg, and Whitman went there in 1862, staying some time in the camp, then taking a temporary post in the paymaster's office in Washington. He spent his spare time visiting wounded and dying soldiers in the Washington hospitals, spending his scanty salary on small gifts for Confederate and Union soldiers alike and offering his usual "cheer and magnetism" to try to alleviate some of the mental depression and bodily suffering he saw in the wards.

In January 1865 he became a clerk in the Department of the Interior; in May he was promoted but in June was dismissed because the secretary of the Interior thought that Leaves of Grass was indecent. Whitman then obtained a post in the attorney general's office, largely through the efforts of his friend the journalist William O'Connor, who wrote a vindication of Whitman in The Good Gray Poet (published in 1866), which aroused sympathy for the victim of injustice.

In May 1865 a collection of war poems entitled Drum-Taps showed Whitman's readers a new kind of poetry, in free verse, moving from the oratorical excitement with which he had greeted the falling-in and arming of the young men at the beginning of the Civil War to a disturbing awareness of what war really meant. "Beat! Beat! Drums!" echoed the bitterness of the first of the battles of Bull Run, and "Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night" had a new awareness of suffering, no less effective for its quietly plangent quality. The Sequel to Drum-Taps, published in the autumn of 1865, contained "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," his great elegy on Pres. Abraham Lincoln. Whitman's horror at the death of democracy's first "great martyr chief " was matched by his revulsion from the barbarities of war. Whitman's prose descriptions of the Civil War, published later in Specimen Days & Collect (1882-83), are no less effective in their direct, moving simplicity.

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Walt Whitman | Biography, Poems, Leaves of Grass, & Facts

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Walt Whitman, American poet, journalist and essayist whose verse collection Leaves of Grass, first published in 1855, is a landmark in the history of American literature. His aim was to transcend traditional epics and to eschew normal aesthetic form.

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Walt Whitman left school at just eleven years old.

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Walt Whitman (1819-92) is one of the few great nineteenth-century American poets. With his innovative free verse and celebration of the American landscape, he made his poetry a sort of literary declaration of independence, his long, sprawling lines having an almost prophetic quality.

Whitman's life fed into his distinctive poetry in numerous ways. Here are some of the key facts about his life and work, including some of the most interesting details of both.
1. Whitman was born on Long Island in New York, and raised in Brooklyn.
Walt Whitman was born Walter Whitman Jr. at West Hills, Huntington on Long Island in 1819. He remained close to his mother, as their letters from the Civil War period testify. His father was prone to bouts of irritability and anger, but Whitman's relationship with his mother was strong.
2. He left school at just eleven years of age.
Whitman left formal schooling when he was eleven, in order to find work to help support his parents and siblings. Whitman was the second of nine children, so the family was a large one.

The young Whitman worked as an office boy for two lawyers and was then apprentice and 'printer's devil' for the weekly Long Island newspaper, the Patriot. It was while working for the Patriot that Whitman learned about typesetting and printing: skills which would prove invaluable when he came to prepare his own unusual poetry for print years later.
3. Whitman founded his own newspaper while he was still a teenager.
Whitman set up the Long-Islander, his own newspaper venture, when he was just nineteen years old. In his early twenties, he also wrote a temperance tract, Franklin Evans; or, The Inebriate: A Tale of the Times, which he later dismissed as 'rot'. He would be sacked from several newspapers for his radical views.
4. He had a formative experience in New Orleans.
In 1848, Whitman travelled to New Orleans to work on the Crescent newspapers in the city. While living there, he appears to have had some sort of epiphany, perhaps inspired by the long journey to and from New Orleans, which involved taking in the Hudson river, Niagara, and the Great Lakes. Other biographers point to a passionate affair with a local woman, while it's even been suggested that Whitman had a homosexual relationship during this period.

Whatever happened, Whitman came to view himself as a kind of prophet for all of America.
5. His free verse was so innovative he had to design a special size of paper to accommodate them.
Walt Whitman's lines of verse are often so long and rolling that the size of conventional books was insufficient: they literally couldn't be contained within the average poetry volume of the nineteenth century.

So, Whitman designed his own special size of page - eight inches by eleven - with the wider page enabling his longer lines to be typeset more easily so they didn't run onto a new line.

Whitman's free verse was greatly inspired by the Old Testament psalms: unrhymed, rhythmically irregular, and varying between long and short in length according to the movement and mood of the poem. It was like nothing else American readers had seen before.
6. In fact, Whitman's pioneering free verse may have helped to inspire the French revolution in vers libre.
In France, Whitman is thought to have helped to inspire the French version of free verse, vers libre, which was pioneered in the 1880s by the poet Gustave Kahn and others. Although Whitman's direct influence on the French Symbolists is hard to pin down, he has been credited with helping to inspire French poets to innovate with the verse line and move away from more regular, traditional forms.
7. When he sent a copy of Leaves of Grass to another notable American poet, that poet burned his copy.
Whitman had difficulty getting Leaves of Grass published. So he enlisted the help of his neighbours to print a thousand copies of the original print run in 1855. Only one bookshop would stock it: Fowler & Wells, which had shops in both New York and Boston. According to Whitman, not one copy was sold.

Whitman sent complimentary copies of the book to numerous influential people in America, hoping for an endorsement from them. John Greenleaf Whittier was reportedly none too impressed by the scandalous nature of Whitman's subject matter in his poems and burned the copy sent to him.

Since then, other poets have been more generous, acknowledging Whitman's immense importance to the development of American poetry. Ezra Pound, who was born in the US but made a name for himself in Europe, called him 'America's poet', adding: 'He is America.'
8. His brother's plight during the American Civil War inspired Whitman to help veterans of the war.
In December 1862, Whitman read a listing of the fallen soldiers which he interpreted as carrying a potential reference to his brother (the soldier was listed as 'G. W. Whitmore', but names were not always accurately rendered in the reports).

Whitman made his way south to find his brother, whom he found alive, to his relief. However, Whitman was profoundly affected by seeing the wounded soldiers and, in Washington, D. C., secured part-time work in the army paymaster's office. This left Whitman time to volunteer as a nurse in the army hospitals in the area, which he did.
9. Unusually for a poet, he continued to expand his first volume of poems rather than simply publishing new ones.
Whitman's Leaves of Grass, the volume of poetry for which he is best-known, was first published in 1855. For the remaining thirty-seven years of his life, Whitman issued new editions of this collection, each new one larger and more expansive than the previous one.
10. He was reportedly fired from his job for writing Leaves of Grass.
After the end of the Civil War, Walt Whitman worked for the Department of the Interior, but he appears to have been fired in 1864 when the 'scandalous' 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass came to the attention of his employers. The book was also banned in Boston.
11. He is widely considered one of the two more important American poets of the nineteenth century.
Martin Seymour-Smith, in his colossal Guide to Modern World Literature, called Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson the only two great American poets the nineteenth century produced, not least because they are the only two American poets who innovated with what poetry could do (and with what it could be).

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11 Important and Interesting Facts about Walt Whitman

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By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) Walt Whitman (1819-92) is one of the few great nineteenth-century American poets. With his innovative free verse and celebration of the American landscape, he made his poetry a sort of literary declaration of independence, his long, sprawling lines having an almost prophetic quality.

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At the age of twelve, Whitman began to learn the printer’s trade and fell in love with the written word.

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celebrate whitman 200
Walt Whitman was born on May 31, 1819, in West Hills, on Long Island, New York. He was the second son of Walter Whitman, a house-builder, and Louisa Van Velsor. In the 1820s and 1830s, the family, which consisted of nine children, lived in Long Island and Brooklyn, where Whitman attended the Brooklyn public schools.

At the age of twelve, Whitman began to learn the printer's trade and fell in love with the written word. Largely self-taught, he read voraciously, becoming acquainted with the works of Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and the Bible.

Whitman worked as a printer in New York City until a devastating fire in the printing district demolished the industry. In 1836, at the age of seventeen, he began his career as teacher in the one-room schoolhouses of Long Island. He continued to teach until 1841, when he turned to journalism as a full-time career. He founded a weekly newspaper, The Long-Islander, and later edited a number of Brooklyn and New York papers, including the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. In 1848, Whitman left the Brooklyn Daily Eagle to become editor of the New Orleans Crescent for three months. After witnessing the auctions of enslaved individuals in New Orleans, he returned to Brooklyn in the fall of 1848 and co-founded a "free soil" newspaper, the Brooklyn Freeman, which he edited through the next fall. Whitman's attitudes about race have been described as " unstable and inconsistent." He did not always side with the abolitionists, yet he celebrated human dignity.

In Brooklyn, Whitman continued to develop the unique style of poetry that later so astonished Ralph Waldo Emerson. In 1855, Whitman took out a copyright on the first edition of Leaves of Grass, which consisted of twelve untitled poems and a preface. He published the volume himself, and sent a copy to Emerson in July of 1855. Whitman released a second edition of the book in 1856, containing thirty-two poems, a letter from Emerson praising the first edition, and a long open letter by Whitman in response. During his lifetime, Whitman continued to refine the volume, publishing several more editions of the book. Noted Whitman scholar, M. Jimmie Killingsworth writes that "the 'merge,' as Whitman conceived it, is the tendency of the individual self to overcome moral, psychological, and political boundaries. Thematically and poetically, the notion dominates the three major poems of 1855: ' I Sing the Body Electric,' ' The Sleepers,' and 'Song of Myself,' all of which were merged in the first edition under the single title 'Leaves of Grass' but were demarcated by clear breaks in the text and the repetition of the title."

At the outbreak of the Civil War, Whitman vowed to live a "purged" and "cleansed" life. He worked as a freelance journalist and visited the wounded at New York City-area hospitals. He then traveled to Washington, D.C. in December 1862 to care for his brother, who had been wounded in the war.

Overcome by the suffering of the many wounded in Washington, Whitman decided to stay and work in the hospitals; he ended up staying in the city for eleven years. He took a job as a clerk for the Bureau of Indian Affairs within the Department of the Interior, which ended when the Secretary of the Interior, James Harlan, discovered that Whitman was the author of Leaves of Grass, which Harlan found offensive. After Harlan fired him, he went on to work in the attorney general's office.

