AMERICAN LITERATURE

The myths that made America

1.The myth of Columbus and the discovery of America
We talk about the idea of a new world. We are around the 1492 (modern era).

2.The Pocahontas myth, a myth of romantic encounter and conversion

She’s a native American girl, a symbol of a peaceful beginning, with many ideologies and a
powerful myth. The man who idealised her. History of colonisation.

3.The myth of the promised land, based on religious predestination and the collective project of a
new purifies beginning
New society, found home in a new world, far from the religious war and persecution. No churches,
no rules.

4.The myth of the Founding Fathers, the ‘special’ men who fathered and personified the values of
democratic culture
They fathered the country and fought for it, for the values of republic in a spiritual way.

5.The myth of the melting pot, a vision of national unity in a organic community melted in a new
race
The idea of that all men are created equally. The American one. We are in the end of the19 th century,
there are immigrant from Europe (conflictual society because of the class division), moved to the
U.S. (Italy, Russia, Germany, Poland, Scandinavia). Project of equality (regardless of who they
were or where they were born).

6.The myth of the American west, a space of expansion, renewal and pastoral idea
The frontier was moving, that space were everything was possible, new dimension, nature, renewal
from/though violence.

7.The myth of the self-made man, the promise of economic success and upward mobility
Imagine of freedom in different forms, happiness. The reason why they’re still successful is because
there are flexible, adaptable.

New Hempshire's motto: Live free or die (one of the states that fought during the Revolution)
“Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it,
Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me
death!”

FREEDOM is a central topic in the political discourse. The four types of freedom: of speech, of
religion, from want (need, necessity), from fear.

Parltrick Henry ‘chains and slavery’ as a metaphor of being under the UK crown. Millions of people
were enslaved and they worked for free; they’re the founders of the nation.

"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it,
Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me
death!” (Patrick Henry, speech at the parliament of Virginia, 1775)
“[…] Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!“
Emma Lazarus, “The New Colussus”, 1883)

“This will be the day when all of God's children will be able to sing with new meaning: My country,
'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrims'
pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring.” (M.L.King, “I have a dream” speech, 1963)

“Freedom, freedom, I can’t move / Freedom, cut me loose” (Beyoncé, Lamar, et alii, 2016)

Very crucial dates

War of independence: 1776-1783
American Civil war: 1861-1865 (fought to put an end to slavery, considered by many a new birth
for freedom)
Martin Luther King Jr speech: 1963
Governor Wallace speech: 1963
Civil Rights act: 1964 (The year before, Martin Luther King gave his I have a dream speech. In the
very same year, the governor of Alabama (Right wing) gave a speech about Alabama's right to
segregation against tyranny of those who want freedom for all)

Freedom from fear. One symbol of freedom can became a chance. 1963 Martin Luther King ‘I have
a dream’. In the same year, the governor of Alabama, George Wallace, gave a speech (when he was
elected) adopting the word freedom against the tyranny of those who wanted the freedom of them
(slaved) all. [controversy]

Even today, with the BLM movements, police brutality extremely restricts the lives of people of
colour. Ruling against freedom of abortion, which made it not a federal right, but a matter of every
single state, letting the state decide for itself: in Texas abortion is illegal after six weeks from
conception.

The US is seen as a world empire. As a matter of fact, we saw the territories of the united states and
their power over the world basically. Lack of political power of those territories who are
administered by the US. For example the Dominicans cannot vote although they are Americans.
The country with many faces, tradition of supremacy and also of revolutions, protest and dissent .

1776, Declaration: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal and
endowed by their Creator with three unalienable rights: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”

a tradition of dissent, for ex.:

“[I]n the new Code of Laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make I desire you
would remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors.
[…] we are determined to foment a Rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in
which we have no voice, or Representation.”

In a letter dated March 31, 1776, Abigail Adams wrote to her husband, John Adams, in
Philadelphia, urging him and other members of the Continental Congress to keep the interests of
women in mind as they prepared to fight for American independence from Great Britain. He also
mentioned to remember the ladies.
Frederick Douglass was a formerly enslaved man who became a prominent activist, author and
public speaker. He became a leader in the abolitionist movement, which sought to end the practice
of slavery, before and during the Civil War.

What was the main idea of Frederick Douglass's 1852 speech?

Douglass stated that the nation's founders were great men for their ideals of freedom. But in doing
so he brings awareness to the hypocrisy of their ideals by the existence of slavery on American soil.
As a form of protest he revealed the truth on the 5 of July to protest and show the hypocrisy (liberi
voi e noi no?) he was basing his critics (NB: 4 of July was the day of independence) which is quite
ironic because some people were free and others were not.

“What to the slave is the Fourth of July? I answer, a day that reveals to him, more than all other
days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him your
celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling
vanity […]”

What did Frederick Douglass criticize?

Slavery. In his narratives, speeches, and articles leading up to the U.S. Civil War, Douglass
vigorously argued against slavery. He sought to demonstrate that it was cruel, unnatural, ungodly,
immoral, and unjust.

The consensus rhetoric of American studies with its emphasis upon motto “e pluribus unum” had to
be negated and supplemented with a more sophisticated sense of culture as a site of social struggle
(Jose Saldivar,1993)

NB: Immigrants were seen as aliens for Octavia butler (afro American writer)

“The consensus rhetoric of American Studies with its emphasis upon the motto ‘e pluribus unum’
had to be negated and supplemented with a more sophisticated sense of culture as ‘a site of social
struggle’” (Jose Saldivar, 1993)

American writers  wrote about how to makes things right

USA country with many faces, tradition of supremacy

AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM
There are different ways to focus on it. Different process, dimension and levels of meaning
represented by the American Exceptionalism, which also articulates this very famous and
controversial concept American civil religion.

Introduce to the ways that this myths, this narratives, this important and powerful ways to makes
sense of the America, have been interpreted at varies stages of American history and American
culture history.

The first groups of scholars founded what is called American study. They imagined the founding
tropes of the American minds. This was the first who wrote, theorised, commended the American
literature and culture. The new man in the new world or the Virgin land. This rich land where one
could challenge oneself and the universe. They both analysed and created this powerful symbols.
Most of them believed this quite special and exceptional in the USA/American mind.
First half of the 20th century, where the Americans started study. Sometimes in the med 16th and 17th
something changed. Decades of social protests (against the war, or feminist, or civil right), they
contributed to interrogated the nature of this American myth and the also criticised the main stream,
the dominate narratives. They tended to examine aspects like violence, war, sexism. Out of these,
new studies were born, so they tended to include voices marginalized.

