American Studies Commons^™

Stories, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Roxanne Harde , Editor

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Today, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1844–1911) is best known for a handful of her novels: The Gates Ajar (1868), The Silent Partner (1871), and The Story of Avis (1877). During her life, however, the short story was a hugely popular genre in which she was fully invested and where she made a good deal of her living. Stories were her earliest and latest publications, and they were work that she both enjoyed and employed to greater ends. From 1864 to her death in 1911, she published almost one hundred and fifty short stories in the leading periodicals of the day. This …

Memoirs Of The Foreign Legion, Maurice Magnus, D.H. Lawrence

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Maurice Magnus was 39 years old when he enlisted in the French Foreign Legion to join the fight against Germany in World War I. Magnus was an American expatriot living in Rome—a theatrical agent, tutor, newspaper correspondent, writer, editor, and literary entrepreneur. He soon discovered his error—the Legion he found consisted largely of German exiles, prison-avoiding felons, and contemptuous French officers. Magnus spent about six weeks training in North Africa before a transfer to southern France provided the opportunity to desert and flee back to Italy. The Memoirs recounts his brief disenchanted tenure as a Legionnaire. After his military service …

Color, Countee Cullen

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Poet, playwright, novelist, graduate of DeWitt Clinton High, New York University, and Harvard University, Countee Cullen (1903–1946) emerged as a leading literary figure of the Harlem Renaissance. Color (1925), his first published book of poetry, confronts head-on what W.E.B. DuBois called “the problem of the 20th century—the problem of the color line.” The work includes 72 poems, such as the following:

Incident (For Eric Walrond)

Once riding in old Baltimore,
Heart-filled, head-filled with glee,
I saw a Baltimorean
Keep looking straight at me.

Now I was eight and very small,
And he was no whit bigger,
And so I smiled, …

Signs: Savannah To Key West, Laura Madeline Wiseman

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Signs: Savannah to Key West documents an 800-mile, 13-day bicycle ride in 2018-2019. It starts fifty miles outside Savannah, Georgia, and follows the Atlantic coastline to Key West, Florida. The trip culminates in Niceville to visit a grandparent, a military veteran and an engineer born in 1924. A bicycle carries a rider through place. The voices of family carry us back and forth through time. The best journeys end with welcome visits with friends, family, and stories, those memories that hold us together, the signs that we belong.

A Discourse, Delivered At Plymouth, December 22, 1820. In Commemoration Of The First Settlement Of New-England (1821), Daniel Webster, Paul Royster , Ed.

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To celebrate the 200th anniversary of the Mayflower Pilgrims’ Landing at Plymouth Rock, Daniel Webster (1782–1852), former congressman and future senator and secretary of state, delivered this long discourse to the assembled members of the Pilgrim Society. Always the consummate New Englander, Webster sketched 200 years of American history, surveyed the present era, and projected grand future prospects for a nation barely 40 years old, but with deep roots in Reformed Protestant values and English constitutionalism. Underlying all was his belief that “The character of their political institutions was determined by the fundamental laws respecting property.” Webster’s stories highlight the …

Eulogy On King Philip, William Apess, Paul Royster (Ed.)

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In the heart of New England, on the doorstep of the Pilgrim founding fathers, William Apess delivered this eulogy honoring their greatest enemy, Metacomet of the Wampanoags, known as King Philip, who led a coalition of Native peoples that came close to destroying the whole English colonial enterprise in 1675–76. In 1836, one hundred sixty years later, Apess chose to re-examine the circumstances of King Philip’s life and death, and pronounced him equal to or even greater than Washington in love for his country, military skill, and personal honor. While redeeming the memory of Philip as a martyr for his …

A Daughter Of The Samurai, Etsu Inagaki Sugimoto

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Born in 1874 the youngest daughter of a samurai and former daimyo—a feudal prince under the Takugawa shogunate—Etsu Inagaki grew up surrounded by ghosts of an aristocratic military lineage. Having fought on the losing side in the wars that installed the Meiji emperor, the ­Inagaki family was reduced in power, status, and wealth but not in pride or ­devotion to its traditional roles and customs. Etsu’s upbringing and education were conservative and old-fashioned, guided by the Shinto and Buddhist beliefs her family held. The samurai virtues of honor, ­stoicism, and sacrifice applied to daughters and wives as well as sons …

An Appeal In Favor Of That Class Of Americans Called Africans, Lydia Maria Child, Paul Royster (Editor)

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The roots of white supremacy lie in the institution of negro slavery. From the 15th through the 19th century, white Europeans trafficked in abducted and enslaved Africans and justified the practice with excuses that seemed somehow to reconcile the injustice with their professed Christianity. The United States was neither the first nor the last nation to abolish slavery, but its proclaimed principles of freedom and equality were made ironic by the nation’s reluctance to extend recognition to all Americans.

“Americans” is what Mrs. Child calls those fellow countrymen of African ancestry in 1833; citizenship and equality were what she advocated …

The Heroic Slave, Frederick Douglass

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Frederick Douglass based this story on the real-life heroism of Madison Washington, who led the largest successful slave revolt in U.S. history in 1841. His story is told through the eyes and words of two white men. First, Mr. Listwell from Ohio sees Madison enslaved in Virginia, then a fugitive in Ohio, and finally a recaptured returnee bound from Richmond to the slave markets of New Orleans. Lastly, Tom Grant, the mate on the slave transport Creole, describes the ship’s takeover by its human cargo and its passage to the British Bahamas, where 128 men and women stepped out …