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Volume C

Late Nineteenth Century: 1865–1910

C–2

Stephen Crane

This photograph captures some of the chaos and random-ness of the Civil War as experienced in Fred Collins’s quest for water in the midst of battle, in Stephen Crane’s “A Mystery of Heroism.”

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C–3

Literacy, Literature, and Democracy

In the cluster “Literacy, Literature, and Democracy,” Harper’s “Learning to Read,” Hurston’s “How to Write a Letter,” and Dunbar’s “An Antebellum Sermon” show in various ways the freed slaves’ shift from orality to literacy.

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C–4

Pauline Hopkins

In Pauline Hopkins’s Contending Forces, Luke Sawyer’s stories challenge white justifications for lynching by showing lynching’s origins in black economic power and in white men’s sexual abuse of black girls and women.

(Harper's Weekly, October 24, 1874)

C–5

Mary Wilkins FreemanMary Wilkins Freeman’s “A New English Nun” opens and closes with images of hand sewing and needlework. Her readers, on the other hand, like Mary Antin in Promised Land, were likely to be wearing machine sewn or factory made clothing. Regionalist writing often seemed to encapsulate a non-industrial world for readers of an industrial one. (Library of Congress)

C–6

Jack London

Jack London dramatizes the conflict between labor and management in “South of the Slot” by putting both “per-sonalities” into a single character who, north of The Slot, is a UC Berkeley sociologist and south of it, a union man.

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C–7

Mary Antin and Abraham Cahan

Mary Antin in her autobiographical Promised Land as well as the characters in Abraham Cahan’s Yekl find themselves in the U.S.A. living in tenement neighborhoods like this one on New York’s Lower East Side.

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