advances in american art, literature, and science amelia, matt, and tess
TRANSCRIPT
Advances in American Art, Literature, and Science
Amelia, Matt, and Tess
The Art of the Hudson River School
• Suffered from Puritan prejudice that art was sinful, waste of time and obscene
• John Trumball who had fought in the Revolutionary War recaptured its scenes and spirit on canvas
• During the War of 1812 American painters of portraits turned from human landscape to romantic mirrorings of local landscapes
• They encountered competition from photography
The Growth of National Literature
– Nationalism helped literature – Washington Irving, from New York, was
the first American to win international recognition as a literary figure,
– Published Knickerbockers' History of New York, The Sketch Book, Rip Van Winkle, and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
The Growth of National Literature
– James Fenimor Cooper was the first American novelists to gain world fame wrote The Spy about the American Revolution , but most famous for Leatherstocking Tales (Natty Bumppo)
– Puritan William Cullen Bryant from New York went to Massachusetts and wrote Thanatopsis, one of the first quality poems and excelled in journalism
The Growth of National Literature
• 1836 Emerson writes Nature• 1836 Transcendentalists meet informally in
Boston and Concord• 1850 Nathaniel Hawthorne writes The Scarlet
Letter• 1851 Herman Melville writes Moby Dick• 1852 Harriet Beecher Stowe writes Uncle Tom’s
Cabin• 1855 Walt Whitman writes Leaves of Grass• 1860 Emily Dickinson writes several hundred
poems
Walt Whitman
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Transcendentalism
• A philosophical, spiritual, and literary movement that advocates reliance on romantic intuition and moral human conscience, first emerging out of New England around 1830
• Has roots in Romanticism, Unitarianism and Hinduism
• Refers to the belief that in order to determine the ultimate meaning of God or self; one must transcend the physical world
Transcendentalism
• Liberalizing Purtian theology and foreign influences rejected John Locke’s theory
• Ralph Waldo Emerson, a poet and a philosopher, wrote The American Scholar and was critic of slavery and supported the union cause in the civil war
• Henry David Thoreau a poet, also against slavery, wrote Walden: or Life in the Woods
Literary Individualists
• Edgar Allan Poe wrote The Raven, and The Fall of the House of Usher, morbid opposed to the optimism of American culture
• Moby Dick was an allegory of good and evil, told in terms of conflict of a whaling captain
• A lot of writing was not profitable at the time
Pioneers in American Science
• Benjamin Silliman (1779-1864) – a Professor at Yale who was a pioneer chemist and geologist
• Louis Agassiz (1807-1873) – a Professor at Harvard who reformed the way that biology was taught and published over 350 books and papers
• There were more American inventors in the 1800s than actual scientists, such as Eli Whitney, John Deere and Cyrus McCormick
Setbacks to Science
• In the 1800s, there were few American pioneers of theoretical, basic science
• Americans, who were busy shaping the land and spreading social reform, were more interested in practical concerns like machinery
Advances in Architecture
• From 1820 to 1850 there was a revival in Greek architecture (“Beaux-Arts”) for public and expensive buildings
• For the second half of the century, neo-Gothic architecture became popular
• America did not have much of its own architecture
• Thomas Jefferson, who designed the University of Virginia and his own home in Monticello, was probably the greatest American architect of the time
Study of American History
• As other forms of American literature were finally beginning to emerge, historians devoted themselves to studying the nation’s past
• Most American historians were from the North, where they had more access to historical documents, and Southerners complained that they were writing history “wrong”, with a Northern bias
American Historians
• George Bancroft (1800-1891) – “Father of American History”, published a six-volume history of America in 1789
• William H. Prescott (1796-1859) – wrote about the conquest of Mexico (1843) and the conquest of Peru (1847)
• Francis Parkman (1823-1893) – wrote a series, beginning in 1851, that recounted the French-British struggle to colonize the New World
DBQ
To what extent did Transcendentalism govern the philosophies of the popular writers of the early 1800s?
Document 1
1: A philosophy that emphasizes the a priori conditions of knowledge and experience or the unknowable character of ultimate reality or that emphasizes the transcendent as the fundamental reality
-Merriam Webster
Document 2
-If a man can write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mouse-trap, than his neighbor, though he build his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
Document 3ish
To him whose elastic and vigorous thought keeps pace with the sun, the day is always at morning. It matters not what the clock says, or the attitudes and labors of men. Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me...To be awake is to be alive. I have never met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?...We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavour.
-Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Document 4
• - Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality.
• -Edgar Allen Poe
Picture
Christopher Cranch, Transparent Eyeball
Works Cited
• The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Leonard Everett Fisher Bradbury Thompson. Ink on Board. 1974.
• The Declaration of Independence. John Trumbull Oil on canvas, 12' x 18'Commissioned 1817; purchased 1819; placed 1826 in the Rotunda
• Nathaniel Hawthorne. photograph by Mathew Brady. The Granger Collection, New York.
• Ralph Waldo Emerson, lithograph by Leopold Grozelier, 1859 .Courtesy of The Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
• American Transcendentalism: A History. Philip F. GuraHill and Wang, 365 pp., illustrated,
Works Cited
• Melville, Herman, 1819-1891. Moby-Dick, or, The Whale Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Library.
• "Thanatopsis" Yale Book of American Verse. Ed. Thomas R. Lounsbury. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1912.
• Kennedy, David M., Lizabeth Cohen, and Thomas A. Bailey. The America Pageant. 13th ed. Houghton Mifflin, 2006.
• "Trancendentalism." Def. 1. Merriam Webster. 14 Nov. 2008 <http://www.merriam-webster.com/>.
• "Calvinism and Transcendentalism." Calvanism and Transcendentalism. Washington State University. 14 Nov. 2008 <http://www.wsu.edu/~campbelld/engl368/caltran.htm>.
• Walden, Henry David Thoreau