Mightier Than the Sword

Mightier Than the Sword PDF Author: David S Reynolds
Publisher: WW Norton
ISBN: 9780393342352
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
“Fascinating . . . a lively and perceptive cultural history.” —Annette Gordon-Reed, The New Yorker In this wide-ranging, brilliantly researched work, David S. Reynolds traces the factors that made Uncle Tom’s Cabin the most influential novel ever written by an American. Upon its 1852 publication, the novel’s vivid depiction of slavery polarized its American readership, ultimately widening the rift that led to the Civil War. Reynolds also charts the novel’s afterlife—including its adaptation into plays, films, and consumer goods—revealing its lasting impact on American entertainment, advertising, and race relations.

Mightier Than the Sword

Mightier Than the Sword PDF Author: David S Reynolds
Publisher: WW Norton
ISBN: 9780393342352
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
“Fascinating . . . a lively and perceptive cultural history.” —Annette Gordon-Reed, The New Yorker In this wide-ranging, brilliantly researched work, David S. Reynolds traces the factors that made Uncle Tom’s Cabin the most influential novel ever written by an American. Upon its 1852 publication, the novel’s vivid depiction of slavery polarized its American readership, ultimately widening the rift that led to the Civil War. Reynolds also charts the novel’s afterlife—including its adaptation into plays, films, and consumer goods—revealing its lasting impact on American entertainment, advertising, and race relations.

Mightier than the Sword: Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Battle for America

Mightier than the Sword: Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Battle for America PDF Author: David S. Reynolds
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393082342
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
“Fascinating . . . a lively and perceptive cultural history.” —Annette Gordon-Reed, The New Yorker In this wide-ranging, brilliantly researched work, David S. Reynolds traces the factors that made Uncle Tom’s Cabin the most influential novel ever written by an American. Upon its 1852 publication, the novel’s vivid depiction of slavery polarized its American readership, ultimately widening the rift that led to the Civil War. Reynolds also charts the novel’s afterlife—including its adaptation into plays, films, and consumer goods—revealing its lasting impact on American entertainment, advertising, and race relations.

Beneath the American Renaissance

Beneath the American Renaissance PDF Author: David S. Reynolds
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199976406
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 656

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Book Description
The award-winning Beneath the American Renaissance is a classic work on American literature. It immeasurably broadens our knowledge of our most important literary period, as first identified by F.O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance. With its combination of sharp critical insight, engaging observation, and narrative drive, it represents the kind of masterful cultural history for which David Reynolds is known. Here the major works of Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, and Dickinson receive striking, original readings set against the rich backdrop of contemporary popular writing. Now back in print, the volume includes a new foreword by historian Sean Wilentz that reveals the book's impact and influence. A magisterial work of criticism and cultural history, Beneath the American Renaissance will fascinate anyone interested in the genesis of America's most significant literary epoch and the iconic figures who defined it.

A Historical Guide to Walt Whitman

A Historical Guide to Walt Whitman PDF Author: David S. Reynolds
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195120817
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
This study combines contemporary cultural studies and historical scholarship to illuminate Walt Whitman's diverse contexts. The essays explore Whitman's relationship to working-class politics, race and slavery, sexual mores and the idea of democracy.

Harriet Beecher Stowe

Harriet Beecher Stowe PDF Author: Nancy Koester
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
ISBN: 0802833047
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 391

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Book Description
"So you're the little woman who started this big war," Abraham Lincoln is said to have quipped when he met Harriet Beecher Stowe. Her 1852 novel Uncle Tom s Cabin converted readers by the thousands to the anti-slavery movement and served notice that the days of slavery were numbered. Overnight Stowe became a celebrity, but to defenders of slavery she was the devil in petticoats. Most writing about Stowe treats her as a literary figure and social reformer while downplaying her Christian faith. But Nancy Koester's biography highlights Stowe s faith as central to her life -- both her public fight against slavery and her own personal struggle through deep grief to find a gracious God. Having meticulously researched Stowe s own writings, both published and un-published, Koester traces Stowe's faith pilgrimage from evangelical Calvinism through spiritualism to Anglican spirituality in a flowing, compelling narrative.

Abe

Abe PDF Author: David S. Reynolds
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0143110764
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 1089

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Book Description
Now an Apple TV+ documentary, Lincoln's Dilemma. One of the Wall Street Journal's Ten Best Books of the Year | A Washington Post Notable Book | A Christian Science Monitor and Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2020 Winner of the Gilder Lehrman Abraham Lincoln Prize and the Abraham Lincoln Institute Book Award "A marvelous cultural biography that captures Lincoln in all his historical fullness. . . . using popular culture in this way, to fill out the context surrounding Lincoln, is what makes Mr. Reynolds's biography so different and so compelling . . . Where did the sympathy and compassion expressed in [Lincoln's] Second Inaugural—'With malice toward none; with charity for all'—come from? This big, wonderful book provides the richest cultural context to explain that, and everything else, about Lincoln." —Gordon Wood, Wall Street Journal From one of the great historians of nineteenth-century America, a revelatory and enthralling new biography of Lincoln, many years in the making, that brings him to life within his turbulent age David S. Reynolds, author of the Bancroft Prize-winning cultural biography of Walt Whitman and many other iconic works of nineteenth century American history, understands the currents in which Abraham Lincoln swam as well as anyone alive. His magisterial biography Abe is the product of full-body immersion into the riotous tumult of American life in the decades before the Civil War. It was a country growing up and being pulled apart at the same time, with a democratic popular culture that reflected the country's contradictions. Lincoln's lineage was considered auspicious by Emerson, Whitman, and others who prophesied that a new man from the West would emerge to balance North and South. From New England Puritan stock on his father's side and Virginia Cavalier gentry on his mother's, Lincoln was linked by blood to the central conflict of the age. And an enduring theme of his life, Reynolds shows, was his genius for striking a balance between opposing forces. Lacking formal schooling but with an unquenchable thirst for self-improvement, Lincoln had a talent for wrestling and bawdy jokes that made him popular with his peers, even as his appetite for poetry and prodigious gifts for memorization set him apart from them through his childhood, his years as a lawyer, and his entrance into politics. No one can transcend the limitations of their time, and Lincoln was no exception. But what emerges from Reynolds's masterful reckoning is a man who at each stage in his life managed to arrive at a broader view of things than all but his most enlightened peers. As a politician, he moved too slowly for some and too swiftly for many, but he always pushed toward justice while keeping the whole nation in mind. Abe culminates, of course, in the Civil War, the defining test of Lincoln and his beloved country. Reynolds shows us the extraordinary range of cultural knowledge Lincoln drew from as he shaped a vision of true union, transforming, in Martin Luther King Jr.'s words, "the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood." Abraham Lincoln did not come out of nowhere. But if he was shaped by his times, he also managed at his life's fateful hour to shape them to an extent few could have foreseen. Ultimately, this is the great drama that astonishes us still, and that Abe brings to fresh and vivid life. The measure of that life will always be part of our American education.

