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Reasons for the Rise of American Transcendentalism

There was no one precise "cause" for the beginning of Transcendentalism. According to Paul Boller, chance, coincidence and several independent events, thoughts and tendencies seemed to have converged in the 1830s in New England. Some of these were:

1. The steady erosion of Calvinism.
2. The progressive secularization of modern thought under the impact of science and technology.
3. The emergence of a Unitarian intelligentsia with the means, leisure, and training to pursue literature and scholarship.
4. The increasing insipidity and irrelevance of liberal religion to questing young minds - lack of involvement in women's rights and abolitionism.
5. The intrusion of the machine into the New England garden and the disruption of the old order by the burgeoning industrialism.
6. The impact of European ideas on Americans traveling abroad.
7. The appearance of talented and energetic young people like Emerson, Fuller, and Thoreau on the scene.
8. The imperatives of logic itself for those who take ideas seriously - the impossibility, for instance, of accepting modern science without revising traditional religious views.

Transcendental Legacy

1. Professed post-Civil war Transcendentalist: Samuel Johnson, John Weiss, Samuel Longfellow, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, David A. Wasson, Moncure Conway, and Octavius B. Frothingham.
2. The influence on contemporary writers: Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, and Dickinson.
3. The Concord School of Philosophy founded by A. Bronson Alcott and William T. Harris in 1879.
4. The Movements: Mind Cure through Positive Thinking - Christian Science (Mary Baker Eddy) and New Thought (Warren F. Evans).
5. William James and his ideas on the "subconscious."
6. The influence on Mahatma Gandhi, Rev. M. L. King, Jr. and others who protested using civil disobedience.
7. The influence on the "beat" generation of the 1950s and the "young radicals" of the '60s and '70s who practised dissent, anti-materialism, anti-war, and anti-work ethic sentiments.
8. The influence on Modernist writers like: Frost, Stevens, O'Neill, Ginsberg.
9. The popularity of Transcendental Meditation, Black Power, Feminism, and sexual freedoms.

Abolitionism

Britannica Concise Encyclopedia

(c. 1783 – 1888) Movement to end the slave trade and emancipate slaves in western Europe and the Americas. The slave system aroused little protest until the 18th century, when rationalist thinkers of the Enlightenment criticized it for violating the rights of man, and Quaker and other evangelical religious groups condemned it as un-Christian. Though antislavery sentiments were widespread by the late 18th century, they had little immediate effect on the centres of slavery themselves — the West Indies, South America, and the southern U.S. In 1807 the importation of African slaves was banned in the U.S. and the British colonies. Slavery was abolished in the British West Indies by 1838 and in the French possessions 10 years later. In the 11 Southern states of the U.S., however, slavery was a social and economic institution. American abolitionism laboured under the handicap that it threatened the harmony of North and South in the Union, and it also ran counter to the U.S. Constitution, which left the question of slavery to the individual states. The abolitionist movement in the North was led by agitators such as William Lloyd Garrison, founder of the American Anti-Slavery Society, writers such as John Greenleaf Whittier, former slaves such as Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. The election of Abraham Lincoln, who opposed the spread of slavery to the West, marked a turning point in the movement. Convinced that their way of life was threatened, the Southern states seceded from the Union (see secession), which led to the American Civil War. In 1863 Lincoln (who had never been an abolitionist) issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed slaves held in the Confederate states; the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (1865) prohibited slavery throughout the country. Slavery was abolished in Latin America by 1888. In some parts of Africa and in much of the Islamic world, it persisted as a legal institution well into the 20th century.



 

 

American South


Date: 2015-12-24; view: 1354


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