Main currents in American thought

It is with a certain feeling of temerity that I offer the present study of a field of American letters which has been pretty largely neglected. That feeling springs from no sens...

French romantic theories, the rise of capitalism, and the transition from an agricultural to an industrial order; and Volume III will concern itself with the beginnings of dissa...

immigrants, in other colonies than New England, who came hither singly and unorganized, and took immediate imprint from the new environment, creating during the eighteenth centu...

I. Carolinian liberalism an attempt to create a new social system to replace the feudal, resulting in the doctrine of natural rights, democracy, and equalitarianism. The result...

I. Samuel Sewall--Yankee--First representative of the new order. The Sewall of tradition; the real Sewall: middle-class, governed by a prudential morality. Uncreative, conservat...

III. The frontier--Land of Promise: _Letters_ of Crèvecœur: A French Physiocrat; his travels in America; first interpretation of the influence of the frontier in economic terms-...

I. Background Facts: Causes of the Revolution obscure. Home rule and imperial centralization. Native liberalism. Three areas and three diverse interests. The imperial problem. G...

I. Background of Ideas--English and French contributions. The struggle between political realists and humanitarian liberals. Influence of English middle class. Puritan ethics of...

I. The Impact of the French Revolution--Stirred party passions afresh. Popularized democracy in America and provided a body of philosophy: doctrines of the majority will, expedi...

Common report has long made out Puritan New England to have been the native seat and germinal source of such ideals and institutions as have come to be regarded as traditionally...

The body of thought brought to America by the immigrant Puritans, and which gave a special cast to the New England mind, may be summed in a phrase as Carolinian liberalism. It w...

The Great Migration, it will be remembered, fell in the time of the Laudean reaction, when the Presbyterian Utopia seemed remote and the hopes of the Puritan dreamers were falle...

The most authoritative representative in New England of the ideal of priestly stewardship was the excellent John Cotton, first teacher to the church at Boston. While pastor of t...

Other ideals than those of Winthrop and Cotton, fruitful or feculent according to the special bias of whoever judges them, came out of England in the teeming days of the Puritan...

The most caustic pen of early New England was wielded by the lawyer-minister and wit, Nathaniel Ward of Ipswich, author of the crotchety little book, _The Simple Cobler of Aggaw...

It is not pleasant to linger in the drab later years of a century that in its prime had known able men and accomplished notable things. A world that accepted Michael Wiggleswort...

By good fortune an intimate record of daily life in old New England has been preserved in abundant detail. The diary of Samuel Sewall not only narrates the homely activities of...

For one who is not a loving student of the unamiable bickerings that clutter the records of early New England, and who does not read them by the gentle light of filial loyalty,...

In the days when Sir Edmund Andros was seeking to fasten upon Massachusetts Bay the principles and practice of Stuart prerogative, an event occurred that greatly stirred New Eng...

New England Churches, Introduction_. The current Tory interpretation of the common law of sedition was severe. “In 1679, at the trial of Henry Carr [Care], indicted for some pas...

The undistinguished years of the early and middle eighteenth century, rude and drab in their insularity, were the creative springtime of democratic America--plebeian years that...

Immigration in the eighteenth century was almost wholly economic in motive. The reports of free land and free opportunity in America penetrated to remote hamlets of Great Britai...

Before an adequate democratic philosophy could arise in this world of pragmatic individualism, the traditional system of New England theology must be put away, and a new concept...

Edwards unconsciously admits that the doctrine of sovereignty was reactionary. “From my childhood up, my mind had been full of objections against the doctrine of God’s sovereign...

There was a singularly dramatic fitness in the life and career of Benjamin Franklin. America has never been more worthily represented at old-world capitals than by this unpreten...

The American Revolution remains after a hundred and fifty years somewhat of a puzzle to historians. Much careful investigation has been done in the last two decades, but we stil...

So nearly forgotten by later generations is the American Tory of Revolutionary times that it will be well to examine the genus with some care; for only by understanding the grea...