Midnight Rising

Midnight Rising PDF Author: Tony Horwitz
Publisher: Henry Holt and Company
ISBN: 1429996986
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 383

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Book Description
A New York Times Notable Book for 2011 A Library Journal Top Ten Best Books of 2011 A Boston Globe Best Nonfiction Book of 2011 Bestselling author Tony Horwitz tells the electrifying tale of the daring insurrection that put America on the path to bloody war Plotted in secret, launched in the dark, John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry was a pivotal moment in U.S. history. But few Americans know the true story of the men and women who launched a desperate strike at the slaveholding South. Now, Midnight Rising portrays Brown's uprising in vivid color, revealing a country on the brink of explosive conflict. Brown, the descendant of New England Puritans, saw slavery as a sin against America's founding principles. Unlike most abolitionists, he was willing to take up arms, and in 1859 he prepared for battle at a hideout in Maryland, joined by his teenage daughter, three of his sons, and a guerrilla band that included former slaves and a dashing spy. On October 17, the raiders seized Harpers Ferry, stunning the nation and prompting a counterattack led by Robert E. Lee. After Brown's capture, his defiant eloquence galvanized the North and appalled the South, which considered Brown a terrorist. The raid also helped elect Abraham Lincoln, who later began to fulfill Brown's dream with the Emancipation Proclamation, a measure he called "a John Brown raid, on a gigantic scale." Tony Horwitz's riveting book travels antebellum America to deliver both a taut historical drama and a telling portrait of a nation divided—a time that still resonates in ours.

Abolitionist Geographies

Abolitionist Geographies PDF Author: Martha Schoolman
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452942137
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
Traditional narratives of the period leading up to the Civil War are invariably framed in geographical terms. The sectional descriptors of the North, South, and West, like the wartime categories of Union, Confederacy, and border states, mean little without reference to a map of the United States. In Abolitionist Geographies, Martha Schoolman contends that antislavery writers consistently refused those standard terms. Through the idiom Schoolman names “abolitionist geography,” these writers instead expressed their dissenting views about the westward extension of slavery, the intensification of the internal slave trade, and the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law by appealing to other anachronistic, partial, or entirely fictional north–south and east–west axes. Abolitionism’s West, for instance, rarely reached beyond the Mississippi River, but its East looked to Britain for ideological inspiration, its North habitually traversed the Canadian border, and its South often spanned the geopolitical divide between the United States and the British Caribbean. Schoolman traces this geography of dissent through the work of Martin Delany, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Wells Brown, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, among others. Her book explores new relationships between New England transcendentalism and the British West Indies; African-American cosmopolitanism, Britain, and Haiti; sentimental fiction, Ohio, and Liberia; John Brown’s Appalachia and circum-Caribbean marronage. These connections allow us to see clearly for the first time abolitionist literature’s explicit and intentional investment in geography as an idiom of political critique, by turns liberal and radical, practical and utopian.

Walt Whitman's America

Walt Whitman's America PDF Author: David S. Reynolds
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0679767096
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 705

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Book Description
Winner of the Bancroft Prize and the Ambassador Book Award and Finalist for the National for the Book Critics Circle Award In his poetry Walt Whitman set out to encompass all of America and in so doing heal its deepening divisions. This magisterial biography demonstrates the epic scale of his achievement, as well as the dreams and anxieties that impelled it, for it places the poet securely within the political and cultural context of his age. Combing through the full range of Whitman's writing, David Reynolds shows how Whitman gathered inspiration from every stratum of nineteenth-century American life: the convulsions of slavery and depression; the raffish dandyism of the Bowery "b'hoys"; the exuberant rhetoric of actors, orators, and divines. We see how Whitman reconciled his own sexuality with contemporary social mores and how his energetic courtship of the public presaged the vogues of advertising and celebrity. Brilliantly researched, captivatingly told, Walt Whitman's America is a triumphant work of scholarship that breathes new life into the biographical genre.

Venus in Boston

Venus in Boston PDF Author: George Thompson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 456

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Book Description
This volume reprints three short works by George Thompson, one of antebellum America's most successful authors of sensational fiction. There are two novels, Venus in Boston and City Crimes, which depict the American city as a place of dark mystery, along with Thompson's autobiography.