In 1873, Whitman suffered a stroke that left him partially paralyzed. A few months later he travelled to Camden, New Jersey, to visit his dying mother at his brother's house. He ended up staying with his brother until the 1882 publication of Leaves of Grass (James R. Osgood), which brought him enough money to buy a home in Camden.

In the simple two-story clapboard house, Whitman spent his declining years working on additions and revisions to his deathbed edition of Leaves of Grass (David McKay, 1891-92) and preparing his final volume of poems and prose, Good-Bye My Fancy (David McKay, 1891). After his death on March 26, 1892, Whitman was buried in a tomb he designed and had built on a lot in Harleigh Cemetery.

Along with Emily Dickinson, he is considered one of America's most important poets.

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celebrate whitman 200 Walt Whitman was born on May 31, 1819, in West Hills, on Long Island, New York. He was the second son of Walter Whitman, a house-builder, and Louisa Van Velsor. In the 1820s and 1830s, the family, which consisted of nine children, lived in Long Island and Brooklyn, where Whitman attended the Brooklyn public schools.

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He was the first African American to serve as consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress.

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Table of Contents

Robert Hayden, in full Robert Earl Hayden, original name Asa Bundy Sheffey, (born August 4, 1913, Detroit, Michigan, U.S.-died February 25, 1980, Ann Arbor, Michigan), African American poet whose subject matter is most often the black experience.

Hayden grew up in Detroit and attended Detroit City College (now Wayne State University; B.A., 1936). He joined the Federal Writers' Project, researching black folklore and the history of the Underground Railroad in Michigan. His first collection of poems, Heart-Shape in the Dust, was published in 1940. While a graduate student at the University of Michigan (M.A., 1944), he studied poetry with W.H. Auden. During much of his career as a Fisk University professor (1946-69) his work was not well known, but he gained a public after his A Ballad of Remembrance (1962) won a grand prize at the First World Festival of Negro Arts in 1966 in Dakar, Senegal. In 1976 he became the first African American to be appointed poetry consultant to the Library of Congress (now poet laureate consultant in poetry).

Hayden was influenced by a wide range of 20th-century poets, from W.B. Yeats to Countee Cullen. His best-known poem dealing with black history is "Middle Passage," an alternately lyric, narrative, and dramatic view of the slave trade. Hayden's Bahaʾī beliefs were often reflected in his poetry, which confronted the brutality of racism. While teaching at the University of Michigan (1969-80), he published the poetry collections Words in the Mourning Time (1970), including his tribute to Malcolm X; The Night-Blooming Cereus (1972), concerned with the meaning of life; Angle of Ascent: New and Selected Poems (1975); and American Journal (1980). Hayden's The Collected Prose (1984) and Collected Poems (1985, reprinted, with a new introduction, 1996) were posthumously published.

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Robert Hayden, in full Robert Earl Hayden, original name Asa Bundy Sheffey, (born August 4, 1913, Detroit, Michigan, U.S.-died February 25, 1980, Ann Arbor, Michigan), African American poet whose subject matter is most often the black experience. Hayden grew up in Detroit and attended Detroit City College (now Wayne State University; B.A., 1936).

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Robert Hayden was born Asa Bundy Sheffey into a poor family in the Paradise Valley neighborhood of Detroit. He also had an emotionally traumatic childhood and was raised in part by foster parents.

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Poet Robert Hayden was born Asa Bundy Sheffey into a poor family in the Paradise Valley neighborhood of Detroit; he had an emotionally traumatic childhood and was raised in part by foster parents. Due to extreme nearsightedness, Hayden turned to books rather than sports in his childhood. After graduating from high school in 1932, he attended Detroit City College (now Wayne State University) on scholarship and later earned a graduate degree in English literature from the University of Michigan. As a teaching fellow, he was the first Black faculty member in Michigan's English department. Hayden eventually became the first African American to be appointed as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. His collections of poetry include Heart-Shape in the Dust (1940), Figure of Time (1955), A Ballad of Remembrance (1962), which won the grand prize at the First World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal, Selected Poems (1966), Words in the Mourning Time (1970), The Night-Blooming Cereus (1972), Angle of Ascent: New and Selected Poems (1975), and American Journal (1978). Hayden's formal, elegant poems about the Black history and experience earned him a number of other major awards as well. "Robert Hayden is now generally accepted," Frederick Glaysher stated in Hayden's Collected Prose, "as the most outstanding craftsman of Afro-American poetry."

The historical basis for much of Hayden's poetry stemmed from his extensive study of American and African American history. Beginning in the 1930s, when he researched Black history for the Federal Writers' Project in his native Detroit, Hayden studied the story of Black people from their roots in Africa to their present condition in the United States. " History," Charles T. Davis wrote in Black is the Color of the Cosmos: Essays on Afro-American Literature and Culture, 1942-1981, "has haunted Robert Hayden from the beginning of his career as a poet." As he once explained to Glenford E. Mitchell of World Order, Hayden saw history "as a long, tortuous, and often bloody process of becoming, of psychic evolution."

Other early influences on Hayden's development as a poet were W. H. Auden, under whom Hayden studied at the University of Michigan, and Stephen Vincent Benet, particularly Benet's poem "John Brown's Body." That poem describes the Black reaction to General Sherman's march through Georgia during the Civil War and inspired Hayden to also write about that period of history, creating a series of poems on slavery and the Civil War that won him a Hopwood Award in 1942.

Although history played a large role in Hayden's poetry, many of his works were also inspired by the poet's adherence to the Baha'i faith, an Eastern religion that believes in a coming world civilization. Hayden served for many years as the poetry editor of the group's World Order magazine. The universal outlook of the Baha'is also moved Hayden to reject any narrow racial classification for his work.

James Mann of the Dictionary of Literary Biography claimed that Hayden "stands out among poets of his race for his staunch avowal that the work of black writers must be judged wholly in the context of the literary tradition in English, rather than within the confines of the ethnocentrism that is common in contemporary literature written by blacks." As Lewis Turco explained in the Michigan Quarterly Review, "Hayden has always wished to be judged as a poet among poets, not one to whom special rules of criticism ought to be applied in order to make his work acceptable in more than a sociological sense." This stance earned Hayden criticism during the polarized 1960s. He was accused of abandoning his racial heritage to conform to the standards of a white, European literary establishment. "In the 1960s," William Meredith wrote in his foreword to Collected Prose, "Hayden declared himself, at considerable cost in popularity, an American poet rather than a black poet, when for a time there was posited an unreconcilable difference between the two roles... He would not relinquish the title of American writer for any narrower identity."

However, much of Hayden's best poetry is concerned with Black experience and history. "The gift of Robert Hayden's poetry," Vilma Raskin Potter remarked in MELUS, "is his coherent vision of the black experience in this country as a continuing journey both communal and private." Hayden wrote about such historical figures as Nat Turner, Frederick Douglass, Malcolm X, Harriet Tubman, and Cinquez. He also wrote poems about the Underground Railroad, the Civil War, and the American slave trade. Edward Hirsch, writing in the Nation, called Hayden "an American poet, deeply engaged by the topography of American myth in his efforts to illuminate the American black experience."

Though Hayden wrote in formal poetic forms, his range of voices and techniques gave his work a rich variety. "Hayden," Robert G. O'Meally wrote in the Washington Post Book World, "is a poet of many voices, using varieties of ironic black folk speech, and a spare, ebullient poetic diction, to grip and chill his readers. He draws characters of stark vividness as he transmutes cardinal points and commonplaces of history into dramatic action and symbol." "His work," Turco wrote, "is unfettered in many ways, not the least of which is in the range of techniques available to him. It gives his imagination wings, allows him to travel throughout human nature." Speaking of Hayden's use of formal verse forms, Mann explained that Hayden's poems were "formal in a nontraditional, original way, strict but not straight-jacketed" and found that they also possessed "a hard-edged precision of line that molds what the imagination wants to release in visually fine-chiseled fragmental stanzas that fit flush together with the rightness of a picture puzzle."

It wasn't until 1966, with the publication of Selected Poems, that Hayden first enjoyed widespread attention from the nation's literary critics. With each succeeding volume of poems his reputation was further enhanced until, in 1976 and his appointment as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, Hayden was generally recognized as one of the country's leading poets. Critics often point to Hayden's unique ability to combine the historical and the personal when speaking of his own life and the lives of his people. Writing in Obsidian: Black Literature in Review, Gary Zebrun argued that "the voice of the speaker in Hayden's best work twists and squirms its way out of anguish in order to tell, or sing, stories of American history-in particular the courageous and plaintive record of Afro-American history-and to chart the thoughts and feelings of the poet's own private space... Hayden is ceaselessly trying to achieve... transcendence, which must not be an escape from the horror of history or from the loneliness of individual mortality, but an ascent that somehow transforms the horror and creates a blessed permanence."

Hayden once said that he considered himself to be "a poet who teaches in order to earn a living so that he can write a poem or two now and then." He taught at Fisk University for more than twenty years, where he rose to become a professor of English. Hayden ended his career with an eleven-year stint at the University of Michigan. His honors and awards included the Academy of American Poets Fellowship. He died in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1980. His Collected Prose (1984) was published posthumously.

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Poet Robert Hayden was born Asa Bundy Sheffey into a poor family in the Paradise Valley neighborhood of Detroit; he had an emotionally traumatic childhood and was raised in part by foster parents. Due to extreme nearsightedness, Hayden turned to books rather than sports in his childhood. After...

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He studied poetry at the University of Michigan, and went on to teaching at both Michigan University and Fisk University.

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Edgar Allan Poe was the son of the English-born actress Elizabeth Arnold Poe and David Poe, Jr., an actor from Baltimore.

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Life

Poe was the son of the English-born actress Elizabeth Arnold Poe and David Poe, Jr., an actor from Baltimore. After his mother died in Richmond, Virginia, in 1811, he was taken into the home of John Allan, a Richmond merchant (presumably his godfather), and of his childless wife. He was later taken to Scotland and England (1815-20), where he was given a classical education that was continued in Richmond. For 11 months in 1826 he attended the University of Virginia, but his gambling losses at the university so incensed his guardian that he refused to let him continue, and Poe returned to Richmond to find his sweetheart, (Sarah) Elmira Royster, engaged. He went to Boston, where in 1827 he published a pamphlet of youthful Byronic poems, Tamerlane, and Other Poems. Poverty forced him to join the army under the name of Edgar A. Perry, but, on the death of Poe's foster mother, John Allan purchased his release from the army and helped him get an appointment to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Before going, Poe published a new volume at Baltimore, Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems (1829). He successfully sought expulsion from the academy, where he was absent from all drills and classes for a week. He proceeded to New York City and brought out a volume of Poems, containing several masterpieces, some showing the influence of John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He then returned to Baltimore, where he began to write stories. In 1833 his " MS. Found in a Bottle" won $50 from a Baltimore weekly, and by 1835 he was in Richmond as editor of the Southern Literary Messenger. There he made a name as a critical reviewer and married his young cousin Virginia Clemm, who was only 13. Poe seems to have been an affectionate husband and son-in-law.

