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Full-Text Articles in American Studies
The American Dream As A Cultural Movement, Thomas W. Raskay
The American Dream As A Cultural Movement, Thomas W. Raskay
English Department: Traveling American Modernism (ENG 366, Fall 2018)
This piece investigates the relationship between the American Dream and automobility through a generational lens, assessing cultural change in each renewal of the American Dream. Comparing generations of Americans exploring and reforming cultural space reveals evidence of the American Dream as a tendency for generations to expand to new frontiers balanced by a duty to reform current social space. Automobility multiplies Americans’ options for exploration and explodes the rate at which modern generations engage with different spaces. Now that automobility is routine, Millenials have expanded to the new social space frontier in cyberspace, but a limitless frontier may disrupt the …
The Influence Of Individualistic Ideas On American Mobility, Markus Magiera
The Influence Of Individualistic Ideas On American Mobility, Markus Magiera
English Department: Traveling American Modernism (ENG 366, Fall 2018)
In this paper I showcase the influence of individualistic thinking ranging back as far as Age of Enlightenment on the development of mobility in America since the eighteenth century. My goal is to identify the factors that shaped the evolution of travel. In order to do so I start by analyzing texts from the early nineteenth century, where travel by foot was the common thing. Next I focus on new means of mobility; first the bicycle, and later on the automobile. I aim to convince that modernity's main instigator was the change in thinking brought forth in the Age of …