For many colonials it was a hard and bitter choice that was thrust upon them by the political situation. They had no wish to choose between loyalty to the British Empire and lov...

In the history of the rise of political democracy in America Samuel Adams occupies a distinguished place. He was by no means the first American to espouse the democratic cause,...

The Revolutionary upheaval produced no polite literature in any respects comparable to its utilitarian prose. The expiring wit literature of England was an exotic that refused t...

With the close of the war the question of the times was the urgent problem of the form and control of the new political state to be erected: whether it should be the coercive so...

When one considers the bulk of commentary that has grown up about the Constitution, it is surprising how little abstract political speculation accompanied its making and adoptio...

Of this great age of American political thought, two important characteristics emerge: it was overwhelmingly English in its antecedents; and it was already differentiating its p...

The dramatic impact of the French Revolution upon a situation which for months had been overwrought entailed disturbing consequences. Within a week after the setting up of the n...

The change which came over political thought in America in consequence of the rise of French Jacobin philosophy is not inadequately revealed in the writings of two men, quite di...

To turn from the field of political theory to the realm of polite literature is not to quit the partisan battle-ground. The long struggle between Federalist and Democrat was too...

I. English Backgrounds: For the broader European movements, see Preserved Smith, _The Age of the Reformation_ (New York, 1920). For English movements, see David Masson, _Life of...

II. Increase Mather: The extensive bibliography is confused, and a definitive list is being prepared by T. J. Holmes and G. P. Winship. Few works have been reprinted, and about...

New Stock: See John R. Commons, _Races and Immigrants in America_ (New York, 1902, 1920). F. R. Diffenderfer, _The German Immigrants into Pennsylvania ..._ (New York, 1900). _Th...

I. Imperial Sovereignty and Home Rule: For the literature of the Revolutionary period, see the invaluable _Literary History of the American Revolution_, by Moses Coit Tyler (2 v...

I. Agrarianism and Capitalism: A vivid account of the party struggles of the time is given in Claude G. Bowers, _Jefferson and Hamilton_ (Boston, 1925), with full bibliography....

I. The Impact of the French Revolution: Abundant material will be found in Charles D. Hazen, _Contemporary American Opinion of the French Revolution_ (Baltimore, 1897, _Johns Ho...

I. Jeffersonianism an expression of native conditions. Interpreted in terms of Physiocratic agrarianism, natural rights. Terminable nature of compact the source of states-rights...

II. John C. Calhoun--Realist. His influence--destroyed Jeffersonianism for the new South. A southern Puritan. His early career--a nationalist. The year 1828 a turning-point--rec...

I. Andrew Jackson--Agrarian Liberal: The rise of western equalitarianism. Federalist contempt for a Democrat. Jackson our first great popular leader. Characteristics. Early drif...

I. Philadelphia the capital of the older American culture. Its contributions to the Revolutionary debates. Its economic prospects curtailed by topography. Its decline with the r...

The New England renaissance the last expression in America of eighteenth-century revolutionary thought. Given a native ethical bias. Twin tendencies of earlier New England. Stat...

I. Old Boston: Conservatism of temper--a reaction from the revolutionary enthusiasm of ’76. Emphasized by refusal to entertain French romantic theories. The renaissance delayed...

I. The stir in the church. French romanticism and Unitarianism. The conservative reaction. The dilemma of Calvinism--efforts to escape the horns of dogma. The growth of rational...

I. The Genesis of Transcendentalism: An expression of metaphysical Utopianism. Idealism long starved in New England. Derived from Unitarian doctrine of the open mind. German ide...

II. Brahminism and history: The New England school: Ticknor, Jared Sparks--methods of the latter. Bancroft’s _History of the United States_--an attempt at a democratic interpret...

To those who follow the main-traveled road of American experience, as we know it today, the mind of the old South seems curiously remote. It is so archaic, so wholly apart from...

