Browsing named entities in Cambridge History of American Literature: volume 2 (ed. Trent, William Peterfield, 1862-1939., Erskine, John, 1879-1951., Sherman, Stuart Pratt, 1881-1926., Van Doren, Carl, 1885-1950.). You can also browse the collection for Massachusetts (Massachusetts, United States) or search for Massachusetts (Massachusetts, United States) in all documents.

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Cambridge History of American Literature: volume 2 (ed. Trent, William Peterfield, 1862-1939., Erskine, John, 1879-1951., Sherman, Stuart Pratt, 1881-1926., Van Doren, Carl, 1885-1950.), Chapter 10: Thoreau (search)
I declined to pay. But unfortunately, another man saw fit to pay it. The recusant even rendered the authorities a reason in writing for his recusancy. Know all men by these presents that I Henry Thoreau do not wish to be regarded as a member of any incorporated society which I have not joined. Opposition to the State followed naturally on opposition to the Church. To his honour, Thoreau took a stand against slavery when it was anything but popular to do so, even in the State of Massachusetts. In all his words on this theme there is a fire not to be found elsewhere. What roused him was the spectacle of fugitive slaves escaping to the free North, and, through the action of Northern courts, dragged back into slavery. The State was clearly in the wrong; Thoreau, in his own phrase, declared war on the State, by refusing to pay his poll-tax. He believed that such passive resistance by a number of taxpayers would bring about the abolition of slavery. He was therefore quite
Cambridge History of American Literature: volume 2 (ed. Trent, William Peterfield, 1862-1939., Erskine, John, 1879-1951., Sherman, Stuart Pratt, 1881-1926., Van Doren, Carl, 1885-1950.), Chapter 12: Longfellow (search)
Chapter 12: Longfellow Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was born in Portland, Maine, 27 February, 1807. In view of what America as a whole then was and of what he was destined to accomplish for the literature of the country, it is difficult to see how he could have been more fortunately circumstanced with respect to stock and environment. Both the Longfellows and his mother's people, the Wadsworths, were well-to-do, and they represented the best New England, particularly Massachusetts, traditions, which, with the spread of Unitarianism, were losing some of their rigidity. Thus the child experienced little that was specially straitening, and he received a training well adapted—to bring out the talents that soon manifested themselves. His native town furnished the influence of the sea and sea-faring men; the virgin District soon to be the State of Maine, afforded other impressive features of nature; and the frontier situation, even if it could not make strenuous a constitutionally g
Cambridge History of American Literature: volume 2 (ed. Trent, William Peterfield, 1862-1939., Erskine, John, 1879-1951., Sherman, Stuart Pratt, 1881-1926., Van Doren, Carl, 1885-1950.), Chapter 13: Whittier (search)
Chapter 13: Whittier It was in 1638, when the great Puritan emigration to Massachusetts was beginning to slacken, that Thomas Whittier, a youth of eighteen, possibly of Huguenot extraction, landed in New England and made a home for himself on the shores of the Merrimac River. The substantial oak farmhouse which, late in life when the early Puritan intolerance of the sect had been smoothed away, the Quaker was found to be a man whose ideals were essentially those of the founders of Massachusetts, contributing to those ideals his own element of kindly sympathy, his own insistence upon the dignity of the individual, and his own uncompromising spirit of ding, and Indian warfare. G. R. Carpenter says of this work that no single modern volume could be found which has so penetrated the secret of colonial times in Massachusetts, for it is almost line by line a transcript and imaginative interpretation of old letters, journals, and memoirs. Its Quaker authorship, moreover, gives it ju
Cambridge History of American Literature: volume 2 (ed. Trent, William Peterfield, 1862-1939., Erskine, John, 1879-1951., Sherman, Stuart Pratt, 1881-1926., Van Doren, Carl, 1885-1950.), Chapter 15: publicists and orators, 1800-1850 (search)