Poe was dismissed from his job in Richmond, apparently for drinking, and went to New York City. Drinking was in fact to be the bane of his life. To talk well in a large company he needed a slight stimulant, but a glass of sherry might start him on a spree; and, although he rarely succumbed to intoxication, he was often seen in public when he did. This gave rise to the conjecture that Poe was a drug addict, but according to medical testimony he had a brain lesion. While in New York City in 1838 he published a long prose narrative, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, combining (as so often in his tales) much factual material with the wildest fancies. It is considered one inspiration of Herman Melville's Moby Dick. In 1839 he became coeditor of Burton's Gentleman's Magazine in Philadelphia. There a contract for a monthly feature stimulated him to write "William Wilson" and "The Fall of the House of Usher," stories of supernatural horror. The latter contains a study of a neurotic now known to have been an acquaintance of Poe, not Poe himself.

Later in 1839 Poe's Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque appeared (dated 1840). He resigned from Burton's about June 1840 but returned in 1841 to edit its successor, Graham's Lady's and Gentleman's Magazine, in which he printed "The Murders in the Rue Morgue"-the first detective story. In 1843 his "The Gold Bug" won a prize of $100 from the Philadelphia Dollar Newspaper, which gave him great publicity. In 1844 he returned to New York, wrote "The Balloon Hoax" for the Sun, and became subeditor of the New York Mirror under N.P. Willis, thereafter a lifelong friend. In the New York Mirror of January 29, 1845, appeared, from advance sheets of the American Review, his most famous poem, "The Raven," which gave him national fame at once. Poe then became editor of the Broadway Journal, a short-lived weekly, in which he republished most of his short stories, in 1845. During this last year the now-forgotten poet Frances Sargent Locke Osgood pursued Poe. Virginia did not object, but "Fanny's" indiscreet writings about her literary love caused great scandal. His The Raven and Other Poems and a selection of his Tales came out in 1845, and in 1846 Poe moved to a cottage at Fordham (now part of New York City), where he wrote for Godey's Lady's Book (May-October 1846) "The Literati of New York City"-gossipy sketches on personalities of the day, which led to a libel suit.

Poe's wife, Virginia, died in January 1847. The following year he went to Providence, Rhode Island, to woo Sarah Helen Whitman, a poet. There was a brief engagement. Poe had close but platonic entanglements with Annie Richmond and with Sarah Anna Lewis, who helped him financially. He composed poetic tributes to all of them. In 1848 he also published the lecture "Eureka," a transcendental "explanation" of the universe, which has been hailed as a masterpiece by some critics and as nonsense by others. In 1849 he went south, had a wild spree in Philadelphia, but got safely to Richmond, where he finally became engaged to Elmira Royster, by then the widowed Mrs. Shelton, and spent a happy summer with only one or two relapses. He enjoyed the companionship of childhood friends and an unromantic friendship with a young poet, Susan Archer Talley.

Poe had some forebodings of death when he left Richmond for Baltimore late in September. There he died, although whether from drinking, heart failure, or other causes was still uncertain in the 21st century. He was buried in Westminster Presbyterian churchyard in Baltimore.

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Edgar Allan Poe | Biography, Poems, Short Stories, & Facts

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Edgar Allan Poe, the master of macabre literature and pioneer of detective fiction, intrigued readers with his haunting tales that explored the depths of human psychology.

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Regarded in literary histories and handbooks as the architect of the modern short story, Poe was also the principal forerunner of the “art for art’s sake” movement in 19th-century European literature.

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Edgar Allan Poe's stature as a major figure in world literature is primarily based on his ingenious and profound short stories, poems, and critical theories, which established a highly influential rationale for the short form in both poetry and fiction. Regarded in literary histories and handbooks as the architect of the modern short story, Poe was also the principal forerunner of the "art for art's sake" movement in 19th-century European literature. Whereas earlier critics predominantly concerned themselves with moral or ideological generalities, Poe focused his criticism on the specifics of style and construction that contributed to a work's effectiveness or failure. In his own work, he demonstrated a brilliant command of language and technique as well as an inspired and original imagination. Poe's poetry and short stories greatly influenced the French Symbolists of the late 19th century, who in turn altered the direction of modern literature.

Poe's father and mother were professional actors. At the time of his birth in 1809, they were members of a repertory company in Boston. Before Poe was three years old both of his parents died, and he was raised in the home of John Allan, a prosperous exporter from Richmond, Virginia, who never legally adopted his foster son. As a boy, Poe attended the best schools available, and was admitted to the University of Virginia at Charlottesville in 1825. While there he distinguished himself academically but was forced to leave after less than a year because of bad debts and inadequate financial support from Allan. Poe's relationship with Allan disintegrated upon his return to Richmond in 1827, and soon after Poe left for Boston, where he enlisted in the army and also published his first poetry collection, Tamerlane, and Other Poems. The volume went unnoticed by readers and reviewers, and a second collection, Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems, received only slightly more attention when it appeared in 1829. That same year Poe was honorably discharged from the army, having attained the rank of regimental sergeant major, and was then admitted to the United States Military Academy at West Point. However, because Allan would neither provide his foster son with sufficient funds to maintain himself as a cadet nor give the consent necessary to resign from the Academy, Poe gained a dismissal by ignoring his duties and violating regulations. He subsequently went to New York City, where Poems, his third collection of verse, was published in 1831, and then to Baltimore, where he lived at the home of his aunt, Mrs. Maria Clemm.

Over the next few years Poe's first short stories appeared in the Philadelphia Saturday Courier and his "MS. Found in a Bottle" won a cash prize for best story in the Baltimore Saturday Visitor. Nevertheless, Poe was still not earning enough to live independently, nor did Allan's death in 1834 provide him with an inheritance. The following year, however, his financial problems were temporarily alleviated when he accepted an editorship at The Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond, bringing with him his aunt and his 12-year-old cousin Virginia, whom he married in 1836. The Southern Literary Messenger was the first of several journals Poe would direct over the next 10 years and through which he rose to prominence as a leading man of letters in America. Poe made himself known not only as a superlative author of poetry and fiction, but also as a literary critic whose level of imagination and insight had hitherto been unapproached in American literature. While Poe's writings gained attention in the late 1830s and early 1840s, the profits from his work remained meager, and he supported himself by editing Burton's Gentleman's Magazine and Graham's Magazine in Philadelphia and the Broadway Journal in New York City. After his wife's death from tuberculosis in 1847, Poe became involved in a number of romantic affairs. It was while he prepared for his second marriage that Poe, for reasons unknown, arrived in Baltimore in late September of 1849. On October 3, he was discovered in a state of semi-consciousness; he died four days later without regaining the necessary lucidity to explain what had happened during the last days of his life.

Poe's most conspicuous contribution to world literature derives from the analytical method he practiced both as a creative author and as a critic of the works of his contemporaries. His self-declared intention was to formulate strictly artistic ideals in a milieu that he thought overly concerned with the utilitarian value of literature, a tendency he termed the "heresy of the Didactic." While Poe's position includes the chief requisites of pure aestheticism, his emphasis on literary formalism was directly linked to his philosophical ideals: through the calculated use of language one may express, though always imperfectly, a vision of truth and the essential condition of human existence. Poe's theory of literary creation is noted for two central points: first, a work must create a unity of effect on the reader to be considered successful; second, the production of this single effect should not be left to the hazards of accident or inspiration, but should to the minutest detail of style and subject be the result of rational deliberation on the part of the author. In poetry, this single effect must arouse the reader's sense of beauty, an ideal that Poe closely associated with sadness, strangeness, and loss; in prose, the effect should be one revelatory of some truth, as in "tales of ratiocination" or works evoking "terror, or passion, or horror."

Aside from a common theoretical basis, there is a psychological intensity that is characteristic of Poe's writings, especially the tales of horror that comprise his best and best-known works. These stories-which include "The Black Cat," "The Cask of Amontillado," and "The Tell-Tale Heart"-are often told by a first-person narrator, and through this voice Poe probes the workings of a character's psyche. This technique foreshadows the psychological explorations of Fyodor Dostoyevsky and the school of psychological realism. In his Gothic tales, Poe also employed an essentially symbolic, almost allegorical method which gives such works as "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Masque of the Red Death," and "Ligeia" an enigmatic quality that accounts for their enduring interest and links them with the symbolical works of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville. The influence of Poe's tales may be seen in the work of later writers, including Ambrose Bierce and H.P. Lovecraft, who belong to a distinct tradition of horror literature initiated by Poe. In addition to his achievement as creator of the modern horror tale, Poe is also credited with parenting two other popular genres: science fiction and the detective story. In such works as "The Unparalleled Adventure of Hans Pfaall" and "Von Kempelen and His Discovery," Poe took advantage of the fascination for science and technology that emerged in the early 19th century to produce speculative and fantastic narratives which anticipate a type of literature that did not become widely practiced until the 20th century. Similarly, Poe's three tales of ratiocination-"The Murders in the Rue Morgue," "The Purloined Letter," and "The Mystery of Marie Roget"-are recognized as the models which established the major characters and literary conventions of detective fiction, specifically the amateur sleuth who solves a crime that has confounded the authorities and whose feats of deductive reasoning are documented by an admiring associate. Just as Poe influenced many succeeding authors and is regarded as an ancestor of such major literary movements as Symbolism and Surrealism, he was also influenced by earlier literary figures and movements. In his use of the demonic and the grotesque, Poe evidenced the impact of the stories of E.T.A. Hoffman and the Gothic novels of Ann Radcliffe, while the despair and melancholy in much of his writing reflects an affinity with the Romantic movement of the early 19th century. It was Poe's particular genius that in his work he gave consummate artistic form both to his personal obsessions and those of previous literary generations, at the same time creating new forms which provided a means of expression for future artists.