The history of the Old Dominion is an easy chapter in the textbook of economic determinism. It is a modern instance that exemplifies the law of land distribution and political c...

To the young Virginia Republicans of the year 1800, Jeffersonianism seemed to be a comprehensive social philosophy peculiarly adapted to their needs. It offered a practical and...

Unlike John Taylor of Caroline, whose fame lies buried with his cause, the reputation of John Marshall has taken on immense proportions with the later triumph of his principles....

The literary renaissance of Virginia began in the late twenties when the English romantic movement reached the quiet plantations. Till then the Virginia mind had lingered pleasa...

In the early thirties came the transition in Virginia from the essay-sketch that had prevailed since the appearance of _The British Spy_, to the full blown romance of love and a...

By the year 1824 a change was becoming evident in the South that was to affect profoundly the course of southern thought in regard to her peculiar institution. The passing of th...

An economic revolution so widespread and profound could not fail to impress its ideals on current political thought. In the year 1825 three streams of tendency were flowing thro...

The pronounced drift of southern thought, in the years immediately preceding the Civil War, towards the ideal of the Greek democracy, has been too carelessly forgotten by later...

In the year 1825 the little city of Charleston, with its fourteen thousand whites and more than fourteen thousand blacks, was perhaps the most delightful spot in America. The Me...

While Calhoun was instructing the South in the theory of a Greek democracy, other sons of the South were learning, in the new world to which they had removed, the ways of a very...

Clay’s pleasant dream of a paternalistic prosperity for America got its first rude awakening from General Jackson and his motley following of western equalitarians and eastern p...

When the West began to appear in literature in the late twenties and early thirties, it was the Ohio valley that became the beneficiary of the new interest, and over the vast re...

The literature of the Middle East during the years of the romantic revolution, unlike contemporary letters north and south, revealed no coalescing unity of spirit and purpose; i...

In the year 1800 one might well have expected Philadelphia to retain indefinitely its proud ascendency as the cultural capital of America. For decades no other colonial city had...

Very different from the gay and cultivated Quaker City was the commercial port of Manhattan, with its Yankee energy ingrafted on the stolid Dutch stock, which fate seized upon a...

Fortunately the stolid New York of earlier days was not to pass away without bequeathing to posterity some fragments of its chronicles. In the midst of a pleasant society of sma...

Satire aimed at the new gospel of progress is not infrequent in Paulding. In _Koningsmarke_ he drew the picture of a politician that was perhaps intended for a burlesque of Henr...

Fenimore Cooper is one of the puzzling figures of his generation. In his substantial character was embodied what may well appear no more than a bundle of contradictions. Romance...

It was during the bustling decade of the forties, when the agrarian unrest in York State was putting in jeopardy the old manorial system, that Cooper’s antagonism to the spirit...

Such lax doctrine, to Cooper, was the evil fruit of the spirit of lawlessness that was laying a blight upon America. A retributive bullet ends the fierce career of old Thousanda...

It was the good fortune of New York to draw to the bustling city some of the best and most vigorous minds of New England. If the sons of Yankees flocked thither, the sons of Pur...

them in the exaltation of agriculture over other forms of labor, as he had come to agree with them in their social-mindedness. Greeley may be accounted a stepson, at least, of t...

The New England renaissance was tardy in appearing and of brief duration, yet in the few years of its extraordinary vigor it imparted a stimulus to American life that its histor...

The year 1815, that brought to a close the unfortunate American venture into the maelstrom of the Napoleonic wars, may be conveniently taken to mark for New England the transiti...

Into the complacent little Boston of Fisher Ames and Robert Treat Paine came the Embargo, the War of 1812, and the industrial revolution to upset its static order and destroy it...

To write a history of Massachusetts, I confess, is not inviting to an expansive thinker.... From 1790 to 1820 there was not a book, a speech, a conversation, or a thought in the...

The first stirrings of new life were felt within the church, the repository of such learning as Harvard College disseminated through the Massachusetts villages. For two hundred...

