Young America Research Articles

Young America: Land, Labor, and the Republican Community

Young America: Land, Labor, and the Republican Community

Young America: childhood in 19th-century art and culture

In an era of both optimism and anxiety about the nation's future, Americans in the nineteenth century focused attention on the cultivation and education of children as future citizens. Contemporary portrayals of children--in fine paintings, popular prints, illustrated primers, and advertisements--helped to shape cultural expectations: pictures of hardy country boys, intent schoolchildren, and little girls practicing embroidery were examples of the ways model Americans should look and behave. At the same time, images showing street urchins, young slaves, or children at work in factories reflected troubling conflicts in society. This appealing book explores representations of children in relation to the currents of American culture, including urbanization, immigration, separate spheres of the genders, and the nation's professed devotion to egalitarianism. A generous selection of illustrations includes well-loved works by such artists as Winslow Homer and Eastman Johnson, as well as fascinating archival images. With engaging depictions of children from varied economic, racial, and geographic backgrounds, Young America opens a new window on the life and culture of the United States during a century of vast change and growth.

Young America: land, labor, and the Republican community

How working people's republican free labor ethos changed the national agenda at a crucial period in U.S. history

Young America: Land, Labor, and the Republican Community

Young America: Land, Labor, and the Republican Community

Trade and Improvements: Young America and the Transformation of the Democratic Party

Trade and Improvements: Young America and the Transformation of the Democratic Party

American Renaissance Poetry and the Topos of Positionality: Genius Mundi and Genius Loci in Walt Whitman and William Gilmore Simms

If the modernist intellectual, fundamentally a deraciné, saw literature as a "strategy of permanent exile" and fundamental displacement . . . the new intellectual rather likes to pose as a topologist: S/he speaks from one specific place of cultural production. . . . "Positionality"—you might have heard of it—is the magic word, and you'd better take it literally. —Roberto Maria Dainotto, Place in Literature1 Ever Since F. O. Matthiessen Published American Renaissance: Art And Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (1941), the phrase "American Renaissance" has provided both an organizing principle for the study of nineteenth-century American literature and a lightning-rod for that study's critique.2 These critiques have challenged Matthiessen's focus on just five authors (Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman), a canonizing gesture that excludes other prominent writers of the "renaissance" period (1850-1855) he addresses. In addition to challenging the exclusion of this period's women writers like Harriet Beecher Stowe and African American writers like Frederick Douglass, critics have more recently questioned the northern bias of Matthiessen's canon, and the author consistently invoked in order to redress this sectional imbalance is the southern writer William Gilmore Simms. In a recent issue of Southern Quarterly, a special issue devoted to Simms, David W. Newton observes that "the construction by Matthiessen and later scholars of the American Renaissance as a critical concept has contributed to the diminishment of Simms's literary reputation," a consequence [End Page 223] that "is particularly ironic since the height of Simms's own literary career corresponds precisely with that crucial moment in American letters between 1850-55 which Matthiessen defines as the American Renaissance."3 Newton's proposed correction, his assertion that "by any measure of literary achievement, [Simms's] poems clearly belong as an important part of the American poetic tradition" (p. 24), underscores the larger point made in the introduction to this issue of Southern Quarterly, where Peter L. Shillingsburg presents Simms as "a literary giant of proportions unacknowledged by—indeed, unknown to—the bulk of Americanist scholars."4 For my purposes here, this effort to renew critical attention to Simms is of interest not for the institutional circumstance it seeks to effect—the delayed justice of Simms's literary canonization—but for the historical circumstance it registers: Simms's Poems: Descriptive, Dramatic, Legendary, and Contemplative was published in 1853, a date significant less for its coincidence with Matthiessen's "American Renaissance" than for its proximity to the 1855 publication date of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. Simms, these dates show, was an established figure in belles lettres and a prominent member of the nativist Young America group well before Whitman gave that literary nationalist stance its currently most celebrated articulations.5 The eclipse of Simms by Whitman might call for more nuanced explanations than Whitman's own populist declaration, in the closing line of his 1855 "Preface," that "the proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it."6 Yet Whitman's affectionate absorption of his country made his work particularly relevant, as Allen Grossman has demonstrated, for a nation on the brink of civil war. Grossman presents Whitman's poetry as a kind of "policy" for preserving union, characterizing the formal innovation of Whitman's line as "an unprecedented trope of inclusion": "Whitman has devised a universal 'conjunctive principle' whose manifest structure is the sequence of end-stopped, nonequivalent, but equipollent lines."7 At a time of national crisis, the reason a country absorbs a given poet—in this case, the reason the United States absorbs Whitman rather than Simms—has more to do with that poetry's social policy than its literary quality. Compelling as Grossman's analysis continues to be, the question it raises is why—apart, perhaps, from...