This new Americanism could be considered post exceptionalist. There isn’t nothing exceptional,
this is an empire like any other empire. There’s a strong connection between the subnational and
transnational.

The function response to the desire to know where society stands. The civil rights movements
contributed to interrogate these American myths. The scholar tended to examine aspects like
genocide, feminism etc. They were basically trying to remove those stereotypes. In the 90’s there
was this transition from national to subnational. Shift on focusing in the life in the country to what
America signifies in the global stage. In American culture there’s this speech called jeremiad aka a
very long sermon of complaint. For our purpose we are going to identify it as a rhetorical structure
that lament the present and moral evils of the presence conditional. With this structure the speaker
laments these conditions and makes prophecy of doom in order to restore lost glory. As an example
the heat is a symbol of restoring the glory for the fact they think they lost their greatness.

USA becomes a symbolical space for all the continent. We cannot use USA to define American
literature because of the ethnicities of the authors. In other words, is the belief that the us is either
unique/exemplary compared to other nations. In economic terms it means having the opportunity
for individual success, in the sense self-interest is for the common good. That’s why it is still very
important. The flaw is that everyone want to get rich which creates inequality in the country.

American civil religions: an institutionalized collection of sacred or quasi sacred beliefs about the
American nation.

DEFINIZIONE DEL LIBRO of American exceptionalism : is the notion that the US was created
differently, developed differently and thus has to be understood differently- essentially on its own
terms and within its own context (Byron Shafer, 1991)

American Exceptionalism
- Religious – a new Jerusalem. It was the promised land. The first colonizers were the
puritans, religious dissenters.
- Political – we have it in our hands to begin the world again.
- Economic – one of the reasons inequality gets so deep in this country is that everyone wants
to be rich. That’s the American ideal. Poor people don’t like talking about poverty because
even though they might live in the projects surrounded by other poor people and have, like,
ten dollars in the bank they don’t like to think themselves as poor.

American exceptionalism is the notion that the United States was created differently, developed
differently, and thus has to be understood differently- essentially on its own terms and within its
own context.
Byron Shafer, 1991
American civil religion: an institutionalized of scared or quasi-scared beliefs about the American
nation, ‘with its own solemn rituals and symbols’, a ‘heritage of moral and religious experience’.
Robert Bellah, 1967

Myths: ways of making sense of the world

 National (myth and symbol school)
 Subnational (critical myth and symbol school)
  Transnational (new Americanists)

In the contest of American culture there is a motivational speech/sermon that the puritans called
Jeremiad(from the bible, from the name of the prophet): a rhetorical structure that the speaker
laments the present social and moral evils, it makes prophecies of doom in the absence of change,
and motivates the listeners to restore a past stage of glory.
famous slogan Make America Great Again (MAGA) (huge legacy)

Aspiration to ‘a more perfect union’

1. Preamble of the US constitution 1787. The Preamble states that the Constitution exists “to
form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquillity, provide for the
common defence, [and] promote the general Welfare.

"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure
domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the
Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the
United States of America”

2. Barack Obama’s 2008 speech “ a more perfect union” - Obama addressed the subjects of
racial tensions, white privilege, and racial inequality in the United States, discussing black
"anger," white "resentment," and other issues. His aim was to build the image of a son in a
multicultural nation. “the stain that has to be removed “ remind us of jeremiad. We need to
restore this project and make it more perfect. Territorial evolution of the US: (we saw a pic
representing the territorial evolution of the U.S). With the arrival of the new Europeans
meant all arrival of bacteria’s and germs that natives never dealt with.

Two hundred and twenty one years ago, in a hall that still stands across the street, a group of men
gathered and, with these simple words, launched America’s improbable experiment in democracy.
Farmers and scholars; statesmen and patriots who had traveled across an ocean to escape tyranny
and persecution […] This was one of the tasks we set forth at the beginning of this presidential
campaign — to continue the long march of those who came before us, a march for a more just,
more equal, more free, more caring and more prosperous America. […] The document they
produced was eventually signed but ultimately unfinished. It was stained by this nation’s original
sin of slavery […] I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. I was
raised with the help of a white grandfather who survived a Depression to serve in Patton’s Army
during World War II and a white grandmother who worked on a bomber assembly line at Fort
Leavenworth while he was overseas. I’ve gone to some of the best schools in America and lived in
one of the world’s poorest nations. I am married to a black American who carries within her the
blood of slaves and slaveowners – an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters. I have
brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across
three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my
story even possible.
William N. Copley  Untitled (Think/flag), 1967

To recap, we introduced the idea of America exceptionalism, the beliefs. Because of the way the
continent was found and compared to paradise on earth, because of the way the US as nation was
founded, based on the idea of individual liberty. A interesting and new experiment for that time of
history. So because of that, it’s the believe that there is something unique, special, extraordinary
about the development and the destiny of the US.

We have to consider how it can be used as many different levels (religious, economic, political).
The archetypes of American civil religion, the promised land, and the concept of reborn and
renewal in the new world. All of these terms, expressions, ideas, will come up again and again, they
contribute to the American ideas and the religious dimensions. America should be a society with the
love of God, more faith because of the American Jeremiad (the need, the faith in continual
reformation, to improve, to move on and do better). It’s a rhetorical strategy, promise of doom. The
fully idea of public life for the community.

CHRISTOPHER COLOMBUS

So, we shall start in 1776 with the independence, or before with Colombo, or even before with the
oral history of native people?
Depending of the different prospective. We consider him in four different chapters.

1. The actual man in his historical setting

A sailer, an explorer. The new land that he wrote so much about. The first European who wrote
quite a lot about America.
2. Emergence of the myth during the revolutionary period
He was a controversial figure also in his lifetime. He didn’t really know where it was and he started
this operation of colonisation, but he failed this mission. Later on, he became an icon during this
time of history, for the founding father, intellectual, political figures. He was brave, he embarked for
his adventure, his dream.
3. How he became a “ethnic hero” for immigrants in the late 19th century
Millions of people immigrates in the US during these years. And somehow Colombus became one
of them, one of the dreamers again. Someone from a minority group.
4. Native American visions: Colombus as a villain
Anti-hero, he was the one who started the colonisation and the destruction of the firsts nations of
America.