under Jackson, and chief justice of the United States from 1836 to 1864, was a learned jurist, whose fame was clouded for the later part of his life by his opinion in the Dred Scott case. Josiah Quincy (1772-1864), an orator of no mean power, represented during the earlier part of his life the narrow New England Federalism which was so bitterly opposed to the politics of Jefferson and Madison. Edward Everett (1794-1865) occupied various public positions—member of Congress, governor of Massachusetts, minister to England, president of Harvard College. Although long active in political affairs he won chief destinction by lectures on literary subjects and by orations of an occasional character. In no other speeches of his generation, probably in no others in our whole history, do we find the same precision and elegance or equal refinement, ease, and grace; in no others are there such marks of real distinction in expression. More than a word should be given to Thomas H. Benton (178
Cambridge History of American Literature: volume 2 (ed. Trent, William Peterfield, 1862-1939., Erskine, John, 1879-1951., Sherman, Stuart Pratt, 1881-1926., Van Doren, Carl, 1885-1950.), Chapter 16: Webster (search)
uary, 1782, of pioneer stock. A frail child, and therefore spared the hard work of his father's farm, he was sent to Phillips Exeter Academy and to Dartmouth College, from which he graduated in 1800. He taught school as a makeshift, studied law, and was admitted to the bar in 1805. He practised first at Boscawen and then at Portsmouth, where he rapidly rose to prominence both as lawyer and public speaker. In 1813 he was sent to the House of Representatives as a Federalist member from Massachusetts, and thus came in close contact with Clay, then speaker, and Calhoun. Within a year Webster was a marked man in Congress. After four years, during which he struck many heavy blows at the administration, he resumed the practice of law. The great cases which he argued—the Dartmouth College Case, McCulloch v. Maryland, Gibbons v. Ogden, Ogden v. Saunders—brought him into the first rank of American lawyers by the time he was forty. Meanwhile his reputation as the greatest American orator
Cambridge History of American Literature: volume 2 (ed. Trent, William Peterfield, 1862-1939., Erskine, John, 1879-1951., Sherman, Stuart Pratt, 1881-1926., Van Doren, Carl, 1885-1950.), Chapter 17: writers on American history, 1783-1850 (search)
a (2 vols., 1797-98) were of scholarly standards but heavy in style. George Richards Minot (1758– 1802), a brilliant Massachusetts lawyer, wrote a History of the Insurrection in Massachusetts (1788), dealing with Shays' Rebellion, and followed it bMassachusetts (1788), dealing with Shays' Rebellion, and followed it by a continuation of Hutchinson's History of Massachusetts (2 vols., 1798-1803). The books were well written and have maintained their credit. Here should be mentioned Henry M. Brackenridge's (1786-1871) History of the Western Insurrection (1817), aMassachusetts (2 vols., 1798-1803). The books were well written and have maintained their credit. Here should be mentioned Henry M. Brackenridge's (1786-1871) History of the Western Insurrection (1817), a fair-minded narrative of the Whisky Insurrection, which was very popular and ran through several editions. Three Southern books which may here be spoken of are hardly up to the standard of the state histories. Dr. Ramsay's History of South Caroliept the invitations of members of the cabinet, supreme court judges, and—Mr. George Bancroft. Bancroft was born in Massachusetts in 1800 and died in Washington in 1891. Having graduated from Harvard in 1817, he went to Gottingen on funds subscri
Cambridge History of American Literature: volume 2 (ed. Trent, William Peterfield, 1862-1939., Erskine, John, 1879-1951., Sherman, Stuart Pratt, 1881-1926., Van Doren, Carl, 1885-1950.), Chapter 18: Prescott and Motley (search)