While Poe is most often remembered for his short fiction, his first love as a writer was poetry, which he began writing during his adolescence. His early verse reflects the influence of such English romantics as Lord Byron, John Keats, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, yet foreshadows his later poetry which demonstrates a subjective outlook and surreal, mystic vision. "Tamerlane" and "Al Aaraaf" exemplify Poe's evolution from the portrayal of Byronic heroes to the depiction of journeys within his own imagination and subconscious. The former piece, reminiscent of Byron's "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage," recounts the life and adventures of a 14th-century Mongol conqueror; the latter poem portrays a dreamworld where neither good nor evil permanently reside and where absolute beauty can be directly discerned. In other poems-" To Helen," "Lenore," and " The Raven" in particular-Poe investigates the loss of ideal beauty and the difficulty in regaining it. These pieces are usually narrated by a young man who laments the untimely death of his beloved. "To Helen" is a three stanza lyric that has been called one of the most beautiful love poems in the English language. The subject of the work is a woman who becomes, in the eyes of the narrator, a personification of the classical beauty of ancient Greece and Rome. "Lenore" presents ways in which the dead are best remembered, either by mourning or celebrating life beyond earthly boundaries. In "The Raven," Poe successfully unites his philosophical and aesthetic ideals. In this psychological piece, a young scholar is emotionally tormented by a raven's ominous repetition of "Nevermore" in answer to his question about the probability of an afterlife with his deceased lover. Charles Baudelaire noted in his introduction to the French edition of "The Raven": "It is indeed the poem of the sleeplessness of despair; it lacks nothing: neither the fever of ideas, nor the violence of colors, nor sickly reasoning, nor drivelling terror, nor even the bizarre gaiety of suffering which makes it more terrible." Poe also wrote poems that were intended to be read aloud. Experimenting with combinations of sound and rhythm, he employed such technical devices as repetition, parallelism, internal rhyme, alliteration, and assonance to produce works that are unique in American poetry for their haunting, musical quality. In "The Bells," for example, the repetition of the word "bells" in various structures accentuates the unique tonality of the different types of bells described in the poem.

While his works were not conspicuously acclaimed during his lifetime, Poe did earn due respect as a gifted fiction writer, poet, and man of letters, and occasionally he achieved a measure of popular success, especially following the appearance of " The Raven." After his death, however, the history of his critical reception becomes one of dramatically uneven judgments and interpretations. This state of affairs was initiated by Poe's one-time friend and literary executor R.W. Griswold, who, in a libelous obituary notice in the New York Tribune bearing the byline "Ludwig," attributed the depravity and psychological aberrations of many of the characters in Poe's fiction to Poe himself. In retrospect, Griswold's vilifications seem ultimately to have elicited as much sympathy as censure with respect to Poe and his work, leading subsequent biographers of the late 19th century to defend, sometimes too devotedly, Poe's name. It was not until the 1941 biography by A.H. Quinn that a balanced view was provided of Poe, his work, and the relationship between the author's life and his imagination. Nevertheless, the identification of Poe with the murderers and madmen of his works survived and flourished in the 20th century, most prominently in the form of psychoanalytical studies such as those of Marie Bonaparte and Joseph Wood Krutch. Added to the controversy over the sanity, or at best the maturity of Poe (Paul Elmer More called him "the poet of unripe boys and unsound men"), was the question of the value of Poe's works as serious literature. At the forefront of Poe's detractors were such eminent figures as Henry James, Aldous Huxley, and T.S. Eliot, who dismissed Poe's works as juvenile, vulgar, and artistically debased; in contrast, these same works have been judged to be of the highest literary merit by such writers as Bernard Shaw and William Carlos Williams. Complementing Poe's erratic reputation among English and American critics is the more stable, and generally more elevated opinion of critics elsewhere in the world, particularly in France. Following the extensive translations and commentaries of Charles Baudelaire in the 1850s, Poe's works were received with a peculiar esteem by French writers, most profoundly those associated with the late 19th-century movement of Symbolism, who admired Poe's transcendent aspirations as a poet; the 20th-century movement of Surrealism, which valued Poe's bizarre and apparently unruled imagination; and such figures as Paul Valéry, who found in Poe's theories and thought an ideal of supreme rationalism. In other countries, Poe's works have enjoyed a similar regard, and numerous studies have been written tracing the influence of the American author on the international literary scene, especially in Russia, Japan, Scandinavia, and Latin America.

Today, Poe is recognized as one of the foremost progenitors of modern literature, both in its popular forms, such as horror and detective fiction, and in its more complex and self-conscious forms, which represent the essential artistic manner of the 20th century. In contrast to earlier critics who viewed the man and his works as one, criticism of the past 25 years has developed a view of Poe as a detached artist who was more concerned with displaying his virtuosity than with expressing his soul, and who maintained an ironic rather than an autobiographical relationship to his writings. While at one time critics such as Yvor Winters wished to remove Poe from literary history, his works remain integral to any conception of modernism in world literature. Herbert Marshall McLuhan wrote in an essay entitled "Edgar Poe's Tradition": "While the New England dons primly turned the pages of Plato and Buddha beside a tea-cozy, and while Browning and Tennyson were creating a parochial fog for the English mind to relax in, Poe never lost contact with the terrible pathos of his time. Coevally with Baudelaire, and long before Conrad and Eliot, he explored the heart of darkness."

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Edgar Allan Poe's stature as a major figure in world literature is primarily based on his ingenious and profound short stories, poems, and critical theories, which established a highly influential rationale for the short form in both poetry and fiction. Regarded in literary histories and handbooks...

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When Edgar was a baby, David abandoned the family, leaving Eliza to support three young children.

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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).

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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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Realist works depicted people of all classes in ordinary life situations, which often reflected the changes brought on by the Industrial and Commercial Revolutions.

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The second half of the 19th century has been called the positivist age. It was an age of faith in all knowledge which would derive from science and scientific objective methods which could solve all human problems.
In the visual arts this spirit is most obvious in the widespread rejection of Romantic subjectivism and imagination in favour of Realism - the accurate and apparently objective description of the ordinary, observable world, a change especially evident in painting. Positivist thinking is evident in the full range of artistic developments after 1850- from the introduction of realistic elements into academic art, from the emphasis on the phenomenon of light, to the development of photography and the application of new technologies in architecture and constructions.

Three Wemen in a Church - Wilhelm Lebil - 1867

Realism sets as a goal not imitating past artistic achievements but the truthful and accurate depiction of the models that nature and contemporary life offer to the artist. The artificiality of both the Classicism and Romanticism in the academic art was unanimously rejected, and necessity to introduce contemporary to art found strong support. New idea was that ordinary people and everyday activities are worthy subjects for art. Artists - Realists attempted to portray the lives, appearances, problems, customs, and mores of the middle and lower classes, of the unexceptional, the ordinary, the humble, and the unadorned. They set themselves conscientiously to reproduce all to that point ignored aspects of contemporary life and society - its mental attitudes, physical settings, and material conditions.
Realism in France appears after the 1848 Revolution. In France it expresses a taste for democracy. At the same time in England artists - Realists came before the public with the reaction against the Victorian materialism and the conventions of the Royal Academy in London.

In spite of its social inclinations Realism produces no new style in architecture and few valuable sculptures. It was the time of introduction of new technologies in constructions. The revolutionary modular construction and largest spans in structural skeleton that could then be mass-produced - used on exhibition halls, railway stations; the use of cast iron as building material and invention of twisted-wire cable that extended main spans of bridges in Europe and United States. Less positive attitude toward technological progress can be seen in the first attempts to incorporate structural iron into architecture proper.

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The second half of the 19th century has been called the positivist age. It was an age of faith in all knowledge which would derive from science and scientific objective methods which could solve all human problems. In the visual arts this spirit is most obvious in the widespread rejection of Romantic subjectivism and...

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Realism rejects imaginative idealization in favor of a close observation of outward appearances.

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realism, in the arts, the accurate, detailed, unembellished depiction of nature or of contemporary life. Realism rejects imaginative idealization in favour of a close observation of outward appearances. As such, realism in its broad sense has comprised many artistic currents in different civilizations. In the visual arts, for example, realism can be found in ancient Hellenistic Greek sculptures accurately portraying boxers and decrepit old women. The works of such 17th-century painters as Caravaggio, the Dutch genre painters, the Spanish painters José de Ribera, Diego Velázquez, and Francisco de Zurbarán, and the Le Nain brothers in France are realist in approach. The works of the 18th-century English novelists Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, and Tobias Smollett may also be called realistic.

Realism was not consciously adopted as an aesthetic program until the mid-19th century in France, however. Indeed, realism may be viewed as a major trend in French novels and paintings between 1850 and 1880. One of the first appearances of the term realism was in the Mercure français du XIX siècle in 1826, in which the word is used to describe a doctrine based not upon imitating past artistic achievements but upon the truthful and accurate depiction of the models that nature and contemporary life offer the artist. The French proponents of realism were agreed in their rejection of the artificiality of both the Classicism and Romanticism of the academies and on the necessity for contemporaneity in an effective work of art. They attempted to portray the lives, appearances, problems, customs, and mores of the middle and lower classes, of the unexceptional, the ordinary, the humble, and the unadorned. Indeed, they conscientiously set themselves to reproducing all the hitherto-ignored aspects of contemporary life and society-its mental attitudes, physical settings, and material conditions.

Realism was stimulated by several intellectual developments in the first half of the 19th century. Among these were the anti-Romantic movement in Germany, with its emphasis on the common man as an artistic subject; Auguste Comte's Positivist philosophy, in which sociology's importance as the scientific study of society was emphasized; the rise of professional journalism, with its accurate and dispassionate recording of current events; and the development of photography, with its capability of mechanically reproducing visual appearances with extreme accuracy. All these developments stimulated interest in accurately recording contemporary life and society.