Unitarianism was generous in its bequests to New England, and amongst its contributions to a nobler life not the least valuable was its warm social sympathy. Channing’s tender s...

The flintiest character amongst the New England militants, curiously enough, was the son of an immigrant family, brought to Newburyport and abandoned by a shiftless father. Will...

From the doctrine of the open mind that was the core of Unitarianism, came the transcendental movement that marked the full flowering of the New England renaissance. It was the...

What shall be the substance of my shrift? Adam in the garden, I am to new-name all the beasts of the field and all the gods in the sky. I am to invite men drenched in Time to re...

“Wisdom crieth in the streets and no man regardeth her”; yet “she teacheth temperance and forethought, justice and fortitude; than which men can have in their life nothing more...

Theodore Parker was described by one of his biographers as “the best working-plan of an American yet produced,” and by a fellow minister as “a conscience since Luther unsurpasse...

The fame of Margaret Fuller has waned greatly since her vivid personality was blotted out in the prime of her intellectual development. Misunderstood in her own time, caricature...

The discussion of the New England mind hitherto has kept pretty much to the outskirts of Boston, to Concord and Roxbury and undistinguished precincts; it has not penetrated the...

After his immersion for some months in the Utopian dreams of Brook Farm, Miles Coverdale in _The Blithedale Romance_ discovered that he had drifted far from reality. “No sagacio...

Since the death of Holmes in 1894, his reputation has shrunk and dwindled with that of his group. With the rise of other literary schools, New England standards have been submit...

Information will be found in the _Library of Southern Literature_ by E. A. Alderman and others (16 vols., New Orleans, 1908-13) and in Montrose J. Moses, _Literature of the Sout...

Biographies: W. E. Dodd, in _Statesmen of the Old South_ (New York, 1911). H. von Holst, _John C. Calhoun (American Statesmen Series_, Boston, 1882, 1899). W. M. Meigs, _Life of...

Excellent bibliographical material for western literature will be found in Ralph Leslie Rusk, _The Literature of the Middle Western Frontier_ (2 vols., New York, 1925). See also...

For Philadelphia, see Ellis Paxson Oberholtzer, _The Literary History of Philadelphia_ (Philadelphia, 1906). Also H. M. Ellis, “Joseph Dennie and His Circle” (_University of Tex...

I. For the political backgrounds, see A. E. Morse, _The Federalist Party in Massachusetts to the Year 1800_ (Princeton, 1909). W. A. Robinson, _Jeffersonian Democracy in New Eng...

Abolitionism: Sufficient materials will be found in Garrison, _Life of William Lloyd Garrison_ (4 vols., New York, 1885-1889). See also Catherine N. Birney, _Sarah and Angelina...

I. Transcendentalism: The literature is abundant. See _The Dial_ (4 vols., Boston, 1840-1844).--_The Harbinger_ (4 vols., New York, 1844-1848).--Harold Clarke Goddard, _Studies...

II. Nathaniel Hawthorne: _Works_ (12 vols., Boston, 1871-76; Fireside Edition, 12 vols., Boston, 1879; Riverside Edition, 12 vols., Boston, 1883; Standard Library Edition, 15 vo...

1917, and the reaction to it following the war. Parrington called this period of liberalism the “great stock-taking venture.” These liberals announced that the democratic hopes...

Changes in traditional economies after the Civil War. The rise of American industrialism and the conquest of nature by science. The age of the middle class. The last flare-up of...

I. Free America: Half a continent awaiting preëmption; new raw materials--oil, steel, copper, coal. A new technique of exploitation--capital, transportation, machinery. Philosop...

I. Disintegration and Reintegration: Two forces creating a new ideology, science and the machine. The decay of the older theological, political mind, and the emergence of an urb...

II. The Farmer Considers Politics: His intellectual equipment--homespun theories derided by the schools. The movement of organization: The Grange, The Alliance, Populism. The fl...

