Law and Letters in American Culture

Law and Letters in American Culture
Author: Robert A. Ferguson
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 456
Release: 1984
Genre: Law
ISBN: 9780674514652

The role of religion in early American literature has been endlessly studied; the role of the law has been virtually ignored. Robert A. Ferguson's book seeks to correct this imbalance. With the Revolution, Ferguson demonstrates, the lawyer replaced the clergyman as the dominant intellectual force in the new nation. Lawyers wrote the first important plays, novels, and poems; as gentlemen of letters they controlled many of the journals and literary societies; and their education in the law led to a controlling aesthetic that shaped both the civic and the imaginative literature of the early republic. An awareness of this aesthetic enables us to see works as diverse as Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia and Irving's burlesque History of New York as unified texts, products of the legal mind of the time. The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the great political orations were written by lawyers, and so too were the literary works of Trumbull, Tyler, Brackenridge, Charles Brockden Brown, William Cullen Bryant, Richard Henry Dana, Jr., and a dozen other important writers. To recover the original meaning and context of these writings is to gain new understanding of a whole era of American culture. The nexus of law and letters persisted for more than a half-century. Ferguson explores a range of factors that contributed to its gradual dissolution: the yielding of neoclassicism to romanticism; the changing role of the writer; the shift in the lawyer's stance from generalist to specialist and from ideological spokesman to tactician of compromise; the onslaught of Jacksonian democracy and the problems of a country torn by sectional strife. At the same time, he demonstrates continuities with the American Renaissance. And in Abraham Lincoln he sees a memorable late flowering of the earlier tradition.

Tracts of the American Revolution, 1763-1776

Tracts of the American Revolution, 1763-1776
Author: Merrill Jensen
Publisher: Hackett Publishing
Total Pages: 576
Release: 2003-01-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780872206939

This volume brings together seventeen of the most important pamphlets produced by the American colonies as they opposed British measures and policies after 1763, and as they disputed the issue of independence with one another between 1774 and 1776. The most famous pamphleteers--James Otis, John Dickinson, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas Paine--are here; so too are lesser-known ones. Students of American history and political thought will find in these tracts rich evidence of the colonists' grievances against Britain, their methods of persuasion, and the development of political thought that led to the Declaration of Independence. A student-oriented introduction presents a capsule history of the events of the period and an analysis of the context of each tract.

Against Calvinism

Against Calvinism
Author: Roger E. Olson
Publisher: Zondervan Academic
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2011-10-25
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0310575958

Calvinist theology has been debated and promoted for centuries. But is it a theology that should last? Roger Olson suggests that Calvinism, also commonly known as Reformed theology, holds an unwarranted place in our list of accepted theologies. In Against Calvinism, readers will find scholarly arguments explaining why Calvinist theology is incorrect and how it affects God’s reputation. Olson draws on a variety of sources, including Scripture, reason, tradition, and experience, to support his critique of Calvinism and the more historically rich, biblically faithful alternative theologies he proposes. Addressing what many evangelical Christians are concerned about today—so-called “new Calvinism,” a movement embraced by a generation labeled as “young, restless, Reformed” —Against Calvinism is the only book of its kind to offer objections from a non-Calvinist perspective to the current wave of Calvinism among Christian youth. As a companion to Michael Horton’s For Calvinism, readers will be able to compare contrasting perspectives and form their own opinions on the merits and weaknesses of Calvinism.

America's Indomitable Character Volume II

America's Indomitable Character Volume II
Author: Frederick William Dame
Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand
Total Pages: 442
Release: 2014-09-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 3735746276