A “new” world ?
He landed in Sal Salvador, a very little island (the Bahamas). Apparently, the place was called
Guanahani by the people who lived there, the Tainos. Immediately he gave this place a new name,
San Salvador (Colombus). Then Watling Island (John Watling).

Why did they make it? To make this place their own.
By naming something you get control over it and other side of the coin, you destroy what was
already there, or the previous name that place meant for other people. Controlling the time, new
name new start, but you are raising the past.

The American literature started with the renaming of these places and items.

1847  Colombus is a national hero. This is the instant of the arrival of the Spanish people in Sal
Salvador. Symbols of European power, Spanish monarch, cross. You can see the native people,
hiding or they all look naked, without clothes (symbol of power and strength, and high social
position), they were consider savage but innocent. At least from the point of view of the colonisers.
People on the background they were searching for God.

C. Colombus, Letter, February 15, 1493

‘Another island, I am told, is larger than Hispaniola, where the natives have no hair, and where
there is countless gold; and from them all I bring Indians to testify to this. To speak, in conclusion,
only of what has been done during this hurried voyage, their Highnesses will see that I can give
them as much gold as they desire, if they will give me a little assistance’

There is a persuasion to sell the new world, this new route to the indies, and to receive financial
resources.

He addressed to the people who financed his voyage. In every word there is wonder. This is quite
crucial how the European approached America. Colombus was inspired by previous reading (Marco
Polo, legends, the garden of Eden). He read the Bible, way of a paradise on earth. You can also
recognised the strategy of persuasion. Good example of early marketing strategy. He had no idea
where he was, but he wanted to mark this historic moment, strategy of a good brave explorer. He
linked himself of this idea of exploration, nobility of the enterprise making a fortune in a material
sense; in a language that was familiar for the Europeans.

C. Colombus, Journal, Friday 12, October, 1492

‘[I] gave to some of them red caps, and glass beads to put round their necks, and many other things
of little value, which gave them great pleasure, and made them so much our friends that it was a
marvel to see. […] They are very well made with very handsome bodies, and very good
countenances. They neither care nor know anything of arms, for I showed them swords, and they
took them by the blade and cut themselves through ignorance. They have no iron, their darts being
wands without iron […] They are all of fair stature and size, with good faces, and well made. […]
They should be good servants and intelligent, for I observed that they quickly took in what was said
to them, and I believe that they would easily be made Christians, as it appeared to me that they had
no religion. I, our Lord being pleased, will take hence, at the time of my departure, six natives for
your Highnesses, that they may learn to speak’

This is about the people. He had been there for just a day. The language is Spanish. Here the natives
are described as innocents, children, ignorant for no religion. Everything marks the others, he has
the power to describe, more interesting of the possibilities of the nature there. They would not
understand why that funny people were there and the act of concurring the land for them had no
meaning. Colombus enfacing this being part of the landscape and it could be declared, simply take
people, which means kidnap people, make them prisoners.

According the some students there, at the moment when Colombus arrived there were around
25.000 people and they spoke 2000 languages, with different traditions and habits. They were
hunters, but some lived in settled communities (agriculture, houses, villages, routes, ceremonial
places). He was more interested or perhaps he was interest in what the land and the people could
mean for the Europeans and their expanding empower. His exaggeration worked, because of the
second expedition. The first people he met were the Tainos. The native population turned in a slave
population, they were hunted. They were mutilated or executed/tortured/burn alive if they didn’t
find gold. In about two years of this, Indians, all the original population was vanished. Many of
them died in captivity, or European diseases.

Around 1515, there was no Tainos left. At this stage we find a two different imagines.
1. A wonderful land, with opportunities (rich with the legacies they left). This is beauty.
2. Genocide and killings. The slavery was the price paid for this.

The information we have, came from this two resources:

 The Diario of Christopher Colombus’s First Voyage to America, 1492-93, abstracted by Fray
Bartolomé de Las Casas (he travelled with him in the 2nd voyage)
 The Life of the Admiral Christopher Colombus by His Son Ferdinand, 1571
In this ‘agendas’ you can read a man guided by Renaissance principles, the nobility of discovery,
the desired of known more about the world. He was seen as a controversial figure, who was
romantic or started the genocide of the Indians.

Broken spears lie in the roads;

we have torn our hair in our grief.
The houses are roofless now, and their walls
are red with blood.
(Aztec inscription in Nauhatl language and Roman alphabet, 1528)

We know there was some native songs, narratives, poetry, stories and religious expressions as well.
They have been inscribed much later.

Native Americans’ poetry, , oral narratives, trickster stories, origin myths, history, speeches,
religious expressions, etc.
Europeans’ travel narratives, diaries, reports, letters, maps, etc

Martin Waldseemüller’s 1507 world map included data gathered during Amerigo Vespucci’s
voyages of 1501–1502. Waldseemüller christened the new lands "America" in recognition of
Vespucci ’s understanding that a new continent had been uncovered

They named America after Amerigo, because he realise it was an unknow continent to the
Europeans.
During the Revolutionary era, riders and intellectuals wonder why America couldn’t name
Columbia. It gives an idea how crucial was Columbus.

This island and all the others are very fertile to a limitless degree, and this island is extremely so. In
it there are many harbors on the coast of the sea, beyond comparison with others which I know in
Christendom, and many rivers, good and large, which is marvelous. Its lands are high, and there are
in it very many sierras and very lofty mountains, beyond comparison with the island of Tenerife. All
are most beautiful, of a thousand shapes, and all are accessible and filled with trees of a thousand
kinds and tall, and they seem to touch the sky. […] And the nightingale was singing and other birds
of a thousand kinds in the month of November there where I went. […] there are very large tracts of
cultivable lands, and there is honey, and there are birds of many kinds and fruits in great diversity.
In the interior are mines of metals, and the population is without number. Española is a marvel. […]
The harbors of the sea here are such as cannot be believed to exist unless they have been seen, and
so with the rivers, many and great, and good waters, the majority of which contain gold.
(C. Columbus, Letter, February 15, 1493)

He’s consider the poet of the American Revolution, one of the most remarkable. He refers to
Colombus in many of his patriotic verses, celebrating him as an unrecognized genius, a brilliant
navigator. He considered him as an individualist in a good sense, sense of destiny of himself,
without have any answer but God. He was described a figure of dissent, kind of rebel. No-
conformist. A powerful symbol in the way he was portrayed in this time.