The Mother and the Law

'Motion pictures must be true to life. The truer they are the greater they are.' D.W. Griffith1 On 1914, even before the release of The Birth of a Nation, D.W. Griffith had been hankering to make an even more grandiose work that would surpass the Italian epics, such as Quo Vadis and Cabiria, then playing to great critical and financial success. However, there was not enough cash in his coffers to finance another major effort, so he had to rein in his ambitions and make what Joseph Henabery termed 'a little, cheap, quickie picture'.2 After mulling over various scripts and finding them unsatisfactory, Griffith wrote one of his own. In 1916, he explained his motivation: Several seasons back I came across Miss Marsh and Mr. Harron browsing around in an out-of-the-way section of the underworld in a Western city. They were making what we call 'life studies'. They seemed so detached from the strange undercurrents of this locality. The thought came to me of putting them into a picture which would reveal the heart of Young America tossed about by the world's old passions, joys and sorrows that add to the contemporary life's complexities.3 From this idea, Griffith developed a story that traced the lives of a boy and girl who come to the city, meet, fall in love, and marry. Similar to The Escape, made earlier in 1914 which dealt with the urban poor, his film would examine how his characters become pawns affected by societal forces. Originally called The Woman and the Law – and referred to as such in the Majestic Company's books for over a year – the picture would during production be re-titled The Mother and the Law.In most film histories, this initial effort has been almost entirely ignored. Instead, critical discussion centers on the much modified version known as the 'modern' story of Intolerance. Little information exists about the original's plot, except for the comment in a trade magazine that the film dealt with 'an impoverished couple of the slums'.4 Griffith selected his cast carefully. For the feminine lead, he chose Mae Marsh.5 She was not a conventionally beautiful girl, but her face mirrors the look of the poverty-pinched lower classes and, with Griffith's coaching, she was able to make the transition from young daughter to distraught wife and then to grieving mother with great skill. In 1917, she modestly described her performance. 'I have seen Intolerance twenty times, I suppose, and it never occurs to me that "The Girl" in the modern epic is myself. It is all Mr. Griffith. When I watch her actions I am no more able to disassociate Mr. Griffith from them than I am able to watch the Babylonian spectacle without thinking of him. In his pictures everything – scenery and players – is just so many instruments in his orchestra.'6 Bobby Harron, as the boy, was also adept at taking direction. His performance is flawless and thoroughly convincing, even in his adoption of the perpetual stoop of the downtrodden. The rest of the cast was aptly chosen, among them Walter Long with his tough looks (he was Gus, the would-be rapist in Birth) as the underworld boss and Miriam Cooper (the placid sister in Birth) as his mistress, called 'the Friendless One'. In general, this highly productive period of Griffith's life (1914–16) is relatively undocumented. Few paper records survive in his files, but some production details can be found in the company books of the Aitkens. Otherwise, one must rely on the recollections of those who worked with Griffith, which are often inaccurate and sometimes contradictory, and on contemporary references in the trade press, which, being closer in time, are far more reliable. Even the dates when The Mother and the Law was first shot have been a matter of dispute. Karl [End Page 404] Brown, the assistant cameraman, stated...