I. [Industrialism and the American theory of freedom: Rise of labor unions. Passing of the frontier. Incoming of German Socialists and the recovery of the doctrine of class war...

I. [Two Worlds: The aristocratic clinging to the romance of the past; the plebeian agrarian joining with the Middle Border in its protest against plutocracy. Tom A. Watson. The...

1. [Movements of Liberalism: Three periods: 1790-1912; 1820-1860; 1903-1917. Since 1870 three attitudes towards democracy: (1) It has been achieved but the machine needs closer...

I. [The War and Liberalism: The reaction developed a many-sided attack on the liberalisms of the preceding period. The older intellectuals had abandoned French equalitarian demo...

When America laid aside its arms after Appomattox and turned back to the pursuits of peace it was well advanced toward the goal set by Alexander Hamilton three-quarters of a cen...

The pot was boiling briskly in America in the tumultuous post-war years. The country had definitely entered upon its freedom and was settling its disordered household to suit it...

It was in the seventies that good taste reached its lowest ebb. Not only in America, but in England as well, where rebels like William Morris were contemptuously rejecting a mac...

his life he suffered from the petty inhibitions of his origins. He could not throw off the frontier--its psychology and its morality were too deeply intertwined with his primiti...

Unlike as were Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Walt Whitman, and Mark Twain, they belonged equally to an America that was passing. In consequence of the silent drift towards consolidatio...

For many thoughtful Americans the welter of frontier individualism was a severe trial to their faith in American institutions. An ambitious industrialism colliding with a shambl...

The figures of the Gilded Age, colossal yet grotesque, belonged to an America that was passing. Another world of thought and experience was rising above the horizon--a world in...

In the welter of change that resulted from the revolutionary transitions of the Gilded Age, one man at least stood apart, skeptical about the worth of the current revolutions, u...

It was not till the eighties that the movement of realism in fiction began to excite wide interest, and then began a brisk and often acrimonious discussion of the merits and sho...

The quarter-century between the panic of 1873 that rudely disturbed the revelry of the Great Barbecue, and the campaign of 1896 that broke the agrarian opposition to capitalism,...

The Middle Border was the first to recover from the heady romanticisms of Whiggery. The malady of preëmption and exploitation quickly ran its course there and after the first en...

With its heritage of Jacksonianism it was natural for the agrarian movement to attempt to carry further the exploration of the democratic principle, seeking to complete the prog...

It was not till the end of the eighties that the bitterness of the frontier began to creep into literature. Its slackness and drab poverty had got into the pages of _The Hoosier...

From the welter of unrest of the later years of the century, with its labor struggles, its agrarian bitterness, its concern over the exhaustion of the public lands and a pinchin...

So late as 1893, in spite of the stark ugliness of Hamlin Garland’s pictures of the Middle Border, American realism was still unlike in temper those somber etchings, burnt into...

[Professor Parrington left no bibliography apart from the works mentioned in the text. It has been possible to formulate one with some certainty by reference to his personal lib...

I. The American Scene. For history of the period see Allan Nevins, _The Emergence of Modern America, 1865-1878_ (in the series _A History of American Life_, Vol. VIII, New York,...

I. Disintegration and Reintegration. For a general survey of philosophical thought during the period see W. H. Hudson, _Philosophies Ancient and Modern_ (London, 1908); Woodbrid...

Henry James, _The Novels and Tales of Henry James_ (24 vols., New York, 1907-1909); _Views and Reviews_ (Boston, 1908); _The Letters of Henry James_ (2 vols., New York, 1920). F...

I. The Plight of the Farmer. For general surveys of the Agrarian movement see Solon Justus Buck, _The Granger Movement_ (In _Harvard Historical Studies_, Vol. XIX, Cambridge, 19...

II. The Quest of Utopia. Edward Bellamy, _The Duke of Stockbridge; a Romance of Shay’s Rebellion_ (New York and Boston, 1901); _Equality_ (3d ed., New York, 1897); _Looking Back...