American Sympathy
American Sympathy

Author: Caleb Crain

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2008-10-01

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 0300133677

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“A friend in history,” Henry David Thoreau once wrote, “looks like some premature soul.” And in the history of friendship in early America, Caleb Crain sees the soul of the nation’s literature. In a sensitive analysis that weaves together literary criticism and historical narrative, Crain describes the strong friendships between men that supported and inspired some of America’s greatest writing--the Gothic novels of Charles Brockden Brown, the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the novels of Herman Melville. He traces the genealogy of these friendships through a series of stories. A dapper English spy inspires a Quaker boy to run away from home. Three Philadelphia gentlemen conduct a romance through diaries and letters in the 1780s. Flighty teenager Charles Brockden Brown metamorphoses into a horror novelist by treating his friends as his literary guinea pigs. Emerson exchanges glances with a Harvard classmate but sacrifices his crush on the altar of literature--a decision Margaret Fuller invites him to reconsider two decades later. Throughout this engaging book, Crain demonstrates the many ways in which the struggle to commit feelings to paper informed the shape and texture of American literature.

Hitler's American Friends
Hitler's American Friends

Author: Bradley W. Hart

Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books

Published: 2018-10-02

Total Pages: 231

ISBN-13: 1250148960

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A book examining the strange terrain of Nazi sympathizers, nonintervention campaigners and other voices in America who advocated on behalf of Nazi Germany in the years before World War II. Americans who remember World War II reminisce about how it brought the country together. The less popular truth behind this warm nostalgia: until the attack on Pearl Harbor, America was deeply, dangerously divided. Bradley W. Hart's Hitler's American Friends exposes the homegrown antagonists who sought to protect and promote Hitler, leave Europeans (and especially European Jews) to fend for themselves, and elevate the Nazi regime. Some of these friends were Americans of German heritage who joined the Bund, whose leadership dreamed of installing a stateside Führer. Some were as bizarre and hair-raising as the Silver Shirt Legion, run by an eccentric who claimed that Hitler fulfilled a religious prophesy. Some were Midwestern Catholics like Father Charles Coughlin, an early right-wing radio star who broadcast anti-Semitic tirades. They were even members of Congress who used their franking privilege—sending mail at cost to American taxpayers—to distribute German propaganda. And celebrity pilot Charles Lindbergh ended up speaking for them all at the America First Committee. We try to tell ourselves it couldn't happen here, but Americans are not immune to the lure of fascism. Hitler's American Friends is a powerful look at how the forces of evil manipulate ordinary people, how we stepped back from the ledge, and the disturbing ease with which we could return to it.

Sympathy and Science
Sympathy and Science

Author: Regina Morantz-Sanchez

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2005-10-12

Total Pages: 501

ISBN-13: 0807876089

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When first published in 1985, Sympathy and Science was hailed as a groundbreaking study of women in medicine. It remains the most comprehensive history of American women physicians available. Tracing the participation of women in the medical profession from the colonial period to the present, Regina Morantz-Sanchez examines women's roles as nurses, midwives, and practitioners of folk medicine in early America; recounts their successful struggles in the nineteenth century to enter medical schools and found their own institutions and organizations; and follows female physicians into the twentieth century, exploring their efforts to sustain significant and rewarding professional lives without sacrificing the other privileges and opportunities of womanhood. In a new preface, the author surveys recent scholarship and comments on the changing world of women in medicine over the past two decades. Despite extraordinary advances, she concludes, women physicians continue to grapple with many of the issues that troubled their predecessors.

The Machine Has a Soul
The Machine Has a Soul

Author: Katy Hull

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2021-01-12

Total Pages: 270

ISBN-13: 0691208123

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A historical look at the American fascination with Italian fascism during the interwar period In the interwar years, the United States grappled with economic volatility, and Americans expressed anxieties about a decline in moral values, the erosion of families and communities, and the decay of democracy. These issues prompted a profound ambivalence toward modernity, leading some individuals to turn to Italian fascism as a possible solution for the problems facing the country. The Machine Has a Soul delves into why Americans of all stripes sympathized with Italian fascism, and shows that fascism’s appeal rested in the image of Mussolini’s regime as “the machine which will run and has a soul”—a seemingly efficient and technologically advanced system that upheld tradition, religion, and family. Katy Hull focuses on four prominent American sympathizers: Richard Washburn Child, a conservative diplomat and Republican operative; Anne O’Hare McCormick, a distinguished New York Times journalist; Generoso Pope, an Italian-American publisher and Democratic political broker; and Herbert Wallace Schneider, a Columbia University professor of moral philosophy. In fascism’s violent squads they saw youthful glamour and impeccable manners, in the megalomaniacal Mussolini they perceived someone both current and old-fashioned, and in the corporate state they witnessed a politics that could revive addled minds. They argued that with the right course of action, the United States could use fascism to take the best from modernity while withstanding its harmful effects. Investigating the motivations of American fascist sympathizers, The Machine Has a Soul offers provocative lessons about authoritarianism’s appeal during times of intense cultural, social, and economic strain.