Democracy's children: the young rebels of the 1960s and the power of ideals

Chapter 1 Introduction Chapter 2 Genesis Chapter 3 Schooling in Changing Times Chapter 4 Restless Youth Chapter 5 Scaling the Ivied Walls Chapter 6 In Diversity, Separation Chapter 7 New Radicals, New Hopes Chapter 8 Young America at War Chapter 9 Counterculture Chapter 10 Politics Chapter 11 Change and Its Limits Chapter 12 Coming Home Chapter 13 Epilogue: Baby Bust and Beyond Chapter 14 Bibliographical Essay Chapter 15 Index

Scotland and the Origins of the Modern World: An Interpretative History

How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World Arthur Herman New York: Three Rivers Press, 2002 Scotland and the Origins of the Modern World: An Interpretative History The author reviews a work in which educational reform in Scotland, together with revitalized ways of looking at personal responsibility are seen as having been carried throughout the British Empire and young America by a spreading Scottish population of enormous talent and energy, and from these places extensively to affect the world. It is argued that Scottish achievements resulted in major contributions to numerous areas of scholarship famously including civil engineering, medicine, economic and political thinking as well as directly promoting the industrial revolution in the English speaking world and the wider expansion of the global economy notably since the mid-nineteenth century. Key Words: Scotland; Scots; Protestant reformation; Calvinism; British Empire; America; Scots-Irish; Economic development; Civil Engineering; Commerce; Family values; Democracy; Anti-authoritarianism; David Hume; Adam Smith. It is not too often when a hook comes from academia which the average lay reader can fully appreciate and enjoy. Historian Arthur Herman of the Smithsonian has produced a brilliant treatise of interpretative history: How the Scots Invented the Modern World. Such a title sounds presumptuous. This work combines history, biography and many obscure anecdotes to not only inform the reader about Scottish accomplishments for Western Civilization over the past three centuries, but also as to why and how the Scots did so despite their former poverty and their disproportionately small numbers. Before the Scots set about to invent the modern world, they were living in one of the poorest regions in Western Europe. War with England was frequent, and brutal clan feuds in both the Highlands and the Lowlands were all too common. The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries further saw wars over religion. What would inspire a people who only knew war and poverty to formulate new ideas to arise out of their poverty? The answer lies with the changes brought about by the Protestant Reformation in the 1560s. Reformer John Knox, and his disciples, had advanced a radical vision of having a school in every parish. It took time for this vision to be a reality, and by the early 1700s this unique education system transformed Scotland into one of the most educated and literate nations in Western Europe. The Scottish thirst for education went beyond studying the scriptures. With the Calvinist concept of the unity of knowledge Scots came to master the humanities, and also scientific and technical subjects. Education further heightened the expectations of the common people, as the sons of farmers and labourers advanced to business and to the professions. In the late 1700s and early 1800s self-made men like civil engineer Thomas Telford built roads, bridges and canals, and mechanic James Watt perfected the steam engine. Scottish universities had a non-elitist ethos, unlike Oxford and Cambridge, and hence gave a greater priority to academic excellence. With their high reputation, the Scottish centers of high learning attracted English students. Edinburgh University's School of Medicine became the best medical school in the British Isles, and Edinburgh emerged as the intellectual center (an Athens of the north) of a unique Scottish Enlightenment, at which philosophers like Lord Kames, David Hume, and Adam Smith emerged. Herman's analysis of Adam Smith should interest many readers. Herman points out that Smith was not an extreme libertarian who gave a green light to big business and materialism. He was more of an observer than an advocate, and he concurred with David Hume's pessimistic views of human nature, and really he saw that the free market was a check on human avarice. …

Orestes Brownson in Young America: Popular Books and the Fate of Catholic Criticism

Nor is it true that the general tendency of art, or aesthetic culture, is to liberate the mind. The panders to vice know very well that art is one of the most effectual means of enchaining their victims, and do not fail to enlist architecture, poetry, music, painting, sculpture, in their servic e... and we may lay it down as an invariable rule, that art uniformly tends to corrupt, when not preceded and accompanied by high spiritual, or moral and religious culture.

