Slavish Shore

Slavish Shore
Author: Jeffrey L. Amestoy
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 398
Release: 2015-08
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0674088190

In 1834 Harvard dropout Richard Henry Dana Jr. became a common seaman, and soon his Two Years Before the Mast became a classic. Literary acclaim did not erase the young lawyer’s memory of floggings he witnessed aboard ship or undermine his vow to combat injustice. Jeffrey Amestoy tells the story of Dana’s determination to keep that vow.

Up and Down California in 1860-1864

Up and Down California in 1860-1864
Author: William Henry Brewer
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 630
Release: 1974
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780520027626

The journal seems to contain information for everyone regardless of one's interest...Each page of this almost six hundred page journal is crammed with facts and descriptions. So much of interest is contained in every entry that each re-reading will reveal many interesting incidents or observations not quite grasped on the first perusal....This book will be a valuable source to all students of California or United States history and to the casual readers as well.

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.

Richard Henry Dana Jr.: Two Years Before the Mast & Other Voyages (LOA #161)

Richard Henry Dana Jr.: Two Years Before the Mast & Other Voyages (LOA #161)
Author: Richard Henry Dana, Jr.
Publisher:
Total Pages: 950
Release: 2005-10-06
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN:

"This volume collects three sea-going travel narratives by Richard Henry Dana, Jr., that span 25 years of maritime history, from the age of sail to the age of steam." "Suffering from persistent weakness in his eyes, Dana left Harvard at age 19 and sailed from Boston in 1834 as a common seaman. Two Years Before the Mast (1840) is the account of his voyages around Cape Horn and time ashore in California in the decade before the Gold Rush. Dana's narrative vividly portrays the daily routines and hardships of life at sea, the capriciousness and brutality of merchant ship captains and officers, and the beauty and danger of the southern oceans in winter. Included in an appendix is "Twenty-Four Years After" (1869), in which Dana describes his return to California in 1859-1860 and the immense changes brought about by American annexation, the frenzy of the Gold Rush, and the growing commerce of "a new world, the awakened Pacific."" "Dana first visited Cuba in the winter of 1859 while the possible annexation of the island was being debated in the U.S. Senate. To Cuba and Back (1859) is his account of his trip, during which he toured Havana and a sugar plantation; attended a bullfight; visited churches, hospitals, schools, and prisons; and investigated the impact on Cuban society of slavery and autocratic Spanish rule." "Journal of a Voyage Round the World, 1859-1860 records the 14-month circumnavigation that took Dana to California, Hawaii, China, Japan, Malaya, Ceylon, India, Egypt, and Europe. The journal provides vignettes of frontier life in California, missionary influence in Hawaii, the impact of the Taiping Rebellion and the Second Opium War on China, and the opening of Japan to the West, while capturing the transition from the age of sail to the faster, smaller world created by the steamship and the telegraph."--BOOK JACKET.