(THIS BOOK IS MANDATORY)! The Norton Anthology of American Literature: Beginnings to 1865 shorter 9th edition Total of two assignment, one is essay and the other long answer questions. Assignment #
AMERICAN LITERATURE 1: Beginnings to 1820
IMPORTANT DATES:
1450: Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press begins operation.
1492: Christopher Columbus sales from Spain and arrives in the “New World,” at San Salvador in the Bahamas.
1501: The Spanish introduce African slaves into the New World, at Hispaniola in the Caribbean (mostly to replace the decimated population of Native American slaves).
1620: William Bradford and the Pilgrims, having arrived on the Mayflower, establish Plymouth Plantation in Massachusetts.
1630: Puritans under John Winthrop arrive at Massachusetts Bay. Winthrop addresses the Puritan immigrants aboard the Arbella, saying that they (and the colony) would be an example to the world, a “city upon a hill.”
1728: Cotton Mather dies, symbolically marking the passing of Puritanism as the colonists had experienced it.
pretty much all of the 18th century (the 1700s): THE ENLIGHTENMENT—a general intellectual and philosophical move away from the primacy of religion in determining law, politics, and moral rectitude toward a more rational, sentimental, and secular focus; DEISM; a move toward “modernity” as we know it
1730s: Jonathan Edwards becomes a leading figure in the so-called “Great Awakening”—a conservative, Calvinistic, Puritan backlash against Enlightenment principles.
1763: The Boston Tea Party—in response to the Stamp Act of 1764 (exorbitantly taxing all colonial newspapers, legal documents, and licenses)
July 4, 1776: The Declaration of Independence
1798-1799: Charles Brockden Brown essentially defines the “American Gothic” (adopting the European Gothic mode to the American landscape) with 4 quickly written novels—Wieland, Ormond, Arthur Mervyn, and Edgar Huntly.
CONNECTIONS?
From the beginning, “discovery” was not limited to the perspective of the Europeans. The beginnings and developments of what would become the American identity, then, were chiefly an intermixture of Native, European, and African cultures. From the very beginning, it was a hybrid identity.
The European advantage: steel, gunpowder, and microbes (a result of two independent ecosystems—smallpox, measles, typhus, among other diseases)
Unanimous solidarity among Native Americans against the encroaching Europeans was not always the case—taking advantage of their technology and methods against rival tribes or other personal agendas (the fall of Aztec emperor Montezuma and the Pequot War of 1637, for example, with the Narragansetts and the Mohegans having aligned themselves with the English against the fierce Pequots).
European atrocities were most often committed as a result of blundering and miscommunication, from the split between policy and action. Communications technology of that time had a lot to do with it; it would often take weeks and even months for communications to be transmitted between continents.
The decades-recent invention and implementation of Gutenberg’s printing press most certainly had a hand in disseminating interest, documentation, and opinion concerning New World expeditions, thus directly feeding the machine of European expansion into America.
European opinion in the New World was not unanimous either; there was guilt, protest, disaffection, riots, and mutinies—from moral conflicts, conflicts of interest, and frustration with the aforementioned communications bureaucracy. In this lack of unanimity, of course, lies the seeds of the American Revolution.
The roots of the often-observed “Puritan” American character (more cultural than actually religious) and choice of metaphors are typically traced back to the establishment of the Pilgrim and Puritan colonies.