There are a number of reason why this happened. Colombus as hero in the Revolutionary period:
why?

1) Not British (a new man for restarted, he was not implicated with British colonialism)
2) Oppressed by monarchs (during his life, he was also put in jailed)
3) Precursor to expansion (looking for a way to reach the Indies and to expand commerce, to
improve the condition of living, he became a symbol of this Spanish expansionism)
4) American individualist (he faced great obstacles, embodied the purest form of individualism)
5) Sense of providence (everything he wrote about his view of America wasn’t doubt of religious
dimension, he was always looking for a signs, that God was with him, they were fulfilled their
destiny)

for Philip Freneau («poet of the American revolution») Columbus was a genius, a brilliant
navigator, an individualist, an idealist, a dissenter, …the first ‘true American’

Late 19th century  Columbus: an immigrant himself and an ethnic hero

20th century  Columbus: a villain

Later in the century, when the country was established, there was no more need for foundation
figure. Somehow the last decade of 19th century, because of the massive immigration, he came to be
viewed under a new light. First of all he was an Italian. Huge number of poor people immigrates to
the US, looking for hope, a way to escape misery, not really welcomed by the nativists. He was
sailing for the Spanish crown. He never landed in the Noth America and he was a catholic. He was
seen as an unwanted immigrant, dangerous perhaps, corrupting the pure blood of Northen
Americans. At this point he became an ethnic hero for the immigrants minorities, figure of hope,
transformation and heroism. They needed a sense of their own destiny in this new continent, they
needed motivation and inspiration.

1992, marks the years since Colombus arrival. There was a protests of native Americans, against
what they consider the beginning the genocide; massive combination of protests. For example, in
South Dakota or New Mexico, 2 of October became the indigenous day. It is easy to see why they
consider him as a villain.

More recently in 2019, Trump celebrated Colombus as a skilled, symbol of American spirit. Much
later, in the past few years, is not uncommon to see the beheaded statue of Colombus or vandalized
with red paint (symbol of blood of native people).

So, how do you see Colombus? There are many sides.

Nativists , these people they believed in the superiority of the Anglo-Saxons white people and
viewed immigrants from many other countries as inferior (too similar to Africans). Italians were
considers dirty, trouble makers, criminals and also non white. Negative light. Sometimes he was
consider the brilliant explorer, symbol of progress, but an exception compared to the rest of Italians.
They are represented in a negative term, as short, dark, gross.

“If Immigration was properly Restricted you would no longer be troubled with Anarchy, Socialism,
the Mafia and such kindred evils !” [1891]

American and Italians institutions and organisations celebrated Colombus, choose him as icon. For
the Italian immigrants he represented the way out of exclusion. If Colombus made it, they could
also make it. Colombus was adopted also to Jewish people migrants as symbol of those refugees
from Europe, looking for a new country. Beginning for a new period for these people. In this sonnet
she imagine America the virgin land where every problem (religion, prank) disappears. Even the
Jewish were not welcomed like Italians. Then the Irish, the most big group of Catholics, represented
as drunk. In 1892, an association called Knights of Colombus, was founded by an Irish priest in
Connecticut and he fight the discrimination (Roman Catholicism and American democracy). These
Irish association fights to include Catholics. They were consider corrupted and not advanced
enough, not civilized.

Colombus stands the beginning, and for many other people he stands for the beginning of the
deadly era. 1992, large number of voices of native people where produced and published,
revisioning the idea of discovery of this new beginning, humours parody.

It may be impossible to civilize the Europeans. When I claimed England for the Osage Nation, last
month, some of the English chiefs objected. […] So I said the hell with England for this trip and
went to France and rented a little Renault in Paris and drove past the chateaux to Biarritz, stopping
only to proclaim that everything the Loire and Seine flowed past was ours.
(Carter Revard, “Report to the Nation: Repossessing Europe.”)

On a more serious note, there was many articles articulated that American history begins just the
Europeans note. Pick up one examples of the main ideas that are illustrated, for each of these
transformations.

Race is not something you can touch of a physical thing, it’s a concept really affects in real life. The
idea of race has changed across time, these new immigrants were considered coloured. Italians is
something in between. Problem of colour line (an invention). After the end of slavery, when
American Africans asked for political al civil rights, racism in America were drawing the colour
line, that time people from Europe became assimilated with white Americans (important step, after
WW2).

Paradoxically, Colombus became very important for political and ethnic minorities, because they
have used their intellectual energy in order to empower themselves, against what Colombus stood
for. Native American humours is legendary famous, telling told stories (making fun on the symbol
of Indians). It was a huge controversy. For many was an insult on native symbol.

Why Americans battle and weapons are named after people? What psychological need there is
behind? Geronimo himself was a famous native American warrior. There were wars between them.
Forms of denial, propaganda. It’s not easy to answer. As they belong to a culture that it’s no longer
with us, disappeared, vanished.

N. Scott Momaday
Native American writer who was important for the modern native American literature. He was born
in 1934 and still very active. Writer, poet, artist. He’s a key figure for old generations of indigenous
writers and people who discover their heritage through his works. The relationship with his heritage
is complex because for one he never got to learn his family native language. He grew up speaking
English. His grandfather was a very important figure, he lived though the golden age for those
people. So he go back to discover their legacy and traditions, the heritage was been lost.

The Way to Rainy Mountain, 1969. It’s the story of a veteran, soldier man, who suffered from post-
traumatic stress and alienation. He doesn’t know who he belongs to. So he goes back home to heal
himself and find his identity.

