-The Romantic Movement -Emerson and Transcendentalism -Thoreau's Transcendentalism -Male literary figures -Female literary figures -Emergent painting styles -Popular culture -Slave culture [SLIDE 1] The Romantic Movement began in Europe and spread to the United States. It was a reaction against the preceding era of Neo-classicism and its emphasis on the intellect. By contrast, Romanticism drew its inspiration from the heart. Individualized, introspective expression was central, as was exaltation of the primitive, natural world, as well as focus on the common person. America, with its vast wilderness ready to capture the imagination, saw its own flowering of Romanticism, emerging first in the religious realm. [SLIDE 2] A central figure of the American Romantic movement was Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson was a Unitarian minister in Boston who underwent a crisis of faith when his young wife died of tuberculosis, a common disease at the time and one to which he had already lost several family members. It is clear from Emerson's writings that many of his issues related to the times in which he lived. He wrote: "I have sometimes thought that, in order to be a good minister, it was necessary to leave the ministry. The profession is antiquated. In an altered age, we worship in the dead forms of our forefathers." Having resigned his church position, he traveled to Europe, where he met leading figures of the Romantic movement, like writers William Wordsworth and Thomas Carlyle and brought back his own fusion of Romanticism and Unitarianism in what he called transcendentalism, a philosophical outlook in which the divine is in everything and each person can locate their own separate path to truth. [SLIDE 3] As part of their search for truth and insistence on individual rectitude, even against society's currents, Emerson and particularly Thoreau were active abolitionists. Thoreau's Walden was both a personal declaration of independence and a social experiment. The cabin he built at Walden Pond was on land owned by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Although he actually lived there for over two years, Walden compresses the time into a year and uses the four seasons to signify human development. His writing on "Resistance to Civil Government" or "Civil Disobedience" argues that governments must not silence an individual's conscience. He wrote it in response to slavery and the Mexican-American War of 1846–48. [SLIDE 4] Longfellow and Whitman were two of the writers inspired by Emerson's transcendentalism and call to create an American idiom. They were both influenced by Emerson and both exemplify features of the Romantic Age in America. [SLIDE 5] Even before Emerson's lecture on "The American Scholar," James Fenimore Cooper had created a uniquely American hero in the character of Natty Bumppo, a resourceful frontiersman living among the Delaware Indians. George Bancroft, on the other hand, created an American history imbued with the idea of divine providence being at work behind the crafting of the nation. [SLIDE 6] Journalist, editor, and critic Margaret Fuller was a pioneer for women's rights, including the right to education and the right to work. She also championed prison rights and abolition. Among her other firsts, she was the first woman allowed to use Harvard library. As a foreign correspondent for The Tribune, she had an affair with an Italian revolutionary that resulted in a child. All three drowned in 1850 in a shipwreck off the coast of New York while coming to America. Henry David Thoreau, at the urging of Emerson, went to Fire Island to search for her body, but it was never found. Lydia Sigourney was a more conventional woman, whose writing represented and promoted the less adventurous virtues of the genteel class, but she was a trailblazer in being one of the first American woman to earn a living as a writer. [SLIDE 7] Catherine Beecher was the daughter of renowned Presbyterian minister Lyman Beecher and the half-sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of the abolitionist work Uncle Tom's Cabin. She was an advocate for women's equal access to all subjects of education, including physical education, which went against current notions of feminine frailty. Unlike other family members, including her brother, Brooklyn preacher Henry Ward Beecher, whose speeches on women's suffrage, temperance, and abolition drew thousands of listeners, Catherine Beecher opposed women's suffrage, believing women's roles as teachers and educators to be the source of women's power and influence and too important to weaken. Susan Warner's father had lost his money in the Panic of 1837 and in poor investments thereafter. When the family's circumstances deteriorated, Susan and her sister Ann turned to writing to earn money. Ann was the author of the poem, Jesus Loves Me, which evolved into a Christian hymn. Susan's early novels were appreciated in the U.S., England, and elsewhere for their portrayal of rural American life. She and her sister held Bible study sessions with students at West Point, and Susan is buried in the West Point Cemetery. [SLIDE 8] The Hudson River school of artists depicted in their dramatic landscapes a wilderness that was fast disappearing. They painted the same rugged upstate New York territory where James Fenimore Cooper's novels were set, and their work had the same nationalistic appeal. George Caleb Bingham represented the democratic focus of America in his depictions of everyday life and everyday people along the Missouri River. Although born in Virginia, his family had moved to Franklin, Missouri, when he was a boy, at the Missouri terminus of the Santa Fe Trail. [SLIDE 9] Alcoholism was endemic among the urban poor. Gin and whiskey could be bought cheaply pretty much anywhere: taverns, barbershops, theaters, and sporting events. Whiskey was cheaper than beer and safer to drink than water, which was often contaminated and caused diseases like cholera. Protestant Evangelical efforts to curb drinking among the urban poor, many of whom were Catholic, exacerbated interreligious and class tensions. [SLIDE 10] African-American slaves created a unique culture of adaptation and resistance in order to live within their difficult circumstances. This culture included African elements that survived and were adapted and merged with the American reality of their lives. The familiar tales of Br'er Rabbi and Br'er Fox can be traced back to African trickster tales. Typically, in a trickster tale, a clever character is engaged in some type of struggle with an individual of higher social status but manages to win the encounter through his own cleverness. Sometimes these may be cautionary tales about what not to do in such a circumstance. Trickster tales likely would have provided an emotional release within the starkly uneven social circumstances of African-American slaves. [SLIDE 11] Telling tales about overcoming someone of higher social status was a way to ridicule them and was itself a form of passive resistance, but there were other ways to resist besides humor. We have seen in other lessons a number of examples of active, armed resistance. In this period, the most violent of the uprisings was led by Nat Turner, an enslaved black preacher who felt he had a divine destiny, led about 70 people in attacks moving from plantation to plantation in Southampton County, Virginia. The attackers, who included both slaves and free blacks, killed anyone they came upon, including small children. The rebellion resulted in the execution of Turner and sixteen others, and the retaliation was terrible.