Gustave Courbet was the first artist to self-consciously proclaim and practice the realist aesthetic. After his huge canvas The Studio (1854-55) was rejected by the Exposition Universelle of 1855, the artist displayed it and other works under the label "Realism, G. Courbet" in a specially constructed pavilion. Courbet was strongly opposed to idealization in his art, and he urged other artists to instead make the commonplace and contemporary the focus of their art. He viewed the frank portrayal of scenes from everyday life as a truly democratic art. Such paintings as his Burial at Ornans (1849) and the Stone Breakers (1849), which he had exhibited in the Salon of 1850-51, had already shocked the public and critics by the frank and unadorned factuality with which they depicted humble peasants and labourers. The fact that Courbet did not glorify his peasants but presented them boldly and starkly created a violent reaction in the art world.

The style and subject matter of Courbet's work were built on ground already broken by the painters of the Barbizon School. Théodore Rousseau, Charles-François Daubigny, Jean-François Millet, and others in the early 1830s settled in the French village of Barbizon with the aim of faithfully reproducing the local character of the landscape. Though each Barbizon painter had his own style and specific interests, they all emphasized in their works the simple and ordinary rather than the grandiose and monumental aspects of nature. They turned away from melodramatic picturesqueness and painted solid, detailed forms that were the result of close observation. In such works as The Winnower (1848), Millet was one of the first artists to portray peasant labourers with a grandeur and monumentality hitherto reserved for more important persons.

Another major French artist often associated with the realist tradition, Honoré Daumier, drew satirical caricatures of French society and politics. He found his working-class heroes and heroines and his villainous lawyers and politicians in the slums and streets of Paris. Like Courbet, he was an ardent democrat, and he used his skill as a caricaturist directly in the service of political aims. Daumier used energetic linear style, boldly accentuated realistic detail, and an almost sculptural treatment of form to criticize the immorality and ugliness he saw in French society.

Pictorial realism outside of France was perhaps best represented in the 19th century in the United States. There, Winslow Homer's powerful and expressive paintings of marine subjects and Thomas Eakins 's portraits, boating scenes, and other works are frank, unsentimental, and acutely observed records of contemporary life.

Realism was a distinct current in 20th-century art and usually stemmed either from artists' desire to present more honest, searching, and unidealized views of everyday life or from their attempts to use art as a vehicle for social and political criticism. The rough, sketchy, almost journalistic scenes of seamy urban life by the group of American painters known as The Eight fall into the former category. The German art movement known as the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), on the other hand, worked in a realist style to express the cynicism and disillusionment of the post- World War I period in Germany. The Depression-era movement known as Social Realism adopted a similarly harsh and direct realism in its depictions of the injustices and evils of American society during that period.

Socialist Realism, which was the officially sponsored Marxist aesthetic in the Soviet Union from the early 1930s until that country's dissolution in 1991, actually had little to do with realism, though it purported to be a faithful and objective mirror of life. Its "truthfulness" was required to serve the ideology and the propagandistic needs of the state. Socialist Realism generally used techniques of naturalistic idealization to create portraits of dauntless workers and engineers who were strikingly alike in both their heroic positivism and their lack of lifelike credibility.

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Realism | History, Definition, & Characteristics

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Realism, in the arts, the accurate, detailed, unembellished depiction of nature or of contemporary life. Realism was a major trend in French novels and paintings between 1850 and 1880. Highlights included Gustave Courbet's painting Burial at Ornans (1849) and Gustave Flaubert's novel Madame Bovary (1857).

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Images – The Ambrose Bierce Letters Project

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Bierce separated from his wife, lost his two sons, and broke many friendships over the course of his career.

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The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica • Edit History

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Ambrose Bierce, American newspaperman, wit, satirist, and author of sardonic short stories based on themes of death and horror. His life ended in an unsolved mystery. Reared in Kosciusko county, Indiana, Bierce became a printer’s devil (apprentice) on a Warsaw, Indiana, paper after about a year in

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His parents were farmers and he was the tenth of 13 children, all of them were given names beginning with "A" at their father's insistence.

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Ambrose Bierce's literary reputation is based primarily on his short stories about the Civil War and the supernatural-a body of work that makes up a relatively small part of his total output. Often compared to the tales of Edgar Allan Poe, these stories share an attraction to death in its more bizarre forms, featuring depictions of mental deterioration, uncanny and otherworldly manifestations, and the horror of existence in a meaningless universe. Like Poe, Bierce professed to be mainly concerned with the artistry of his work, yet critics find him more intent on conveying his misanthropy and pessimism. His bare, economical style of supernatural horror is usually distinguished from the verbally lavish tales of Poe. In his lifetime, Bierce was famous as a California journalist dedicated to exposing the truth as he understood it, regardless of whose reputations were harmed by his attacks. For his sardonic wit and damning observations on the personalities and events of the day, he became known as "the wickedest man in San Francisco."

Bierce was born in Meigs County, Ohio. His parents were farmers and he was the tenth of 13 children, all of whom were given names beginning with "A" at their father's insistence. The family moved to Indiana, where Bierce went to high school; he later attended the Kentucky Military Institute. At the outbreak of the Civil War, he enlisted in the Union army. In such units as the Ninth Indiana Infantry Regiment and Buell's Army of the Ohio, he fought bravely in numerous military engagements, including the battles of Shiloh and Chickamauga and in Sherman's March to the Sea. After the war Bierce traveled with a military expedition to San Francisco, where he left the army and began a literary career.

Bierce published two books of poetry, Black Beetles in Amber (1892) and Shapes of Clay (1903), which were later published as the fourth and fifth volumes in his Collected Works (1909-1912). A talented critic and satirist, his poems and other works were published in numerous newspaper columns for over 40 years, beginning with the Californian. In 1868 he became the editor of The News Letter, for which he wrote his famous "Town Crier" column. Bierce became something of a noted figure in California literary society, forming friendships with Mark Twain, Bret Harte, and Joaquin Miller. In 1872 Bierce and his wife moved to England where, during a three-year stay, he wrote for Fun and Figaro magazines, acquiring the nickname "Bitter Bierce." His first three books of sketches- Nuggets and Dust Panned Out in California (1872), The Fiend's Delight (1873), and Cobwebs from an Empty Skull (1874)-were published during this period. When the English climate aggravated Bierce's asthma he returned to San Francisco. In 1887 he began writing for William Randolph Hearst's San Francisco Examiner, continuing the "Prattler" column he had done for the Argonaut and the Wasp. Bierce relocated to Washington, DC in 1896, where he continued to publish poems, essays, epigrams, and short stories in newspapers and magazines.

Bierce's major fiction was collected in Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (1891) and Can Such Things Be? (1893). Many of these stories are realistic depictions of the author's experiences in the Civil War. However, Bierce was not striving for realism, as critics have pointed out and as he himself admitted, for his narratives often fail to supply sufficient verisimilitude. His most striking fictional effects depend on an adept manipulation of the reader viewpoint: a bloody battlefield seen through the eyes of a deaf child in "Chickamauga," the deceptive escape dreamed by a man about to be hanged in "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," and the shifting perspectives of "The Death of Halpin Frayser." The classic Biercian narrative includes a marked use of black humor, particularly in the ironic and hideous deaths his protagonists often suffer. The brutal satire Bierce employed in his journalism appears as plain brutality in his fiction, and critics have both condemned and praised his imagination as among the most vicious and morbid in American literature.

Along with his tales of terror, Bierce's most acclaimed work is The Devil's Dictionary (1906), a lexicon of its author's wit and animosity. His definition for "ghost"-"the outward and visible sign of an inward fear"-clarifies his fundamentally psychological approach to the supernatural. In The Devil's Dictionary, Bierce vented much of his contempt for politics, religion, society, and conventional human values. A committed opponent of hypocrisy, prejudice, and corruption, Bierce acquired the public persona of an admired but often hated genius, a man of contradiction and mystery. In 1913 he informed many of his correspondents that he intended to travel Mexico and join Pancho Villa's forces as an observer during that country's civil war. He was never heard from again, and the circumstances of his death are uncertain.

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Ambrose Bierce's literary reputation is based primarily on his short stories about the Civil War and the supernatural-a body of work that makes up a relatively small part of his total output. Often compared to the tales of Edgar Allan Poe, these stories share an attraction to death in its more...

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He was known in his time as the “wickedest man in San Francisco”!

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Ambrose Bierce - Cleveland Public Library

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Ambrose Gwinett Bierce, known in his time as the “wickedest man in San Francisco” for his acid wit and punishing observations was born in a log cabin on Horse Cave Creek in Meigs County, Ohio, on June 24, 1842. The tenth of thirteen children born to poor farmer parents, the future satirist, newspaper columnist, and […]

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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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Alice Walker was blinded in one eye.

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10 Things You Might Not Know About Alice Walker

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From her groundbreaking essays to Pulitzer Prize-winning novel ‘The Color Purple,’ Alice Walker’s work explores Black American experiences.

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She won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction in 1983 and the National Book Award.

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Alice Walker is an internationally celebrated writer, poet and activist whose books include seven novels, four collections of short stories, four children's books, and volumes of essays and poetry. She won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction in 1983 and the National Book Award.

Walker has written many bestsellers; among them, The Temple of My Familiar (a wisdom tale that originates in prehistory); By The Light of My Father's Smile ( sexuality and forgiveness as paths of healing); Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992), which explores the effects of female genital mutilation on one woman's psyche as well as her body (she becomes a patient of a fictional Carl Jung). This novel led to the 1993 book and documentary film Warrior Marks: Female Genital Mutilation and the Sexual Blinding of Women, both collaborations with British-Indian filmmaker Pratibha Parmar, and We are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For: Inner Light in a Time of Darkness.(Meditations on spiritual and political issues).

Her other novels are: The Third Life of Grange Copeland (one family's struggle to survive the sharecropping system - slavery under another name - in the South), Meridian (a spiritual biography of The Civil Rights Movement), The Color Purple (liberation from enforced, male dominant, religion and thought; also poses the question never asked by societies in which they occur: what becomes of the children whose parents are lynched/assassinated?) and Now Is the Time To Open Your Heart (a couple on the verge of separating decides to live together, fully in the present, despite awareness of the universal unraveling of societies around the globe).

Her short story collections include: In Love & Trouble: Stories of Black Women ( poor and marginalized women of color make choices reflecting their status in life) and You Can't Keep A Good Woman Down (the spirit of woman rises with the smallest encouragement; one of our most valuable human contributions) and The Way Forward Is With A Broken Heart (after a painful divorce, a woman opens herself to the heartbreak offered by the world, and loves the world enough to persevere).