It’s not a novel or a collection of traditional stories of his family, it’s a collection of his own
personal memories. Interesting of mixing genres. He said that for a long time he took stories from
his relatives, until he realise how precarious they were. Near the state of extinction and to be
preserved (their heritage). An effort to discover himself as the product of conflicting identities. In
the prologue and introduction he mentioned his journey to the grave of his grandmother, the last
witness. Unlike Colombo, this is a journey of self-discovery to the place where he grow up, he had
to recover the meaning of who he was before it was too late. There is a sense of tragic loss, but at
the same time there is a sense of cycling renewal. It’s much deeper than we aspect. It’s a journey of
transformation of his soul and imagination, it connects with many other journeys that took place
before his. He adopt the language of wonder, first use by Colombus. Reconnect with his past,
innovative way. America is not the idyllic place, it is a place where one can get the past and also
where many stories found the others unlike the single story that Colombus recognised ad valid (the
Bible). Value of imagination. He’s not celebrating the single origin. So the past it’s made of many
different trends, not just one single route.

“A journey is an evocation of three things in particular, a landscape that is incomparable, a time that
is gone forever, and the human spirit, which endures. The imaginative experience and the historical
express equally the traditions of man’s reality. Finally, then, the journey recalled is among other
things the revelation of one way in which these traditions are conceived, developed, and interfused
in the human mind. There are on the way to Rainy Mountain many landmarks, many journeys in the
one. From the beginning the migration of the Kiowas was an expression of the human spirit, and
that expression is most truly made in terms of wonder and delight”

Vision where time is different from when Colombus suspected or assumed. Time is not linear, you
can travel back in time by going back to the place. Not just the original place, but many places. The
way the soul can transform, human spirit. It helps us imagine native American history which is still
present, it’s not gone.

There is something more of the English language and history, there is more than the USA as nation.

“I do not speak Kiowa, and I never understood her prayers, but there was something inherently sad
in the sound, some merest hesitation upon the syllables of sorrow. She began in a high and
descending pitch, exhausting her breath to silence; then again and again -and always the same
intensity of effort, of something that is, and is not, like urgency in the human voice. Transported so
in the dancing light among the shadows of her room, she seemed beyond the reach of time. But that
was illusion; I think I knew then that I should not see her again”

POCAHONTAS

The Disney princess and the native American woman, who was called Matoaka and renamed
daughter of Powhatan and the leader of the Algonquians living around the Chesapeake Bay, now it’s
Virginia. She became such a powerful symbol of American beginnings. Pocahontas is a nickname
from her people. The first successful English settlement was based in 1607. There is a laps of time
between Colombus arrival and the first English settlement.

In between, the Spanish and Portuguese shipments had dominated the ocean, until the last part of
the decade where the English destroyed the invincible armada. Basically they were able to
challenge the domination of the Spanish and Portuguese. Time of pirates and someone else
adventures, to gain fame or money. In 1607 this group of English men (soldiers) founded
Jamestown. Captain John Smith instrumental in 1607 founding of Jamestown (king James),
Virginia (queen Elisabeth), England’s first long-lived settlement in the New World. This is an
important moment. Virginia is one of the most important southern states, the foundation narrative of
beginning of the USA is based in the south. He was from the English middle class, an adventure and
explorer, voyager. Soldier and he believed in the English mission to expand England. So the English
were trying to replicate England everywhere in the world.
Captain Smith was taking prisoners, he was let to the leaders. Something looked like a ceremony.
We know this story from himself. He’s the only source, we suspect he romanticised a lot. At this
point a young girl asked her father not to kill this man. The romantic narrative became very popular.
1624, first script, 7 years after her death.

Smith: taken captive by the Powhatans.

Threatened execution or complex ceremony?
Pocahontas became the protagonist of a foundational myth of encounter between the Natives and
the colonists that could end well…

What is crucial here?

Captain Smith was a testimonial of the colonisation in the new world. His vision was not really
based on religion, on the desire to improve these condition and this society based on social class. He
was the son of a farmer, not aristocrat. An adventure who became something more.

(John Smith, Advertisements for the Unexperienced Planters of New England, or Any Where: Or,
the Pathway to Experience to Erect a Plantation, 1631)

"Who can desire more [.] than planting and building a foundation for his posterity, got from the rude
earth, by God's blessing and his own industry, without prejudice [harm] to any? If he have any grain
of faith or zeal in religion, what can he do less hurtful to any; or more agreeable to God? What so
truly suits with honor and honesty, as the discovering things unknown? Erecting towns, peopling
countries, informing the ignorant, reforming things unjust, teaching virtue; and gaining [a kingdom]
to our native mother country [...]"

Evidenced of civilisation, erecting town. There was no cities in America compared with the ones is
Europe. Other implication were that the indigenous people did not have their own religion, they
were ignorant, not schools, any culture. With God’s blessing. Way to build wealth for the kingdom
of England. Colonising were act of charity for the native population, enthusiastic supporter. He
offered America as a place for much was to be created.

How she became a symbol for many people and groups in general.

The romantic narrative about how he was rescued from Pocahontas was the central myth of the
colonisation and American beginning. There was an historical collection that Smith collected with
others. He participated in the foundation of Jamestown and he came back in 1609 to England, to
become a testimonial for English colonisation. He published several of his adventures and he
mentioned Pocahontas. He talked as a messenger between the English and the natives. The first
time he mentioned this rescued appeared in 1624.

Pocahontas herself was already dead (20-21 aged) in 1617 while he returning to England. He had
tobacco plantation.

"At his [John Smith's] entrance before the King [Powhatan], all the people gave a great shout. The
Queene of Appamatuck was appointed to bring him water to wash his hands, and another brought
him a bunch of feathers, instead of a Towell to dry them: having feasted him after the best barbarous
manner they could, a long consultation was held, but the conclusion was, two great stones were
brought betore Powhatan: then as many as could lad hands on him, dragged him to them, and
thereon laid his head, and being ready with their clubs to beate out his brains, Pocahontas, the Kings
dearest daughter, when no entreaty could prevaile, got his head in her arms, and laid her owne upon
his to saue him from death."
(John Smith in The Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles, 1624)

Amerigo Vespucci discovers America, by Theodor Galle (after Johannes Stradanus)

"Americus rediscovers America; he called her once and thenceforth she was always awake."

Spelling is regular, it is just old and English was not settled yet. It’s quite mysterious, Smith is not
very clearly. The way it is narrate, John Smith is the author, but it’s in the third person. He choose
this type of narrator because he wanted to be objective, there is a romance like quality. He was
perhaps trying to announce this era of adventure, himself as the protagonist of this romantic
adventure. He was not a noble man, he was trying to project an imagine of himself as an aristocratic
hero, saved by the princess. He wrote it later probably because he didn’t want to scare potential
settlers, maybe he was embarrassed, or in 1624 things have changed so much that he need someone
to champion the colony, someone an insider, a native to represent that English people were
welcomed in the new world. To tell that there was natives sided with the invaders.