Motley John Lothrop Motley (1814-77) was like Prescott in being a son of Massachusetts and born with a silver spoon of pure Boston metal in his mouth. In each caf the two Bostonians was the same, the storm brewing beyond the confines of Massachusetts had burst and had forced her conservative citizens out of their aloofness, published until 1849, was semi-historic in character. The scene is laid in Massachusetts in 1628—in that crepuscular period which immediately preceded the rise of t surprised at the unanimity of its condemnation. He had no more desire for Massachusetts political life. By this date, Motley was thirty-five, no longer a youth, yh Sumner, and when a breach came between the president and the senator from Massachusetts, the former found a pretext to recall Motley, and again a secretary of statles Farrar Browne, Artemus Ward (834-67). The first of these, a child of Massachusetts, wandered out to Ohio and finally settled as an auctioneer in New York Stat
Cambridge History of American Literature: volume 2 (ed. Trent, William Peterfield, 1862-1939., Erskine, John, 1879-1951., Sherman, Stuart Pratt, 1881-1926., Van Doren, Carl, 1885-1950.), chapter 1.9 (search)
nd though to a taste less influenced by eighteenth-century standards it seems formal and sentimental, it exerted a strong influence for good during a critical period of American literature. Among the contributors were Charles Brockden Brown and John Quincy Adams. The most important of the Boston magazines before 1815 was The monthly Anthology. The original title was The monthly Anthology and magazine of polite literature. With the change of proprietorship the sub-title became The Massachusetts magazine, and a little later The Boston review. This was established in 1803 by one Phineas Adams, but after six months it passed into the control of The Anthology Club, founded by the Rev. William Emerson, which conducted it until it was abandoned in 1811. The Anthology Club included at various times from seven to sixteen Boston gentlemen of literary interests, and a few honorary non-resident members. Each member was expected to contribute to the magazine. Books were assigned for re
Cambridge History of American Literature: volume 2 (ed. Trent, William Peterfield, 1862-1939., Erskine, John, 1879-1951., Sherman, Stuart Pratt, 1881-1926., Van Doren, Carl, 1885-1950.), Chapter 21: Newspapers, 1775-1860 (search)
ful. Newspapers remained subject to provincial laws of libel, in accordance with the old common law, and were, as in Massachusetts for a short time in 1785, subject to special state taxes on paper or on advertisements. But public sentiment was grly raised and settled. Reports of state legislative proceedings had always been permitted in the colonies, though in Massachusetts the reporters had been denied the use of the chaplain's pulpit as a desk. As soon as the first Congress assembled, tugh the Federalists were vigorously supported by such able papers as Russell's Columbian Centinel in Boston, Thomas's Massachusetts Spy, The Connecticut Courant, and, after 1793, Noah Webster's daily Minerva (soon renamed Commercial Advertiser) in Nmmunity, and he tried to make his paper fulfill those functions, not for the world at large but for the people of western Massachusetts. With the aid of J. G. Holland and others who joined the staff the paper attained excellent literary quality and
Cambridge History of American Literature: volume 2 (ed. Trent, William Peterfield, 1862-1939., Erskine, John, 1879-1951., Sherman, Stuart Pratt, 1881-1926., Van Doren, Carl, 1885-1950.), Chapter 24: Lowell (search)
ame subjects that all men were writing verse upon in the forties, and written with the same vocabulary, images, and rhythms. Love, nature, liberty, idealism, classic story, personal moods are the themes, but there is some novelty in the ingenuity of the phrases and in the new fauna and flora. If he was following the English romanticists he was transferring their worship of beauty to a New England landscape and their religious musings to the turmoil of idealism that stirred the youth of Massachusetts. He writes of the dandelion and the pine-tree, and his seasons are the riotous June or the Indian summer of Cambridge, his landscape that of Beaver Brook. All is descriptive or reflective; there is no narrative except when it is the mere text for sentiment and moral. Some union of art and morality, of Keats and Carlyle, Poe and Emerson—that was the poet's endeavour. He wrote to Briggs in 1846: Then I feel how great is the office of Poet, could I but even dare to hope to fill i
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