No Sympathy for the Devil
No Sympathy for the Devil

Author: David Ware Stowe

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 0807834580

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In this cultural history of evangelical Christianity and popular music, David Stowe demonstrates how mainstream rock of the 1960s and 1970s has influenced conservative evangelical Christianity through the development of Christian pop music. For an earlier

Class Attitudes in America
Class Attitudes in America

Author: Spencer Piston

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2018-04-19

Total Pages: 251

ISBN-13: 1108426980

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Sympathy for the poor and resentment of the rich are widespread, and they influence Americans' political preferences.

The Power of Sympathy
The Power of Sympathy

Author: William Hill Brown

Publisher: Graphic Arts Books

Published: 2021-08-03

Total Pages: 122

ISBN-13: 1513273671

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The Power of Sympathy (1789) is a novel by American author William Hill Brown. Considered the first American novel, The Power of Sympathy is a work of sentimental fiction which explores the lessons of the Enlightenment on the virtues of rational thought. A story of forbidden romance, seduction, and incest, Brown’s novel is based on the real-life scandal of Perez Morton and Fanny Apthorp, a New England brother- and sister-in-law who struck up an affair that ended in suicide and infamy. Inspired by their tragedy, and hoping to write a novel which captured the need for rational education in the newly formed United States of America, Brown wrote and published The Power of Sympathy anonymously in Boston. The novel, narrated in a series of letters, is the story of Thomas Harrington. He falls for the local beauty Harriot Fawcet, initially hoping to make her his mistress. But when she rejects him, his friend Jack Worthy suggests that he attempt to court and then propose to her, which is the honorable and lawful choice. Thomas’ overly sentimental mind is persuaded by Jack’s unflinching reason, and so he decides to pursue Harriot once more. This time, he is successful, and the two eventually become engaged, but their happiness soon fades when Mrs. Eliza Holmes, a family friend of the Harringtons, reveals the true nature of Harriot’s identity. As the secrets of Mr. Harrington—Thomas’ father—are revealed, the couple are forced to choose between the morals and laws of society and the passionate love they share. The Power of Sympathy is a moving work of tragedy and romance with a pointed message about the need for education in the recently founded United States. Despite borrowing from the British and European traditions of sentimental fiction and the epistolary novel, Brown’s work is a distinctly American masterpiece worthy of our continued respect and attention. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy is a classic of American literature reimagined for modern readers.

The Plight of Feeling
The Plight of Feeling

Author: Julia A. Stern

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2008-04-15

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 0226773094

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American novels written in the wake of the Revolution overflow with self-conscious theatricality and impassioned excess. In The Plight of Feeling, Julia A. Stern shows that these sentimental, melodramatic, and gothic works can be read as an emotional history of the early republic, reflecting the hate, anger, fear, and grief that tormented the Federalist era. Stern argues that these novels gave voice to a collective mourning over the violence of the Revolution and the foreclosure of liberty for the nation's noncitizens—women, the poor, Native and African Americans. Properly placed in the context of late eighteenth-century thought, the republican novel emerges as essentially political, offering its audience gothic and feminized counternarratives to read against the dominant male-authored accounts of national legitimation. Drawing upon insights from cultural history and gender studies as well as psychoanalytic, narrative, and genre theory, Stern convincingly exposes the foundation of the republic as an unquiet crypt housing those invisible Americans who contributed to its construction.

Rethinking Sympathy and Human Contact in Nineteenth-Century American Literature
Rethinking Sympathy and Human Contact in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Author: Marianne Noble

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2019-03-28

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 1108627587

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In accessible and impassioned discussions of literature and philosophy, this book reveals a surprising approach to the intractable problem of human contact. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Emily Dickinson rethought the nature of human contact, turning away from transcendentalist approaches and towards sympathetic ones. Their second and third works portray social masks as insufficient, not deceptive, and thus human contact requires not violent striking through the mask but benevolent skepticism towards persons. They imagine that people feel real in a real world with real others when they care for others for the other's sake and when they make caring relationships the cornerstone of their own being. Grounded in philosophies of sympathy - including Adam Smith and J. G. Herder - and relational psychology - Winnicott and Benjamin - Rethinking Sympathy and Human Contact in Nineteenth-Century American Literature shows that antebellum literature rejects individualist definitions of the human and locates the antidote to human disconnection in sympathy.