We don’t know what actually happened, we might imagine these reasons and circumstances. We
know that Pocahontas was a young girl when she met Smith and later she married another man, but
was really popularised was the love story between Smith and the native girl.

2005, in one movie called The New World, rescued scene.

Somehow there was a chemistry between them. There’s contradictions of John Smith prospective
(he’s scared, he’s trying to save himself). There’s a point of view of the natives, with an
sophisticated and elaborated culture (ritual, initiation, execution).

From these words, she became the heroine of American colonial romance, and the testimonial an
intercultural encounter, that could be happy, successful, if only things went the right way. In 1622
Pocahontas’s uncle lead one of these members … Jamestown. Smith was offering the fantasy and
imagine of peaceful coexisting. Of course represented in a very European term (he used his terms
ad queen or princess). Things went very differently, Virginia was the first colony to introduce
legislation into marriage, in 1662, the colony past an act against mixed marriage. But still the
romance of Smith seen as foundational, of how American relation could have been.

According to them, the Irish lacked "knowledge of God or good manners.* They had no sense of
private property and did not "plant any Gardens or Orchards, Inclose or improve their lands, live
together in setled Villages or Townes. The Irish were described as lazy, "naturally" given to
"idleness,." and unwilling to work for "their own bread." "loose, barbarous and most wicked" and
living "like beasts.

Queen Elisabeth the 1st encouraged the colonisation of Ireland. It could be become a military base.
Favourite Elisabeth’s men were sir, they were protestants and considered Irish as wild people (they
were Catholics). The Irish were viewed as people who lived outside civilisation. Christianity were
considered deviant. They were not famers and they didn’t do anything to improve their land (no
plantation, no cities). They lived alone, described as lazy, criminal stealing from the English. It’s a
very advance propaganda. This left a legacy for centuries to come, the vision of the savage Irish still
have currency in 19/20 century. The Irish became the target of brutal violence. The English were
cruel, with burning villages and campaign of terror. These atrocities would infected the ways with
the Indians (Ireland, same with America).

Francis Drake  war in Ireland and colonisation, they shared memories.

They also wrote about the first native people they met, reminding them the Irish.
The English projected the familiar under the strange, trying to interpretate their relationship with the
Indians. So, there is a connection between Ireland and American colonisation.
There was this associate with savage Caribbean and the coming of a new world. There was a sense
of fear but also fascination. There was practise in kidnapping people, English engaged in this
practice, so it became common also in Ireland. Sometimes just to have the possibility to learn the
language and become translator. These people represented savagery, Indians seems to luck
everything of human being (letters, clothes). Unlike the English, they were driven by their passion.
There are 2 faces of the same coin: hate and love. Two aspects of the same strategy, of
manipulation. It should not be a surprise that the first English settlers described America as an
allegorical feminised place.

The land or even the nation represented as woman. In North America the practise of imagine the
continent or the regions as female is also evident in Virginia, at the end of 16th century. Amerigo
Vespucci discover America. He has symbols of European power, empire, Gods, and technological
power. Perhaps she’s surprise, or invite him to come closer. Spontaneous. There’s inscriptions; in
the background there are some imagines, for example some natives roosting what is look like a leg,
there is attractions but also dangers. Dangers of intercultural contact, the authority of the native is
preserved.

Pocahontas. The first love story set in America. It was also a way to hide colonial aggressions.
Moved by love, rather by power. The Indian princess became the protagonist of this myth of
peaceful encounters, where things could have been fine. An appealing way to frame colonisation.

That’s why she eventually getting married with another man. All of it is made up. The truth is just
between us. Love and friendship, paradise dreamed about by explorers. The director is giving his
vision over an old legacy. The new world is also Europe that Pocahontas gets to know years later.
The new world is discovering what is new, no matter what it is. Interesting at least. The fact that at
the centre of the narration there is a woman who is called princess, who sacrifices herself, signal
that completely European.

"the first English narrative about the first permanent English settlement in the 'new world' centers
on the story of a woman native to the American continent who is discursively appropriated and put
to use in various guises for the purpose of legitimizing European conquest: as an allegorical
representative of the 'new world' in accordance with the connotations of exotic femininity, as a
cultural mediator and supporter of European colonialism, and as a model for assimilation and
conversion." (Heike, 94)

Three ways that European colonisation appropriated the symbol of Pocahontas. She has own
strategy to survival. Somehow will be a vision developed much later when there is a founding
figures for all those native people who survived, who found ways not do die, to live in peace, to go
on with their legacy.

You need to distinguish the public figure with the important symbol she has become later. Just few
of them mentioned and used her.

Facts about Pocahontas’s life

o Born around 1595
o Encountered Smith (she believed Smith was dead)
o Helped people of Jamestown
o Taken captive by the English in 1612
 o Converted to Christianity in 1613 while in Jamestown
o Married John Rolfe in 1614, gave birth to Thomas (the first euro-american person) in 1615
o Traveled to England in 1616
o Attended the Twelfth Night masque in 1617
o Visited by John Smith
o Died on her way back to America in 1617

in the many retellings of her life:

1° part – Smith
2° part – Rolfe

She was used as a trope of colonial assimilation, became a foundational figure but not around
European figures. If we focus on the her myth, if we believe in this story of love and sacrificed.
The narratives of genocide, rape, cultural destruction marginalised. We can consider her under many
different lights.

 Painting of John.G Champman, Baptism of Pocahontas, 1839 (placed Rotunda, U.S.

Capitol, in 1840)
We have the second part of her life, not her marriage, but her conversion to Christianity. She’s in
white represented pure, represent of Jamestown. Behind there’s her husband, painting tells story
with colours, lights, positions, clothes. Spiritual darkness, some of them are not even looking at her.
It was made in a period where Indian wars were the country, just not a vision of peace or of the
perfect conversion of the natives because they didn’t agreed. Her figure like a foundation mother
even if she’s not a politician, aware of her role, maybe she was. Native are represented in the dark.
The way stand and look signal something in the economy. The attention is focused on the light. She
is renewed.

