The Strange Genius of Mr. O

The Strange Genius of Mr. O

Author: Carolyn Eastman

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2020-12-11

Total Pages: 361

ISBN-13: 1469660520

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When James Ogilvie arrived in America in 1793, he was a deeply ambitious but impoverished teacher. By the time he returned to Britain in 1817, he had become a bona fide celebrity known simply as Mr. O, counting the nation's leading politicians and intellectuals among his admirers. And then, like so many meteoric American luminaries afterward, he fell from grace. The Strange Genius of Mr. O is at once the biography of a remarkable performer--a gaunt Scottish orator who appeared in a toga--and a story of the United States during the founding era. Ogilvie's career featured many of the hallmarks of celebrity we recognize from later eras: glamorous friends, eccentric clothing, scandalous religious views, narcissism, and even an alarming drug habit. Yet he captivated audiences with his eloquence and inaugurated a golden age of American oratory. Examining his roller-coaster career and the Americans who admired (or hated) him, this fascinating book renders a vivid portrait of the United States in the midst of invention.


The Strange Genius of Mr. O.

The Strange Genius of Mr. O.

Author: Carolyn Eastman

Publisher: Omohundro Ins

Published: 2021-03

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 9781469660516

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"The Strange Genius of Mr. O is at once the biography of a remarkably odd celebrity--a gaunt, opium-addicted Scottish orator who lectured in a toga--and a tour of the fledgling United States. James Ogilvie arrived in the United States in 1793 as an educated, impoverished, and deeply ambitious teacher. By the time he returned to Britain in 1819, he was a celebrity known simply as "Mr. O" who counted the nation's leading politicians, writers, and intellectuals among his admirers. Following Ogilvie on lecture tours from the Atlantic coast as far west as frontier Kentucky, Eastman reconstructs his path to renown, explaining how and why Ogilvie mattered to the citizens of the early republic. His example inspired countless men and more than a few women to become amateur orators and helped inaugurate America's golden age of oratory. At a time when Americans were eager for national unity, Ogilvie and his audiences hoped that eloquence might knit a divided public together--that educated, elevated oratory might provide a bedrock for citizenship and civic belonging. In Eastman's hands, Ogilvie's remarkable life story has as much to tell us about a fascinating man as it has to reveal about the nation he helped fashion"--


Family, Slavery, and Love in the Early American Republic

Family, Slavery, and Love in the Early American Republic

Author: Jan Ellen Lewis

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2021-10-26

Total Pages: 434

ISBN-13: 1469665646

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One of the finest historians of her generation, Jan Ellen Lewis (1949-2018) transformed our understanding of the early U.S. Republic. Her groundbreaking essays defined the emerging fields of gender and emotions history and reframed traditional understandings of the founding fathers and the U.S. Constitution. As significant as her work was within each of these subfields, her most remarkable insights came from the connections she drew among them. Gender and race, slavery and freedom, feelings and politics ran together in the hearts, minds, and lives of the men and women she studied. Lewis's brilliant research revealed these long-buried connections and illuminated their importance for America's past and present. Family, Slavery, and Love in the Early American Republic collects thirteen of Lewis's most important essays. Distinguished scholars shed light on the historical and historiographical contexts in which Lewis and her peers researched, wrote, and argued. But the real star of this volume is Lewis herself: confident, unconventional, erudite, and deeply imaginative.


No Ordinary Genius

No Ordinary Genius

Author: Richard Phillips Feynman

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 1994

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 9780393313932

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A portrait of the late Nobel Prize-winning physicist recounts his early enthusiasm for science, work on the atom bomb, and inquiry into the Challenger explosion.


A Nation of Speechifiers

A Nation of Speechifiers

Author: Carolyn Eastman

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2010-06-15

Total Pages: 303

ISBN-13: 0226180212

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In the decades after the American Revolution, inhabitants of the United States began to shape a new national identity. Telling the story of this messy yet formative process, Carolyn Eastman argues that ordinary men and women gave meaning to American nationhood and national belonging by first learning to imagine themselves as members of a shared public. She reveals that the creation of this American public—which only gradually developed nationalistic qualities—took place as men and women engaged with oratory and print media not only as readers and listeners but also as writers and speakers. Eastman paints vibrant portraits of the arenas where this engagement played out, from the schools that instructed children in elocution to the debating societies, newspapers, and presses through which different groups jostled to define themselves—sometimes against each other. Demonstrating the previously unrecognized extent to which nonelites participated in the formation of our ideas about politics, manners, and gender and race relations, A Nation of Speechifiers provides an unparalleled genealogy of early American identity.


Collected Writings of Charles Brockden Brown

Collected Writings of Charles Brockden Brown

Author: Jared Gardner

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2022-08-15

Total Pages: 705

ISBN-13: 1611484553

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Charles Brockden Brown (1771–1810) was a key writer of the revolutionary era and early U.S. republic, known for his landmark novels and other writings in a variety of genres. The Collected Writings of Charles Brockden Brown presents all of Brown’s non-novelistic writings—letters, political pamphlets, fictions, periodical writings, historical writings, and poety—in a seven-volume scholarly set. This series’ volumes are edited to the highest scholarly standards and will bear the seal of the Modern Language Association Committee on Scholarly Editions (MLA-CSE). The American Register and Other Writings, 1807–1810,volume 6 of the series, assembles and presents for the first time Charles Brockden Brown’s writing from the final years of his life, including from his magisterial periodical project, the American Register. In this semi-annual periodical, Brown narrates the tumultuous political events of the United States and Europe amidst the Napoleonic Wars. In addition to providing the complete text of the “Prefaces” and “Annals” from the five volumes of the American Register, this volume also includes other late periodical writing by Brown and his prospectus for the unpublished “A System of General Geography.” Each edited text provides detailed information concerning publication history, provenance, and attribution, along with extensive scholarly annotation. A Historical Essay provides detailed contextualization of the geopolitical affairs in which Brown’s writing is steeped. A Textual Essay offers full bibliographical information and context for each edited text and explains editorial protocols for the volume.


Edison

Edison

Author: Edmund Morris

Publisher:

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 801

ISBN-13: 081299311X

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From Pulitzer Prize-winning author Morris comes a revelatory new biography ofThomas Alva Edison, the most prolific genius in American history.


Perfect Rigour

Perfect Rigour

Author: Masha Gessen

Publisher: Icon Books Ltd

Published: 2011-03-03

Total Pages: 119

ISBN-13: 1848313098

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In 2006, an eccentric Russian mathematician named Grigori Perelman solved one of the world's greatest intellectual puzzles. The Poincare conjecture is an extremely complex topological problem that had eluded the best minds for over a century. In 2000, the Clay Institute in Boston named it one of seven great unsolved mathematical problems, and promised a million dollars to anyone who could find a solution. Perelman was awarded the prize this year - and declined the money. Journalist Masha Gessen was determined to find out why. Drawing on interviews with Perelman's teachers, classmates, coaches, teammates, and colleagues in Russia and the US - and informed by her own background as a math whiz raised in Russia - she set out to uncover the nature of Perelman's astonishing abilities. In telling his story, Masha Gessen has constructed a gripping and tragic tale that sheds rare light on the unique burden of genius.