There are seven volumes of poems. Among them: Once, Revolutionary Petunias, Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful, Good Night, Willie Lee, I'll See You In the Morning, Her Blue Body Everything We Know, Absolute Trust In the Goodness of the Earth, Hard Times Require Furious Dancing, and The World Will Follow Joy: Turning Madness Into Flowers.

In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose examines the creative inheritance of one's maternal line, and how our own contributions,whether political, activist, or poetic connect on this foundation. Essays in Living By the Word reflect Walker's Earth and Womanist based spirituality. Anything We Love Can Be Saved: A Writer's Activism ( explores activism as a source of inspiration), The Same River Twice: Honoring the Difficult chronicles the adventure of having a film made of her novel The Color Purple and weathering storms of censorship, banning, criticism, and verbal attack.

Her work has been translated into more than two dozen languages, and her books have sold more than fifteen million copies. Along with the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, Walker, in 2006, was honored as one of the inaugural inductees into the California Hall of Fame. In 2007, her archives were opened to the public at Emory University in her birth state of Georgia. In 2010 she presented the keynote address at The 11th Annual Steve Biko Lecture at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, where she met the beautiful sons of Steve Biko, and was awarded the Lennon/Ono Peace Grant in Reykjavik, Iceland, where she met John Lennon and Yoko Ono's "beautiful boy" Sean Lennon. (Walker donated this latter award to an orphanage for the children of AIDS victims in East Africa, The Margaret Okari Foundation in Kisi, Kenya). She served as jurist (2010 and 2012)for two sessions of The Russell Tribunal on Palestine. In Cape Town, South Africa, and NYC, New York.

Recent works are: Overcoming Speechlessness: A Poet Encounters the Horror in Rwanda, Eastern Congo and Palestine/Israel; Hard Times Require Furious Dancing; The World Has Changed: Conversations with Alice Walker; and The Chicken Chronicles: Sitting With the Angels Who Have Returned With My Memories, a Memoir. She also writes regularly on her blog site at www.alicewalkersgarden.com.

Two new books were presented in Spring of 2013: The Cushion in the Road: Meditation and Wandering as the Whole World Awakens to Being in Harm's Way; and The World Will Follow Joy: Turning Madness into Flowers, poems.

Walker has been an activist all of her adult life, and believes that learning to extend the range of our compassion is activity and work available to all. She is a staunch defender not only of human rights, but of the rights of all living beings. She is one of the world's most prolific writers, yet continues to travel the world to literally stand on the side of the poor, and the economically, spiritually and politically oppressed. She also stands, however, on the side of the revolutionaries, teachers and leaders who seek change and transformation of the world. Upon returning from Gaza in 2008, Walker said, "Going to Gaza was our opportunity to remind the people of Gaza and ourselves that we belong to the same world: the world where grief is not only acknowledged, but shared; where we see injustice and call it by its name; where we see suffering and know the one who stands and sees is also harmed, but not nearly so much as the one who stands and sees and says and does nothing."

Alice Walker was awarded the Mahmoud Darwish Literary Prize for Fiction 2016.
Collage by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, one of the authors of the important forthcoming book: Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Frontlines Edited by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, China Martens, and Mai'a Williams

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About | Alice Walker | The Official Website for the American Novelist & Poet

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Alice Walker is an internationally celebrated writer, poet and activist whose books include seven novels, four collections of short stories, four children's books, and volumes of essays and poetry. She won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction in 1983 and the National Book Award.

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Her 1982 novel The Color Purple was the subject of a major motion picture and Broadway musical.

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National Museum of African American History and Culture

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Alice Walker (b. 1944) is an American writer, poet, and activist known for her insightful portrayal of African American life and culture. Her 1982 novel The Color Purple was the subject of a major motion picture and Broadway musical.

Born in Eatonton, Georgia, the daughter of sharecroppers, Walker was injured in a childhood accident that blinded her in one eye. Her mother felt Walker would be better suited for writing than doing chores. Her writing and academic prowess afforded her a scholarship to Spelman College, where she studied for two years before transferring to Sarah Lawrence College, where she graduated in 1965.

After graduation, Waker moved to Mississippi to become involved in the Civil Rights Movement. She began teaching and writing poetry, short stories, and essays. In 1967, Walker married Melvyn Rosenman Leventhal, a Jewish civil rights lawyer and the couple became the first legally married interracial couple in Mississippi. The couple had a daughter before divorcing in 1976.

Walker published her first book of poetry, Once (1968) and first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970) to much acclaim. In 1973, Walker alongside scholar Charlotte D. Hunt discovered the unmarked grave of Zora Neale Hurston in Ft. Pierce, Florida, and had it marked. In 1975, when Walker became the editor of Ms. Magazine, she published the article, "In Search of Zora Neale Hurston," which renewed interest for Hurston and her works.

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Alice Walker (b. 1944) is an American writer, poet, and activist known for her insightful portrayal of African American life and culture. Her 1982 novel The Color Purple was the subject of a major motion picture and Broadway musical. Born in Eatonton, Georgia, the daughter of sharecroppers, Walker was injured in a childhood accident that blinded her in one eye.

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1. Sense of disillusionment and loss of faith in the "American Dream": the independent, self-reliant, individual will triumph.
2. Emphasis on bold experimentation in style and form over the traditional.
3. Interest in the inner workings of the human mind (ex. Stream of consciousness).

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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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Modernists felt a growing separation incompatible with Victorian morality, optimism, and convention.

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Modernism, in the fine arts, a break with the past and the concurrent search for new forms of expression. Modernism fostered a period of experimentation in the arts from the late 19th to the mid-20th century, particularly in the years following World War I.

In an era characterized by industrialization, the nearly global adoption of capitalism, rapid social change, and advances in science and the social sciences (e.g., Freudian theory), Modernists felt a growing alienation incompatible with Victorian morality, optimism, and convention. New ideas in psychology, philosophy, and political theory kindled a search for new modes of expression.

Modernism in literature

The Modernist impulse is fueled in various literatures by industrialization and urbanization and by the search for an authentic response to a much-changed world. Although prewar works by Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and other writers are considered Modernist, Modernism as a literary movement is typically associated with the period after World War I. The enormity of the war had undermined humankind's faith in the foundations of Western society and culture, and postwar Modernist literature reflected a sense of disillusionment and fragmentation. A primary theme of T.S. Eliot's long poem The Waste Land (1922), a seminal Modernist work, is the search for redemption and renewal in a sterile and spiritually empty landscape. With its fragmentary images and obscure allusions, the poem is typical of Modernism in requiring the reader to take an active role in interpreting the text.

Eliot's was not the dominant voice among Modernist poets. In the United States Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg evocatively described the regions-New England and the Midwest, respectively-in which they lived. The Harlem Renaissance produced a rich coterie of poets, among them Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and Alice Dunbar Nelson. Harriet Monroe founded Poetry magazine in Chicago in 1912 and made it the most important organ for poetry not just in the United States but for the English-speaking world. During the 1920s Edna St. Vincent Millay, Marianne Moore, and E.E. Cummings expressed a spirit of revolution and experimentation in their poetry.

A sense of disillusionment and loss pervades much American Modernist fiction. That sense may be centred on specific individuals, or it may be directed toward American society or toward civilization generally. It may generate a nihilistic, destructive impulse, or it may express hope at the prospect of change. F. Scott Fitzgerald skewered the American Dream in The Great Gatsby (1925), Richard Wright exposed and attacked American racism in Native Son (1940), Zora Neale Hurston told the story of a Black woman's three marriages in Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), and Ernest Hemingway's early novels The Sun Also Rises (1926) and A Farewell to Arms (1929) articulated the disillusionment of the Lost Generation. Meanwhile, Willa Cather told hopeful stories of the American frontier, set mostly on the Great Plains, in O Pioneers! (1913) and My Ántonia (1918), John Steinbeck depicted the difficult lives of migrant workers in Of Mice and Men (1937) and The Grapes of Wrath (1939), and William Faulkner used stream-of-consciousness monologues and other formal techniques to break from past literary practice in The Sound and the Fury (1929).

Across the Atlantic, the publication of the Irish writer James Joyce's Ulysses in 1922 was a landmark event in the development of Modernist literature. Dense, lengthy, and controversial, the novel details the events of one day in the life of three Dubliners through a technique known as stream of consciousness, which commonly ignores orderly sentence structure and incorporates fragments of thought in an attempt to capture the flow of characters' mental processes. Portions of the book were considered obscene, and Ulysses was banned for many years in English-speaking countries. Other European Modernist authors whose works rejected chronological and narrative continuity included Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, and the American expatriate Gertrude Stein.

The term Modernism is also used to refer to literary movements other than the European and American movement of the early to mid-20th century. In Latin American literature, Modernismo arose in the late 19th century in the works of Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera and José Martí. The movement, which continued into the early 20th century, reached its peak in the poetry of Rubén Darío. ( See also American literature; Latin American literature.)

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Modernism | Definition, Characteristics, History, Art, Literature, Time Period, Postmodernism, & Examples

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Modernism, in the fine arts, late 19th to mid-20th century, a break with the past and the concurrent search for new forms of expression. It fostered a period of experimentation in literature, music, dance, visual art, and architecture. Learn more about the history of Modernism and its various manifestations.

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Modernism Stands For Innovation and Experimentation!

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Like any other description of an epoch in art, 'modernism' and 'modern art' are difficult to define precisely. The reason is that such categories are subjective in a way and therefore will always stay controversial. Using the term 'modernism', we usually speak of a global movement that occurred both socially and culturally at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century in the countries of the Western world. Especially in fine art, the term meant a break with almost everything that happened before in art. And it describes the search for new means of expression.

Enclosed with great social, cultural, and political upheavals, 'modernism' is considered a period of innovation and experimentation. Roughly speaking, the term 'modernism' in art ranges from the realism of artists like Gustave Courbet to the abstraction of the 1960s. In the following, we will explain 'modernism' to you in more detail using 5 facts and 12 works of art.

1. Modernism Does Not Describe One Single Style

Mostly, the description of an epoch is made according to its similarities in the works of art produced in a special period. , however, is not so easy to narrow down - quite the contrary. Instead of a single style, many different styles and artforms emerged in the modernist period. Many of the new art forms and styles have one thing in common: many bear the suffix in their name. These include, for example, Impressionism , which was followed by Expressionism . But also and fall into the category of 'modernism.'

