Author: Oscar Handlin
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674326408
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 516
Get Book Here
Book Description
Oscar and Lilian Handlin show how the new voyagers in the twentieth century--from Asia, Africa, Australia, and Latin America--record their experiences in the United States. Many accounts are newly translated from Arabic, Persian, Hebrew, and Spanish, and include such authors as Rabindranath Tagore, V. S. Naipaul and Octavio Paz.
Author: Thomas Ruys Smith
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807143081
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 258
Get Book Here
Book Description
Even in the decades before Mark Twain enthralled the world with his evocative representations of the Mississippi, the river played an essential role in American culture and consciousness. Throughout the antebellum era, the Mississippi acted as a powerful symbol of America's conception of itself -- and the world's conception of America. As Twain understood, "The Mississippi is well worth reading about." Thomas Ruys Smith's River of Dreams is an examination of the Mississippi's role in the antebellum imagination, exploring its cultural position in literature, art, thought, and national life. Presidents, politicians, authors, poets, painters, and international celebrities of every variety experienced the Mississippi in its Golden Age. They left an extraordinary collection of representations of the river in their wake, images that evolved as America itself changed. From Thomas Jefferson's vision for the Mississippi to Andrew Jackson and the rowdy river culture of the early nineteenth century, Smith charts the Mississippi's shifting importance in the making of the nation. He examines the accounts of European travelers, including Frances Trollope, Charles Dickens, and William Makepeace Thackeray, whose views of the river were heavily influenced by the world of the steamboat and plantation slavery. Smith discusses the growing importance of visual representations of the Mississippi as the antebellum period progressed, exploring the ways in which views of the river, particularly giant moving panoramas that toured the world, echoed notions of manifest destiny and the westward movement. He evokes the river in the late antebellum years as a place of crime and mystery, especially in popular writing, and most notably in Herman Melville's The Confidence-Man. An epilogue discusses the Mississippi during the Civil War, when possession of the river became vital, symbolically as well as militarily. The epilogue also provides an introduction to Mark Twain, a product of the antebellum river world who was to resurrect its imaginative potential for a post-war nation and produce an iconic Mississippi that still flows through a wide and fertile floodplain in American literature. From empire building in the Louisiana Purchase to the trauma of the Civil War, the Mississippi's dominant symbolic meanings tracked the essential forces operating within the nation. As Smith shows in this groundbreaking work, the story of the imagined Mississippi River is the story of antebellum America itself.
Author: Taunton (Mass.). Public Library
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 264
Get Book Here
Book Description
Author: C. Vann Woodward Sterling Professor of History Yale University (Emeritus)
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199874328
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 171
Get Book Here
Book Description
No history of the European imagination, and no understanding of America's meaning, would be complete without a record of the ideas, fantasies, and misconceptions the Old World has formed about the New. Europe's fascination with America forms a contradictory pattern of hopes and fears, dreams and nightmares, yearnings and forebodings. America and Americans--according to one of their more indulgent European critics--have long been considered "a fairlyland of happy lunatics and lovable monsters." In The Old World's New World, award-winning historian C. Vann Woodward has written a brilliant study of how Europeans have seen and discussed America over the last two centuries. Woodward shows how the character and the image of America in European writings often depended more upon Old World politics and ideology than upon New World realities. America has been seen both as human happiness resulting from the elimination of monarchy, aristocracy, and priesthood, and as social chaos and human misery caused by their removal. It was proof that democracy was the best form of government, or that mankind was incapable of self government. America was regularly used both as an inspiration for revolutionaries and as a stern warning against radicals of all kinds. Americans have been seen as uniformly materialistic, hot in pursuit of dollars: "Such unity of purpose," wrote Mrs. Trollope, "can, I believe, be found nowhere else except, perhaps, in an ants' nest." And they have been admired for their industry--one young Russian Communist visited New York in 1925 and wrote that America is "where the 'future,' at least in terms of industrialization, is being realized." Decade after decade, America has been hailed for its youth, and lambasted for its immaturity. It has been looked to as a model of liberty, and attacked for maintaining the tyranny of the majority. But always it has been a metaphor for the possibilities of human society--possibilities both bright and foreboding. After a year of heady talk of a "New World Order," of American victory in the Cold War, of a new American Century, The Old World's New World provides a thoughtful and sobering perspective on how America has been seen in centuries past. C. Vann Woodward is one of America's foremost living historians. His books have won every major history award--including the Pulitzer, Bancroft, and Parkman prizes--and he has served as president of the American Historical Association as well as the Organization of American Historians and the Southern Historical Association. With this new book, he further enhances his reputation while making his vast learning accessible to a general audience.
Author: Virginia State Library
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Biography
Languages : en
Pages : 322
Get Book Here
Book Description
Author: Dayton Public Library and Museum
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Library catalogs
Languages : en
Pages : 802
Get Book Here
Book Description
Author: Edward Channing
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : United States
Languages : en
Pages : 504
Get Book Here
Book Description
Author: Grand Rapids Public Library (Grand Rapids, Mich.)
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Dictionary catalogs
Languages : en
Pages : 744
Get Book Here
Book Description
Author: Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Libraries
Languages : en
Pages : 472
Get Book Here
Book Description
Author: Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Libraries
Languages : en
Pages : 868
Get Book Here
Book Description
