Category Archives: American literature

Edmund S. Morgan’s Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea is one good place discover the process Puritans expected from each other as they started and joined congregations and took communion. This process has its own history, of course, … Continue reading →

will be posted in links to the right, by title. I may group them together as the semester continues. The first is “The Cultural Dynamics of American Puritanism” by David M. Robinson.

English 3510 Contact zones and transculturation (from American Passages) Has Pablo Tac written an example of transculturation? What evidence from his text might defend that idea? Transculturation: A term coined by Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz that refers to a process … Continue reading →

Adam Gopnik’s “Angles and Ages” is an excellent essay about influences on Lincoln’s language and how his language has since influenced our culture.

An important way to increase your understanding of a text is understand its historical and discursive contexts. By historical contexts, I mean answers to questions like what sorts of events were taking place around the time the text was being … Continue reading →

The The Norton Anthology of American Literature,our English 2510 text, points out how The New-England Primer changed as a result of the American revolution and the influence of Puritanism (see page 354 and the footnotes on 355 especially). How similar (or different) are … Continue reading →

Each bullet point below is a quotation from Vaughan, Alden T. and Edward W. Clark. “Cups of Common Calamity.” Introduction. Puritans Among the Indians. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1981.1-28. The current edition can be found here. Ironically, the earliest New World … Continue reading →

Mortality was a constant part of the Puritan’s lives; they felt death was always very close and this belief affected all the phases of each of their individual lives–not just belief but ideas of family, of career, of the worth … Continue reading →

It’s slightly dated, but this New York Review of Books essay offers brief introductions to several popular books on John Smith and Jamestown. Written by Edmund S. Morgan and Marie Morgan, the title is “Our Shaky Beginnings.” Also interesting is … Continue reading →