Antebellum American culture

U.S. History to 1877

A New Literature

■ Washington Irving

■ James Fenimore Cooper

■ American Renaissance

– William Cullen Bryant

– John Greenleaf Whittier

– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

■ Young America movement

– Edgar Allan Poe

– Nathaniel Hawthorne

– Herman Melville

– Walt Whitman

Religion and culture

■ “Christian Nurture”

– Sunday School movement

■ Transcendentalism, 1836

– Ralph Waldo Emerson

■ Self-reliance; American scholar; nature mysticism

– Henry David Thoreau, Walden

■ Moralism in art & literature

– Hudson River School

■ Thomas Cole

■ Frederic Church

– Literature of “uplift”

Antebellum culture

■ Uplifting society

– Education

■ Horace Mann

– Penal reform

■ “Penitentiaries”

– Asylum reform

■ Dorothea Dix

Antebellum culture

■ “Doctrine of the spheres”

– Male sphere

■ Active, intellectual, outdoors

■ Money & power: Politics, business, professions

– Female sphere

■ Passive, emotional, home

■ Purity & culture: Church, children, art & literature

■ “Angel of the home”

– Equality(?)

■ Discovery of childhood innocence

Falls of the Katerskills

Thomas Cole: The Oxbow

Church, Falls of the Niagara