YOUNG AMERICAN PUNS: ANTEBELLUM WORDPLAY AND DEMOCRATIC MANHATTAN

�� In 1845, a small group of New York Democrats announced themselves “Young Americans” and so began a new phase in a campaign on behalf of their nation’s literature. Founding members Evert Duyckinck, Jerry Auld, William Jones, and Russell Trevett had banded together as early as 1836 to argue that our domestic letters surpassed Europe’s. By the middle of the next decade, their nationalist rhetoric had reached fever pitch. As essayists and editors based in antebellum Manhattan, they kept their cultural critique on the front pages of the city’s magazines and newspapers. Long-term aims were a bit vague but seemed to hinge upon the domestic production and democratic dissemination of truly American belles lettres. The highprofile nature of its message has earned the group a spot in recent literary histories (Miller 1956; Bender 1988; Widmer 1999). Less noted has been Young America’s contribution to American speech. Part of that contribution stems from what I call the Young American

The American in Charity: "Benito Cereno" and Gothic Anti-Sentimentality

THE AMERICAN IN CHARITY: "BENITO CEREÑO" AND GOTHIC ANTI-SENTIMENTALITY Peter Coviello Bowdoin College In 1852, a year after the publication and rather tepid reception of Moby-Dick, Herman Melville released to the world a novel he had promised was "much more calculated for popularity." "A regular romance," he called it in a letter to his publisher, though the romance that followed —the novel Pierre, or the Ambiguities—is anything but regular .1 It is a novel in which, among other things, an amplifying strain of gothicism, and ofgothic opacity, comes gradually to consume the plot, the major characters, and finally the narrative voice itself, much to the predictable dismay of the author's contemporaries. (One newspaper, the New York Day Book, gave its notice the pithy title, "HERMAN MELVILLE CRAZY."2) Still, before the novel's incest and murder plots are fully ripened, Melville pauses to consider young Pierre Glendinning's fate as an author, and the more general fate of authorship in America. In a chapter called "Young America in Literature," he writes: Pierre himself had written many a fugitive thing, which had brought him, not only vast credit and compliments from his more immediate acquaintances, but the less partial applauses of the always intelligent, and extremely discriminating public. In short, Pierre had done that, which many other boys have done—published.3 For Melville, this is irony so broad and unregulated it might as well be called sarcasm; and the clear bitterness he felt over the treatment of Moby-Dick, particularly at the hands of the "Young America" clan of authors and editors, is on uncomfortably naked display here. That nakedness is probably what motivated one critic to aver that "whether the satire has the serious political implications which have been attributed to it may be doubtful."4 We might have reason to be a bit more credulous than this, since the anger here, uncontoured though it may be, is directed not just at what this critic calls a "literary clique" but at, precisely , "the public"—the very same "public" who, as Melville goes on to write, "had applauded [Pierre's] gemmed little sketches of thought and fancy." At issue, in other words, is more than any literary clique, more than that "high and mighty Campbell clan of editors" who so 156Peter Coviello unabashedly overpraise Pierre, but a specifically civic body, a "public" whose capacity for literacy, and aptitude for literary responsiveness, Melville wishes to worry over. And this makes sense, since the question of literacy—of a person or group's fluency with a variety of communicative acts and interpretive tools—is, for Melville, ever a matter of dramatic and necessarily civic consequence. We need only think of all the scenes of failed reading, impotent silence, and interpretation gone awry on that floating allegory of national fate, the Pequod. The moral is difficult to miss: civic health, in Melville's fictional cosmos, requires able readership. Pierre appears in 1852, and the years immediately following do nothing to allay Melville's anxieties about the readerly capacities of the American public. But the events of those years do, it seems, focus his misgivings. Melville's breath, we might say, had time to straighten, his brain to bubble cool, so that what would come from him by 1855 was no longer that sneering broadside vitriol, but the rigidly controlled, exactingly apportioned anger of a writer who has passed beyond wounded authorial pride into a vastly more embracing fatalism. In the essay that follows, I want to contend that the vehicle Melville fashions to carry this anger, this furious dismay before a direly inept and seemingly ineducable American readership, is the great novella of slave revolt "Benito Cereño"; that its method is, in a complicated way, gothic; and that what not indirectly inspires and crystallizes this anger—what transpires so momentously between Moby-Dick and "Benito Cereño"— is the publication and unprecedented reception of Harriet Beecher Stowe' s sentimental epic, Uncle Tom's Cabin, in 1852.5 "Benito Cereño" responds to Uncle Tom's Cabin in at least two ways. It does so, first, in its assault on the self-satisfied and pointedly sentimental mode ofreading...