Volume II of America's Indomitable Character has information on: A synopsis of Volume I. A preview concerning the content of Volume II with the sub-themes of Nature, human nature, society, the social contract, and education and how they weave into American character identity. American character identity and its Colonial connection to the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The historical personage Michel Guillaume (J. Hector St. John) de Crèvecoeur, a French, British, American Colonial citizen, and the America farmer par excellence who posed the famous question: What is an American? Benjamin Franklin's contributions to the developing American character identity. Thomas Paine's revolutionary views on American character identity. Thomas Jefferson's philosophical contributions to American character identity. John Dickinson, America's soldier and founding father. Hugh Henry Brackenridge, American publisher and author who educated Colonial Americans in politics. The literary group the Connecticut Wits who were both for and against America's independent development. The role of Colonial Religion and early attitudes concerning the American Colonial Theater as they relate to American character identity. The American dramatist and jurist Royall Tyler and his play The Contrast (A Comedy in Five Acts) in which the newly developing American consciousness of independence, including female independence, vis-à-vis English foppery and buffoonery are presented. Further, the use of the Native American's chanson du mort, in this case the Song of Alknomook and the dramaturgical presentation of Yankee Doodle are of utmost importance in understanding The Contrast and how they interplay with American character identity. The Albany Plan of Union. The Declaration of Independence written by the Founding Fathers. The Articles of Confederation (and Perpetual Union). A chronology of theatrical events between 1600 and 1800.

Myths of Capitalism

Myths of Capitalism
Author: Andrew Torre
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
Total Pages: 386
Release: 2014-08-14
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1499041527

Myths of Capitalism shows that tenets of the capitalist belief system – the sanctity of private property, the social benefits of profit, etc. – do not hold up under empirical scrutiny. It also addresses seminal issues such as: enforced scarcity resulting from technological advances in production; the historically unique and unsustainable separation of political and economic systems resulting from the 18th century democratic revolutions; the ruling-class drive to replace democratic government with a global plutocracy; and increased democratic participation as the only route to systemic change. A comprehensive primer on the capitalist system, written in layman’s language and non-polemical, this is a book for everyone, including students of economics and political science.

American Wilderness

American Wilderness
Author: Michael L. Lewis
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 299
Release: 2007
Genre: History
ISBN: 0195174143

Addresses the state of scholarship on the political, cultural, and intellectual history of American responses to wilderness, from first contact to the present.

The Society for Useful Knowledge

The Society for Useful Knowledge
Author: Jonathan Lyons
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 242
Release: 2013-06-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 1608195538

A spellbinding, rich history of the American Enlightenment--think 1776 meets The Metaphysical Club

Advocacy Journalists

Advocacy Journalists
Author: Edd Applegate
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
Total Pages: 255
Release: 2009-05-11
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0810869292

In all likelihood advocacy journalism is the oldest form of reportage. It appears frequently whenever journalists desire to advocate their beliefs or ideas about major political or social problems. In Advocacy Journalists: A Biographical Dictionary of Writers and Editors, Edd Applegate identifies the most notable figures in this field. Each entry contains biographical information about a writer or editor who either wrote advocacy journalism or edited one or more publications that featured such material. Entries consist of discussions of the journalists' lives, professional careers, major works, and, in some cases, commentary on those works. Among those profiled here are such notables as Ambrose Bierce, William F. Buckley Jr., Eldridge Cleaver, Daniel Defoe, Germaine Greer, Pete Hamill, Karl Marx, H. L. Mencken, George Orwell, Thomas Paine, Wilfrid Sheed, Gloria Steinem, and Jonathan Swift. Unlike other books that focus on the form of advocacy journalism itself or how and why it developed, this book focuses on the lives of journalists and editors and their contributions to advocacy journalism. For scholars, teachers, and students of journalism, along with general readers who wish to discover more about advocacy journalism, this volume is an important and accessible resource.

The Mystery of Iniquity

The Mystery of Iniquity
Author: William H. Shurr
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Total Pages: 392
Release: 2021-12-14
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0813195055

This book is the first to consider the work of Herman Melville's later years as a whole, in the light of his life and reading during those years and of the intellectual and artistic ambience of the later nineteenth century. With the exception of Billy Budd, almost all of the writing Melville produced between 1857 and 1891 is poetry. Until now little attention has been given to the poetry and it has been customary to view Melville's final masterpiece, Billy Budd, against the background of the earlier fiction—almost as if the writing of the intervening thirty-four years had not existed. William H. Shurr, who has studied the poems with close attention to the Melville manuscripts in the Houghton Library at Harvard University, contends that Melville's poetry merits more attention and appreciation than has hitherto been accorded it. Concerned principally with the maturation of Melville's darker themes, he has been the first to study the carefully designed sequences in which Melville published his poems. He has also discovered in the poems thematic patterns—among them Melville's heterodox Christology and his concept of a particular kind of individualism found in what he calls the "transcendent act"—that shed new light on the complexities of Billy Budd.