In this section, you can see one work each of the artists Claude Monet and George Braque . On the surface, these works of art could not be more different. The technique as well as the colors and motifs are fundamentally different. However, the two works have more in common than you might suspect in the beginning. Both paintings were created during the modernist period in art. What still unites them will be shown in the following explanations.

2. Modernist Artists Questioned Or Even Rejected Conservative Values

The era of modernism in art was heralded when more and more artists rejected classical principles of art and increasingly repudiated traditional ideas about art. Artists such as Claude Monet refrained from depicting the world as realistically as possible in their paintings, as it was taught in the Renaissance before. Instead, like many other artists, he was concerned with a subjective expression of perception. This also meant that artists like Monet questioned seeing as such. An objective idea of seeing was put to the test and was increasingly replaced by a subjective idea of seeing.

Let us take a look at Edvard Munch 's famous painting (1893). With this artwork, Edvard Munch shows how sudden excitement changes all our sensory impressions. All lines in the painting lead to the screaming head in the center of the painting. The wild mixture of bright colors and organic lines intensify the impression of the outburst of emotion. In this painting by the Norwegian artist, something becomes very clear: Painting in 'modernism' is neither about truths of nature nor about the presentation of ideal beauties. What counts is the pure expression of emotion, even if this means distorting a figure to the point of ugliness.

3. Modernism Stands For Innovation And Experimentation

Modern art was strongly influenced by the social and political events of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The turn of the century represents one of the greatest historical upheavals for Western societies. Industrialization really took off during this period, capitalism took hold more and more, there were inventions such as the railway and the First World War. All of this confronted people with the unforeseen. This awakening and upheaval could also be felt in art. There were many innovations and people experimented with shapes, colors, lines, and motifs as they had done never before.

A good example of this development is Pablo Picasso's artwork Les Demoiselles D'Avignon (1907). If you look at this painting today, one could almost think that Picasso painted this work to change Western painting from its ground. Here, the artist does not only play with the shape of the female body by combining it with geometric forms but the faces of the women were inspired by African art . Both can be seen as elements of a pictorial revolution.

Abstraction also found its way into art at the time of modernism. The Swedish artist Hilma af Klint is today considered a pioneer of abstract art , together with artists such as Wassily Kandinsky . In her art, she went through a pictorial development from naturalistic art to abstract art. Hilma af Klint painted her first abstract pictures already around 1906.

4. The Focus Was Often On Material, Color, Technique And Process

Whether the brushstrokes of a Claude Monet, the areas of color on a work by Piet Mondrian or splashes of paint on an action painting by Jackson Pollock - in the age of modernism, material, color, technique and painterly procedure pushed themselves into the foreground in the works of many artists.

Yet, the paintings need not be overloaded in any way. Often it is even the total reduction that creates a special focus. Some good examples of this are the monochrome works of the French artist, .

Yves Klein is considered an artist of the avant-garde . His monochrome picture compositions, which he created in an ultramarine blue developed by himself, have become particularly famous. The color bears the official name International Klein Blue. In such a blue picture the color becomes the only motif and thus immediately attracts the attention of the viewer.

5. Clement Greenberg: An Important Theoretician Of (Abstract) Modernism

One name that is definitely worth knowing in connection with modern art is Clement Greenberg. The art critic Clement Greenberg is something like the head of late modern painting. Greenberg was convinced that art had to be reduced to its most basic elements: to the surface and its color. Thus, the American theorist primarily propagated Abstract Expressionism and color surface painting.

Artists such as Jackson Pollock, owe their fame and international recognition to the influence and support of Willem de Kooning and Barnett Newman Towards A Newer Laocoon Clement Greenberg. One of Clement Greenberg's most famous writings is (1940). The title already reveals it: With his writing, Greenberg refers to a famous text by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. Like Lessing, Greenberg also wanted to separate the arts into their disciplines. He declares the visual arts to be the highest art. The strength of painting, he explains in his essay, only becomes visible when it renounces all narrative. This is precisely what the avant-garde has set itself in its painting, as we can see in the previous paintings.

So let us note: 'modernism' is the term for a period of time at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. At that time, major social and cultural changes contributed to the fact that art was about to change. Modern art can by no means be reduced to a few similar characteristics. However, there are some characteristics by which modern art can be defined. There was a spirit of new beginnings in art and the courage to experiment. During the modernist era, artists questioned conservative values and traditional notions of art. They expressed themselves with color, forms, lines and techniques, thus paving the way to abstraction. An important theoretician figure in the development of modern art is the American art critic Clement Greenberg. His writings provide decisive answers to the question of what modern art should look like.

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Defining Modernism through 5 Facts and 12 Works of Art

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Like any other description of an epoch in art, 'modernism' and 'modern art' are difficult to define precisely. The reason is that such categories are subjective in a way and therefore will always stay controversial.

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The idea of the American Dream is woven through this country’s politics, music and culture. It suggests a belief that hard work pays off, and that children will have a better life than their parents. But as the effects of the economic downturn continue to reverberate, many feel the American Dream is…

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GRANGER - Historical Picture Archive/Alamy

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Fascinating photos of America in the Roaring Twenties

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These fascinating black-and-white photos show what life in the Roaring Twenties was really like.

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The American Dream during the 20's: Fact 1 

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The American Dream during the 20's: Fact 1 

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In the aftermath of the First World War, because so many young men were dying in the war, old religious certainties were questioned. Which led some survivors to adopt a 'live for the day' attitude.

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The American Dream in the Jazz Age - Themes - Higher English Revision - BBC Bitesize

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Learn about the themes in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby with BBC Bitesize Higher English.

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The American Dream during the 20's: Fact 2 

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The American Dream during the 20's: Fact 2 

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By the Roaring Twenties, 48 states had joined the Union and America’s GDP per capita had increased nearly fivefold.

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The Evolution of the American Dream | Cicero Institute

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Examining past Americans’ standards of living gives a fresh perspective on where we are today, how far we have come, and where we can go from here. If we continue to cherish an entrepreneurial spirit and the competition of free ideas, America’s future contains unlimited possibilities.

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The American Dream during the 30's and 40's 

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The American Dream during the 30's and 40's 

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During the 1930's, the ideal American Dream consisted of three criterions: two children, a marriage, and a three-bedroom house with the infamous white picket fence. The American Dream rose to its greatest fame during the 1930's as a result of the on-going Great Depression from 1929 to 1939. Thousands of Americans were going through tough times and looked up to the American Dream as a goal to achieve and strive for. The American Dream also lured millions of immigrants annually into the relatively new nation, further worsening the low employment rates and increasing poverty. At the beginning of the 1930's, one quarter of all wage-earning workers were unemployed, approximately 15 million Americans. During the 1930's, another one of the parts to the ideal American Dream was the ability to feed one's family. The Dust Bowl occurred throughout the 30's, forcing farmers in the midwest to move and contributing to the rising unemployment.

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During the 1930's, the ideal American Dream consisted of three criterions: two children, a marriage, and a three-bedroom house with the infamous white picket fence. The American Dream rose to its...

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The American Dream during the 30's and 40's

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The American Dream during the 30's and 40's

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In the 1930s, Americans responded to economic calamity by creating a richer and more equitable society. We can do it again.

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The American Dream during the 30's and 40's: Fact 1 

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The American Dream during the 30's and 40's: Fact 1 

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The American Dream of the 1940s was centered around suburban home ownership, stable employment, and a disposable household income!

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United States in the 1940s | Research Starters | EBSCO Research

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The 1940s were a pivotal decade for the United States, marked by profound social, political, and economic changes, largely influenced by World War II and its aftermath. The decade began with the U.S. entering the war following the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, which led to a significant mobilization of resources and manpower. By 1945, the war concluded with the use of atomic bombs on Japan, which ushered in a new period of global tension known as the Cold War, characterized by ideological conflict between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Amidst these developments, the U.S. emerged as a dominant global power, solidifying its role through initiatives like the Marshall Plan and the establishment of NATO in 1949.

Domestically, the 1940s witnessed substantial economic growth, with policies aimed at fostering home ownership and job creation, contributing to the formation of the "American Dream." Suburbanization began to reshape American life, while advancements in technology and medicine during the war led to innovations that had lasting impacts on society. The decade also experienced significant social changes, including increased participation of women in the workforce and the beginnings of the civil rights movement, spurred by activism against systemic racism. Culturally, this era marked the rise of jazz and the "big band" sound, alongside the flourishing of Hollywood's golden age. Overall, the 1940s set the stage for many defining aspects of contemporary American life and global relations.

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The American Dream during the 30's and 40's: Fact 2

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The American Dream during the 30's and 40's: Fact 2

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During the 30's, America had soaring unemployment rates which peaked at around 25% nationally!

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United States in the 1930s | History | Research Starters | EBSCO Research

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The United States in the 1930s is largely characterized by the Great Depression, a profound economic crisis that began with the Stock Market Crash of 1929 and had far-reaching social implications. This decade was marked by soaring unemployment rates, which peaked at around 25% nationally, while African Americans and other racial minorities faced even higher levels of joblessness and discrimination. The Dust Bowl, an environmental disaster, further exacerbated economic hardship for farmers in the Great Plains, leading many to migrate in search of better opportunities.

The political landscape saw significant shifts as Franklin D. Roosevelt assumed the presidency in 1933, implementing a series of reform programs collectively known as the New Deal. These initiatives aimed to provide relief, recovery, and reform through job creation and social safety nets, including the Social Security Act, which laid the groundwork for modern welfare systems. Despite these efforts, the economic recovery remained modest and was not fully realized until the onset of World War II in 1939.

Culturally, the decade witnessed continued artistic expression despite economic hardships, with various government programs employing artists and writers. Nationalism and social change also defined the era, as the American populace grappled with issues of race, class, and the role of government in citizens' lives. Overall, the 1930s in the United States serve as a complex period of struggle, innovation, and transformation that shaped the nation's future.

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American Dream Revisited: Affluence & Turbulence in 1950s America

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Following the devastating World War II, the 1950s was a decade of the American dream, growth, and widespread political and socio-economic change in the USA.