The TRIAD Project: Using Internet communications to challenge students' understandings of choreography

The TRIAD Project presents an innovative approach to the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in the teaching of choreography. The project involved over 40 young dancers, aged 9-18, from Britain, Portugal and America. They formed an Internet dance community, sharing their choreographic ideas via movies and text, and developing an original dance work. The asynchronous method of communication encouraged a reflective attitude that supported the learning situation. Through their efforts to explain their creative processes to peer groups via the dynamic Website, the young dancers developed their personal understandings of choreography. The need to communicate clearly via text and movies led to increases in the students' usage of dance-based critical vocabulary, and encouraged objective appraisal of creative work. Discussion of the work by the other peer groups challenged the students to deal with different dance styles and other choreographic approaches.

The Routledge Historical Atlas of the American Railroads

With 50 full-color original maps, and a keen and perceptive text, the preeminent historian of US railways has created an illustrated atlas that will delight general history readers and railroad fans alike. From the construction of the first US railroads in the 1830s to the advent of Amtrak, this outstanding work explores the revolutionary geographical expansion and rapid acceleration of American life made possible by the people who built, operated and rode the US railway systems. The Routledge Historical Atlas of American Railroads traverses some of the most exciting thoroughfares in our history and culture, and offers a unique view of young America. Anyone interested in the people and events that shaped the US, general readers, students and all railroad fans will make this a new standard work. Also inlcludes 50 color maps.

Young America: The Flowering of Democracy in New York City

Young America: The Flowering of Democracy in New York City

Young America: The Flowering of Democracy in New York City.

Journal Article Young America: The Flowering of Democracy in New York City. By Edward L. Widmer. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. x, 290 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-19-510050-6.) Get access Jonathan A. Glickstein Jonathan A. Glickstein University of California, Santa Barbara, California Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 87, Issue 1, June 2000, Pages 225–226, https://doi.org/10.2307/2567969 Published: 01 June 2000

