Literary Criticism - U.S. Fiction & Prose Literature - Colonial Literature, 19th Century American History - General and Miscellaneous, 19th Century American Literature - Literary Criticism, 18th Century American History - Social Aspects, American Revoluti

Republic of Letters

Name: Republic of Letters
Author: Gilman M. Ostrander
ISBN: 9780945612636

by Gilman M. Ostrander

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Overview

While much has been written about intellectual elites in American history from New England Puritans in the seventeenth century to New York Jews in the twentieth, little scholarly attention has been paid to the ongoing history of what Henry Adams called "the literary class of the United States," considered as a distinct community within the national democratic society.. "This class of reading men and women has always constituted no more than a small fraction of the American public, judging by the sales of scholarly and literary books and magazines from the eighteenth century through the twentieth. Yet their influence on the nation's intellectual development - both public and private - continues to be profound. Republic of Letters is a sweeping account of this literary class in the United States, the serious readers and especially writers from Independence to the Civil War.

About the Author, Gilman M. Ostrander

Gilman Marston 'strander was author of over a dozen books on American intellectual and cultural history including A Concise History of the United States; Early Colonial Thought; The Rights of Man in America, 1606-1861; American Civilization in the First Machine Age, 1890-1940; The Prohibition Movement in California, 1848-1933, and Nevada: The Great Rotten Borough, 1859-1964. After earning his doctorate at the University of California at Berkeley in 1952, 'strander embarked on a teaching career that spanned some thirty-five years, including stints at Reed College, Ohio State University, the University of Missouri, Michigan State University, and the University of Waterloo in Canada. At the University of Waterloo, where he was professor of history from 1971 until his death, he helped found the bilingual journal Historical Reflections/ Reflections Historiques.

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Booknews

American history professor Ostrander (1923-1986) traces the rise of a national intellectual elite back to the American Revolution and from there, back to the nature of 18th-century educational institutions and the reading that was available in those institutions. He then explores how and why those elites were constituted, what their relationship was to the power structures of that world, and their attempts to form institutions patterned after European models while simultaneously forging new institutions characteristic of the developing nation. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)