Covers important cultural developments in the United States up until the mid-nineteenth century. Discusses the cultural contributions of Daniel Boone, Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Transcendentalists, Joseph Smith and the Mormons, and abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison.

1. A SURVEY OF
AMERICAN HISTORY
The Culture of the Early Republic

2. DANIEL BOONE
• Throughout the eighteenth and
early nineteenth century,
America’s cultural scene was
imported from Britain. Most
Americans read British literature
and admired British art.
• The first home-grown literary
sensation in the United States
was John Filson’s biography of
the frontiersman Daniel Boone.
The romance of Boone’s
solitary life in the western
wilderness captured the
imaginations of many readers.

3. WASHINGTON
IRVING
• In the early nineteenth century,
the population became large
enough to sustain a local
literary industry.
• One of the first writers to make
a living from his literary output
was Washington Irving.
• Irving wrote fantasy stories
about America’s colonial past.
• His best-known stories are the
fairytale ‘Rip van Winkle’ and
‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.’

4. JAMES FENIMORE
COOPER
• In the 1820s, James Fenimore
Cooper began publishing a series
of novels about a legendary
frontiersman known as
‘Leatherstocking’ and his Indian
‘brother’ Chingachgook.
• Cooper romanticized his Indian
characters, portraying them as
‘noble savages’ who lived a
simple but virtuous lifestyle in the
wilderness, which was ruined
when settlers arrived.
• Cooper also romanticized his
frontiersman, involving him in
various colonial adventures
including key battles in the French
and Indian War.

5. FRONTIER ROMANCE
AND HORROR
• Cooper’s popularity in America and
Europe led other writers to imitate
his style and choice of subject.
• Lydia Maria Child and Catherine
Maria Sedgwick both achieved
popularity with tales of women who
are taken captive by Indians.
• Later, Robert Montgomery Bird
achieved popularity with Nick of the
Woods, the tale of a bloodthirsty
frontiersman who slaughters
countless Indians as payback for the
violence they inflicted on his family.
• Portrayals of Indians became less
romantic and more grotesque as
America entered the Jacksonian era.

6. RALPH WALDO
EMERSON
• An American intellectual
movement began with the
publication of Ralph Waldo
Emerson’s essays in the 1830s.
• In his essay ‘The Poet’ (1844),
Emerson urged other American
writers to write more about
distinctly American subjects:
“Our logrolling, our stumps and
their politics… our Negroes,
and Indians… the northern
trade, the southern planting, the
western clearing, Oregon, and
Texas, are yet unsung.”

7. TRANSCENDENTALISM
• Throughout the late 1820s, the 1830s, and the
early 1840s, Emerson also founded and
developed an intellectual and spiritual movement
known as Transcendentalism.
• The Transcendentalists believed the following:
• that both human beings and the natural
environment are inherently good,
• that human social institutions ultimately
corrupt the individual,
• and that the true individual must therefore
seek solitude in nature and develop his or her
identity through self-reliance, without being
influenced by traditions, manners, and so on.

8. JOSEPH SMITH
• Founder of the Church of Jesus
Christ of Latter Day Saints, also
known as the Mormon Church.
Lived in upstate New York.
• Claimed that he received a visit
from an angel named Moroni in
1823. Moroni pointed him
towards the location of some
golden plates on which was
written a lost book of the Bible,
the Book of Mormon.
• Suggested that Native
Americans formed the ‘lost tribe
of Israel’ mentioned in the Bible
and that Jesus visited North
America after his death.

9. BRIGHAM YOUNG
• Smith gathered many followers
and, in 1831, he convinced
them to move west in order to
build an American Zion.
• The Mormons first established
themselves in Independence,
Missouri, until violence pushed
them north to Nauvoo, Illinois.
• After Smith was killed by a mob
in an Illinois prison in 1844, his
follower Brigham Young led the
Mormons further west to Utah,
which was then part of Mexico.
Under Young’s leadership, the
Mormons settled permanently
by Utah’s Great Salt Lake.

10. THE MORMON MIGRATION OF 1846-1847

11. ‘OLD HICKORY’
• Throughout the 1820s, 1830s,
and 1840s, the American West
was romanticized along with
the figure of the American
frontiersman, even as the West
became a dumping ground for
Indians displaced by Jackson.
• Jackson himself benefited from
this romanticization. His military
record from the War of 1812
gave him a popular reputation
as an adventurous ‘Indian killer’
and he made much of the youth
he spent in a cabin in the
backwoods of Tennessee.

12. ABOLITIONISM
GAINS ENERGY
• In 1831, the political activist and
abolitionist William Lloyd
Garrison founded The Liberator,
an abolitionist newspaper.
• Garrison radically called for an
immediate end to slavery:
“Assenting to the ‘self-evident
truth’ maintained in [our]
Declaration of Independence,
‘that all men are created equal,
and endowed by their Creator
with certain inalienable rights —
among which are life, liberty and
the pursuit of happiness,’ I shall
strenuously contend for the
immediate enfranchisement of
our slave population.”

13. ABOLITIONISM
GAINS ENERGY
• Garrison continued: “I do not
wish to think, or speak, or write,
with moderation. … [U]rge me
not to use moderation in a
cause like the present. I am in
earnest — I will not equivocate
— I will not excuse — I will not
retreat a single inch — AND I
WILL BE HEARD.”
• Until this moment, abolitionism
in America had been a patient,
incremental phenomenon. Now,
though, it gained new urgency,
attracting increasing numbers
of religious proponents.

14. A SURVEY OF
AMERICAN HISTORY
The Culture of the Early Republic