Thomas Lanier Clingman: Fire Eater from the Carolina Mountains

Thomas Lanier Clingman: Eater from Carolina Mountains. By Thomas E. Jeffrey. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999. Pp. xi, 450. Illustrations. $50.00.) At minimum, Thomas E. Jeffrey deserves commendation for devoting a decade to compose a biography of such unlikable person. Egotistical, eccentric, and thin-skinned, Fire Eater From Carolina Mountains emerges from this book as at heart arrogant, self-serving politician. Never married, Clingman deliberately made his choice of ambition for his mistress, and fame for his reward (3) while his niece recalled that the prizes for which strove in every act of his political (2) were to be a senator then president. Clingman did become a force in antebellum era and remained a presence in North Carolina politics later into nineteenth century, and in this solid biography his career presents an interesting and useful window into political culture of that period in American history (319). Historians know Clingman as nonslaveholding congressman representing North Carolina's district who, notwithstanding slavery's minimal presence in highlands, led his constituents out of party into a Democratic organization committed to a strong defense of southern rights. As much as any other individual, Jeffrey notes, he was responsible for transformation of North Carolina from a bastion into a Democratic (2). Ironically, despite book's subtitle, Clingman actually was no eater. An intelligent, inquisitive, and opportunistic young man, Clingman first rose to prominence advocating policies, especially government-sponsored internal improvements, that believed would bring prosperity to mountains. In North Carolina legislature and in his first congressional term, Clingman persistently supported ultra Whig measures. Belying his later fire eater label, voted against reimposition of that prevented Congress from reading or debating antislavery petitions. Previous scholars, most notably John C. Inscoe and Mark W. Kruman, have pointed to Clingman's vote against gag rule as reason for his defeat for reelection in 1845, a defeat, they argue, that produced his later southern radicalism. Jeffrey instead demonstrates persuasively that important lesson Clingman learned from this loss was not southern loyalties of mountain voters but importance of Democrats as swing voters in his predominantly district. Remaining in party, Clingman regained and held his congressional seat by balancing his appeal as champion of western North Carolina's interests with his image as independent who refused to follow dictates of a Raleigh Clique at head of state party. He realized, too, that election to Senate depended upon Democratic votes in legislature. Thus, in 1850s intoned rhetoric of Southern Rights to curry favor (69) with opposing party. Yet Clingman never advocated secession, insisting that a strong defense of South provided best way to preserve Union. Even after formally switching parties in 1856, Clingman's initial support for Stephen A. Douglas's presidential aspirations and his advocacy of Young America movement's calls for further territorial expansion show that, as a Democrat, is better understood as nationalist than as a southern partisan. …

Making America's Destiny Manifest

an intellectual fulcrum with which to move all sorts of weighty arguments about America's cultural coming of age. They commence their tales era of good feelings with such stolid institutions as Anthology Club and North Review, luxuriate halcyon years of Transcendental Club and Dial, and rest mid-1850s front of Ticknor and Fields' stable of thoroughbred writers, whom publishers touted their Atlantic Monthly. Put another way, most people still piously recite litany of Lewis Mumford's Golden Day and FO. Matthiessen's American Renaissance.' But as latter admitted his magisterial study by that title, to get America just right requires another book, one that takes into account the economic and social forces of time. Alerted to this desideratum by his treatment of Melville and Whitman, writers who, for all their connections to New England, preferred Manhattan's thick and hearty cultural chowder to Brook Farm's dietary reform, Mathiessen placed at center of this projected volume rise of common man (p. viii). truly discerning scholar, other words, would have to deal with New York City. significance of this topic, an analysis of what Matthiessen termed The Age of Fourier, did not escape his Harvard colleague, Perry Miller, who, after he published his indispensable critical anthology of Transcendentalists, turned his attention to group of cultural nationalists New York known as Young America.2 For some reason, though, when Miller tried to unravel their tangled skein of intellectual discourse his usual acuity failed him; he as well as most critics found Raven and Whale (1956) least satisfying of his works, what its author himself termed his comic book.3 This is not to say that it is without merit. We need to be reminded, for example, how deeply in 1840s political parties were involved with concern for literature and education, when a person's understanding of protectionism was inseparable from his style, and his stand on Bank

Young America: The Flowering of Democracy in New York City

This study examines the meteoric rise and subsequent disintegration of a vigorous American literary-political movement in the 1840s. Calling itself 'Young America', the group found a mouthpiece in the Democratic Review, a literary magazine funded by the Democratic Party and edited by the brash and charismatic John O'Sullivan. The Review was not only a major voice in American politics, but also sponsored such writers as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Walt Whitman and greatly inflenced Herman Melville, before it and Young America faded from the national consciousness after the Mexican-American War.

Young America: the flowering of democracy in New York City

Young America: the flowering of democracy in New York City