During the colonial period, her tail was a tail of assimilation. We know because of John Smith’s
agenda, that was trying to sell in the British market. Then, when the British colonist were more
settled, they were worse with the natives, and Pocahontas became a narrative of assimilation. She
represented the flexible Indians (the ones who can be converted). She was Christian and with a new
name, lady Rebecca.
This is a mix of fantasy and appropriation, because we don’t know her version of the story. When
she became the only figure of foundation mother, she isn’t represent as much of his wife, but she
become a symbol of peace, the conversion of native savage to Christianity.

The fact that she was a native princess helped when she entered in the nobility and became an
European princess.

Trumpist supporters during Jan.6, 202. U.S. Capitol attack. This is an interesting mix of references,
because in his head is wearing something reminding us of Sia Buffalo Dancer (the North American
Indian/ Edward S. Curtis. [Seattle, Wash.]: Edward S. Curtis, 1907-30). It’s weird, but not so much
to represent American rebellions.

The female Combatants, 776. Etching /The Lewis, Walpole Library, Yale University) Liberty,
liberty. They represent the American colonist and the British crown on the other side, both are two
women, sometimes proud and fighting. Everything became from Europe is represent old, but also
authority, rules. Everything that could not independence of actions. Old customs. The Indian
woman, half naked, signal of freedom and she fight for it, giving punch on the face on a woman
who can call mother. Friendship here, mother and daughter. The colonist being represented as
young daughter were the ones who need to rebel. Borrowing the energy of the new land/country.
Impulsive essence. This indigenous energy was attracted in order to persuade other political parts.
This was true even in the beginning.

Boston tea party, 1773. Beginning of the events that lead to the revolution, the American
independentist rebelled against another formal cohesion, British government, forced the colony to
by tea from the Indian colonies at a higher price, taxes didn’t wanted to pay because they weren’t
present in England. They dressed up as natives, during the night the went to the boat and through
hundreds of boxes in the sea.

John Davis, first to fictionalize Pocahontas story. He was an English writer, not very famous, he
moved in the US and wrote a lot of stories about Virginia. He wrote the story in a book called
Stories from New Jersey. He focused on the rescued scene and ignored the story of her marriage.
This was the beginning of an era, where a lot of story of her were produced.

The stage, the Indian place in the 19th century. Indian heroine but a sad figure, using her culture and
doomed to lose it of civilisation. The idea that Pocahontas got assimilated by white culture and
Indian was disappearing, combined together. Trope of vanishing Indian. It is the myth that Indians
disappear inevitably.

 John Gast’s 1872 painting “American Progress”

Represented by a woman. It has lots of symbols. It became popular because it was easy to interpret.
We can see cities (symbol of technology with ships, bridges, trains). The natives on the left
disappearing like the wild animals. She’s holding a book, education, civilization. She’s flying above
anything else, and she white with blonde hair. There’s the settlers, Europeans, they’re going to
work. Something inevitable, like an Gods Angel. Both of the paintings were done at time were there
were actual wars, between indigenous nations and US army. They were still fighting to have land
and laws. Anglo-American culture, artists and writers, politician, general public thought the Indian
as figures of the past. They were gone, in any case no space for them in the modern world.

When they became dangerous, they became what they called savage dogs. This president, in 1830,
signed the Indian Removed Act. Because of it thousands indigenous people were forced to move to
west of Mississippi river, in a land called Indian Territory.

How was it possible that an Indian princess became so much popular at this time?
Symbolic resource.
It has been used in so many ways, and some of them were judged. Central of the foundation of the
USA. She is also considered an origin myth of the state of Virginia. Associated with the foundation
of the south, original icon because of the events of the narrative that took place in Virginia (first
English colony) and because the peaceful, cultural, romantic counter booster the imagine of
beautiful and epic south. It became very useful for the war. The southern heritage, tradition, as a
garden of Eden. Myth coming from the north with those narratives etc, everything from the north
(thanksgiving). On the other hand, the south were portrayed as wild, romance, love, gentleness,
beauty of the women or places. The north was accusing (in the second half of the 19th century) the
south of a lack of ethic, of exploiting the north America in slave people. Those black people who
were forced to work as slave. Somehow Virginia and the south adopted Pocahontas as a way to the
image of themselves. New England was based its own narratives on the pilgrims.

Pocahontas became one of the first/earlier American feminists. Mary Hay’s 1803, Female
Biography, which is a collection of hundreds of female biographies, she wrote Pocahontas as a
model woman, the princess politician. True woman hood. The true American woman who was
usually cast as white, republican virtues and a perfect mother in this many version of female
empowerment. Pocahontas is confidence and self-minded who could be forgiven to be a native.

She is consider like a new woman who can fight against her father and choose who she wanted to
marry. Women use her like an emblem (proto feminist). Later on, 20th century, there were many
women native writers who gave Pocahontas an ethnic voice.

She was the first dark Disney princess. They omits her relationship with Rolfe. Interesting is the
way she is visualised, the image of her as a young woman. Mixture of ethnic features, the Disney
animator who designed her told that her combine characteristic of many cultures. The movie
omitted everything historical (violence, wars), it just imagine this romance in the wood.
There is the change of spiritual renewal in the new world and Pocahontas herself represent this.

To sum up
o The centre of a foundational myth invested in ideologies of US-American nation-building
o A trope in colonial tales of assimilation
o Key-figure in a non-Eurocentric account of American beginnings (during the revolution)
o A figure of innocence, love, and redemption (not of greed, rape, and destruction!)
o Functional to romanticize American individualism
o The origin myth of Virginia and the south
o A Founding Mother
o An exotic figure of primitivist empowerment
o A multicultural icon (1995, year of Disney movie)
o A precursor of intersectional feminism: Pocahontas represents American femininity as well
as ethnicity: she is a paradigmatic model for negotiating the intricacies of being marginal in
multiple ways
o Native American rewritings: “there is not one single homogenous Native American response
to the multi-layered ‘white’ mythologization of Pocahontas” (from deconstruction to new
interpretations)

She’s the native American who accepted the English and the English settlement in the New World.
She’s also the first American woman who presume her dream of independence. The first of the 20th
century, it was fascinated of what they call primitive, So the savage became interesting in its own
way. The differences in the way that ethnic women had been treated (native).