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While Kamala Harris tried to peddle good vibes, joy, and optimism in the middle of a crisis, Donald Trump was the only major party candidate to admit that something is wrong with the economy-and that drastic measures are needed. In doing so, he made some of the boldest promises one can imagine:

"If Kamala wins, you are 3 days away from a 1929-style economic depression. If I win, you are 3 days away from the best jobs, the biggest paychecks, and the brightest economic future the world has ever seen."

"Starting on day one, we will defeat inflation quickly and we will make America affordable again. I will cut your energy costs in half. It's time for the working man and woman to finally catch a break. We are going to bring back the American dream-bigger, better, and stronger than ever before."

"We're going to fix everything about our country."

"This will truly be the golden age of America."

How exactly will he achieve these remarkable feats? Chief among his demagogic solutions is his plan to increase tariffs on foreign imports. The most extreme is a potential 60% tariff hike on Chinese imports, meant to protect the American economy from Chinese competition. Trump's pragmatic, businessman's logic says that if Chinese commodities are more expensive to import, companies and consumers in the US will buy products "Made in America" instead.

The idea is that this would lead to historic investment in domestic manufacturing, reforging America's manufacturing base and "making America great again." "Our best days are yet to come," he claims.

Trump says that America was "a smart country" in the 1890s, when it had "all tariffs" and "no income tax." This sounds nice, but a lot has changed in the last 130 years or so. Since then, the US opened itself to the global market and grown exponentially. Today, capitalism is irreversibly reliant on global trade. Interrupting that flow could push the already tottering world economy on edge.

You can't have capitalism in one country

Early in their history, the capitalists realized that specialized companies can produce commodities more efficiently and cheaply, allowing for bigger profit margins. They can develop technique and scale up faster. It's more efficient for a pencil company to buy rubber erasers and aluminum ferrules from other specialized producers and focus exclusively on making pencils, than to produce all the components themselves. Later, in the age of monopolies, the capitalists sought to own or control all aspects of the production process. But the specialization within these conglomerates continued.

As capitalism developed, entire countries specialized in particular industries and traded with others for commodities that their own economies didn't produce. This international division of labor allowed capitalism to develop the productive forces on an unprecedented scale and created an enormous working class. An increase in trade barriers means throwing sand in the gears of modern capitalism.

In the 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the process of globalization got a second wind. The share of global GDP made up by imports and exports increased from 39% in 1990 to 61% in 2008.

Capitalist economies have become extremely interdependent, and any interruption to international trade can damage the world economy's delicate balance. Recall what happened when semiconductor production experienced momentary interruptions from 2020 to 2023. Industries worldwide struggled with the restricted flow of a single commodity. The new tariffs proposed by Trump would interrupt the flows of multiple necessary commodities.

In his victory speech, Trump claimed that "China doesn't have what we have." But they do. The US and China, although fierce rivals, are tied to each other economically. For instance, one American company, Apple, produces around 95% of their products in China. A vast number of other American companies have production lines there. Decoupling from China, which is virtually impossible, would mean major disruptions and price increases. In the case of Apple, they would either stay in China and deal with the tariffs, or strategically move some of their production to other countries, lengthening their supply chains.

Even when there is a break in direct trade with China, America still imports their products. When the US put tariffs on China, Chinese commodities came into America through "connector countries" like Mexico and Vietnam. The supply chain is now artificially longer and more expensive, while the attempt to restrict Chinese commodities is basically nullified-leading to tariffs on Mexico as well. You can see where this is headed. Tariffs on tariffs on tariffs.

In addition to the tariff hike on Chinese goods, Trump has proposed, "10 to 20% tariffs on foreign countries that have been ripping us off for years." If implemented, even these lighter tariffs will be damaging. A third of US imports are raw materials, unfinished components, or means of production for American industry or farming. American companies won't build up domestic production or stick it to China, as Trump promises. Instead, workers will foot the bill for increased costs of production through higher prices.

Protectionism: An endless screw

When one country moves to protectionism, you can expect a feedback loop of retaliatory measures from competing countries. In the 1930s, the US implemented the Smoot-Hawley tariffs in an attempt to alleviate the effects of the Great Depression-but it exacerbated them. The feedback loop of retaliating tariffs from other countries reduced US imports and exports by 67%. Capitalists are aware of this phenomenon and are concerned about the recent protectionist trend. In the words of the International Monetary Fund, if it continues, "We could see the annihilation of the gains from open trade."

Engels called protectionism, "An endless screw, and you never know when you have done with it." In other words, when one national industry is protected, it often damages another national industry, which subsequently has to be protected as a result. This happened during Trump's first term. General Motors closed down multiple factories and cited his protection of the steel industry as a factor.

Donald Trump might seem like a madman for going down this path. It's true that these policies contributed to making him the pariah of the establishment. But the ruling class has often reacted to the inherent contradictions of capitalism by taking a hammer to the means of production, sacrificing layers of the small capitalists, and creating conditions for further immiseration of the working class.

No measure can save capitalism from the current crisis. It is a senile system in terminal decline. Internationally, the capacity exists for the production of more commodities than can be sold for a profit on the market, leading to periodic crises of overproduction. The productive forces brought into being by capitalism are constantly constrained by the system's intrinsic limits-private property and the nation-state. The productive forces are straining to unleash their full power and potential. Only a nationalized planned economy on an international scale can do this. Revolutions to put the working class in the driver's seat are the first step.

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Trump Promises to Bring About "The Golden Age of America." Easier Said than Done! - Revolutionary Communists of America

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Trump says that America was "a smart country" in the 1890s, when it had "all tariffs" and "no income tax." This sounds nice, but a lot has changed in the last 130 years or so.

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The American Dream during the 50's: Fact 1 

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The American Dream during the 50's: Fact 1 

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During the 50's, a strong consumer culture appeared which was symbolized by the rise of suburban living and mass media, specifically television, which became the dominant medium of entertainment and information.

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United States in the 1950s | Research Starters | EBSCO Research

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The United States in the 1950s is often characterized as a period of significant change and contrast. While many Americans experienced a post-war economic boom and a return to traditional family values, the decade was also marked by underlying tensions, particularly related to the Cold War and issues of civil rights. A strong consumer culture emerged, symbolized by the rise of suburban living and mass media, especially television, which became the dominant medium of entertainment and information. This cultural landscape was also punctuated by the Red Scare and the political witch hunts led by Senator Joseph McCarthy, creating an atmosphere of suspicion and fear regarding communism.

The Korean War (1950-1953) intensified global tensions as the U.S. fought to contain communism, resulting in significant military and civilian casualties. Domestically, the civil rights movement began to gather momentum, with landmark events such as the Montgomery Bus Boycott and pivotal legal victories challenging segregation. Meanwhile, the rise of youth culture, exemplified by the popularity of rock and roll music, hinted at increasing dissent against the established norms. Presidents Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower navigated these complexities, with Eisenhower's policies promoting both economic growth and social welfare.

Overall, the 1950s in the U.S. was a decade of both conformity and counterculture, prosperity and anxiety, laying the groundwork for the transformative social movements of the 1960s.

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The American Dream during the 50's: Fact 2 

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The American Dream during the 50's: Fact 2 

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Color televisions became popular and affordable and it was said that audiences viewed an average of six hours per day.

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Smoky Hill Museum | 1950s An American Dream | Salina, KS

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Many have a nostalgic view of the 1950s. This decade beamed with prosperity and new material possessions. Yet, many felt pressure to conform to societal norms.

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Harlem Renaissance "The Jazz Age" "The Roaring 20s": 1920–1940

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Harlem Renaissance "The Jazz Age" "The Roaring 20s": 1920–1940

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1. Black cultural movement in Harlem, New York

2.Some poetry rhythms based on spirituals and jazz, lyrics on the blues, and diction from the street talk of the ghettos

3. 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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Harlem Renaissance"The Jazz Age" "The Roaring 20s": 1920–1940, Fact 1

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Harlem Renaissance"The Jazz Age" "The Roaring 20s": 1920–1940, Fact 1

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In 1925, the Jazz Age was in full swing, flappers were challenging lasting gender norms, and artists, writers, and musicians were producing work that we still admire today!

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The Roaring 20s and the Harlem Renaissance — Stanza Books

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The Roaring 20s and the Harlem Renaissance This year marks the one hundredth anniversary of three extraordinary events. The Harlem Renaissance became a national phenomenon in 1925, and it was also the year F. Scott Fitzgerald published  The Great Gatsby  and Edward Christopher Wil

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Harlem Renaissance"The Jazz Age" "The Roaring 20s": 1920–1940, Fact 2

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Harlem Renaissance"The Jazz Age" "The Roaring 20s": 1920–1940, Fact 2

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The total wealth in the United States more than doubled between 1920 and 1929, and gross national product (GNP) expanded by 40 percent from 1922 to 1929.

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Roaring Twenties: Flappers, Prohibition & Jazz Age - HISTORY

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The Roaring Twenties were a Jazz Age burst of prosperity and freedom for flappers and others during the Prohibition era, until the economy crashed in 1929.

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The American Dream during the 60's and 70's

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The American Dream during the 60's and 70's

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Never was the American Dream more potent or more seductive than in Mid-Century America. The USA stood united and confident at the apex of global power and consumer abundance, racing boldly and conf…

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The American Dream during the 60's and 70's 

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The American Dream during the 60's and 70's 

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The American Dream of the 21st Century is radically different from its 1776 edition. From power struggles to purchasing power, this is the story of its evolution.

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The American Dream during the 60's and 70's: Fact 1 

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The American Dream during the 60's and 70's: Fact 1 

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The promise of the American Dream in the 1960s was centered around the economy and achieving a more equality of opportunity in terms of gathering familial wealth.

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Dreams and Nightmares: The Promise and Reality of the American Dream from 1960 to 2025 By Allison Palmer | Published by Critical Debates in Humanities, Science and Global Justice

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Ideals alone do not create opportunities without a nationwide ambition to pursue the American Dream for all, it will remain an ideal and not reality.

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The American Dream in the 60's and 70's : Fact 2 

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The American Dream in the 60's and 70's : Fact 2 

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By the 1970s, inflation was rising drastically and there was much economic uncertainty which caused some Americans to question how success was achieved.

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Home of the Marist Poll | Polls, Analysis, Learning, and More

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The Marist Institute for Public Opinion (MIPO) is a survey research center. MIPO is home to the Marist Poll and conducts polls on politics, the economy, sports, technology and more at the local, state, and national level.