Paula Gunn Allen wrote this poem. Point of view and there is involve also her husband Rolfe.
Pocahontas is upset, first person who represent the whole world, there’s a reversal of the typical
stereotype the uncivilized native American, especially women. Here she’s the teacher and
civilization as a thing she’s not familiar with. She represents all his people, the colonisers. On the
other hand, John Rolfe is described in those terms, usually used to stereotypes native Americans.
Here she even guess his toughs Why did she saved him, not just once, but many times? For
surviving, his fullish, his liar. This is not a monologue of a person who is alive, the one speaking
here is the spirit.

PILGRIM FATHERS AND FOUNDING FATHERS

Unlike Colombus and Pocahontas gave us a written material. They deeply analysed and interpreted
language, written and oral discourse. They were determined to collaborated for the common good,
of the promise land. The founding fathers were inspired by John Locke. The pilgrim fathers were
inspired by the Bible, where they believe the could found a prophecy destined to them. Two aspects:
the secular and the religion one.

The Pilgrim Fathers were puritan dissenters from England. All pure, sexual repression, religious
fanatism, hypocrisy. Women actually have troubles. Moral corruption and depravity. But, in many
ways they were rebels themselves. Idealists and they themselves were oppressed in England, this is
why they tried to find their promise land somewhere. So basically they migrated to the North
America because they wanted a new democratic society who follows God word. Idea of common
good was based on religion. Puritan imagination were the central of nature of American literature
and writing, culture in general. The puritans were the ones who arrived there in the name of faith,
unlike the settlers in Virginia, they were looking for spiritual freedom. This promise also has a
secular version, the religion promise became the American dream. But it had to be renewed. There
is this mission, promise, believers are asked to be fulfilled.

America as Promised Land > central to the nature of America writing (Obama’s 2020 major, with
his playlist called A Promised Land)

One kid dreams of fame and fortune

One kid helps pay the rent
One could end up going to prison
One just might be president
Only in America
Dreamin' in red white and blue
Only in America
Where we dream as big as we want to
We all get a chance
Everybody gets to dance
Only in America
(“Only in America”, by Brooks and Dunn)

It gives the idea of this promise and dream, in every culture.

“[…] If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous
about him, some heightened sensitivity of the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those
intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had
nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of ‘creative
temperament’—it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never
found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again.”
(The Great Gatsby, F.S.Fitzgerald)

Nostalgia for the new beginning, of something old lost.

Sense of hope and promise, having the task to interpretate life in the right way, no make mistakes.
The dreams were not based in making unfortune, but on the book. It shared sense of wonder, they
had vision of the task but also vision of writing, importance on writing book. Interpretate the Bible
was the key to understand the new world. Because America was full of signs, hidden revelations,
pack to interpretate.
Early 17th century, age of exploration, pirates, traders, slave holders. But also texts, books, major
revolution of human being contact to each other. The way the exchange ideas of the world. They
idea and write books.

The age of text

 Gutenberg Bible, 1454 (first translation from Latin)
 Luther’s New Testament, 1522
 Luther’s Old Testament, 1534
 William Tyndale, 1526 (in English, it form the bases for the following)
 Geneva Bible, 1560 (puritans follow this one)
 King James’s Bible, 1611

For the pilgrims the Bible contain all the truth and their destiny. In addition to this, the Bible gave
each single believer a change, they could talk to God directly. Just God and the believer and
between them the book. They could and they wanted, had to learn to read and write. This was
important for the self-empowerment literacy. The puritans enjoyed the advantages of literacy.

 A sense of promise
 A tale of lost purity, they had to restored building a new society based on this values
 A vision of the work
 A faith in the book

They migrated in New England (Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode Island,
Massachusetts). This religious mission was and is important (American dollars). All these elements
are part of American culture.

Puritan migration started in 1620. They were meant to go to Virginia, the very first colony, but then
they changed their route and they landed in New England, in a place they called Plymouth. They
didn’t come directly from England (before it, they moved to the Netherlands because of the
persecutions and didn’t wanted to confirm the Anglican church). The puritans wanted more, they
could not accept both of the organisations of the church and its rituals, rules, for them it wasn’t
pure. They were guided by John Calvin. His and his teaching were so important for the first
puritans.

1608: Puritan separatists fled to the Netherlands

1620: Plymouth colony (Mayflower, first ship caring the first group of puritans)
1630: Massachusetts Bay Colony (Arbella)
1636: Harvard College founded
1638: Anne Hutchinson banished
1656: First Quakers in Massachusetts arrested and banished
1660: Catholic Charles I king of England; persecution of English Puritans resumed; new wave of
migration to New England

John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 1534

Free to choose what you want, but God knows already. Your destiny is written. The covenant of
works was broken by Adam and Eve. Because of it, people’s hope is just in God.

God’s total sovereignty

Complete lack of human free will
 Predestination
Covenant of Works
Covenant of Grace
 Human innate depravity !

This is what puritans believed:

1) Total depravity after original sin
2) Unconditional election
3) Limited atonement
4) Irresistible grace
5) Perseverance of Saints

Visible Church… Invisible Church

God chooses only people who can become of a visible church.

1st group of puritans: The Pilgrim Fathers of Plymouth Colony

William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation: his account “in the plaine style, with singular regard
unto the simple truth of things”
> simplicity
> personal account

He ruled the colony for 40 years. Everything should be pure, simple, even the writing, without
ornaments. He started his journal a few years after he landed, in 1630. It was an act of faith. They
believed they were repeated what was already existed in the old testament. This small band of
people considered themselves part of a divine plan. On board of the ship, they drafted and
subscribed a compact, known as Mayflower Compact. They decided they would follow a series of
rules subscribed of themselves. It was a civil covenant, subscribed by very religious people. For
many, it formed the basis for the secular US Constitution. It is the result of a white male elite. It has
been idealized as the beginning of the American democracy. People wanted to keep power and
authority in their hand and organised a society. When they arrived it was November, they didn’t
know the land, or something like fishing. They experienced the staving time (like in Jamestown).
They had very bad time, but only native Americans could save them.

They saved the pilgrims. This first episode of support was later made into a national celebration:
Thanksgiving, to commemorate this very first Thanksgiving and help that pilgrims received from
the natives. Squanto, he’s a translator basically, or an interpreter. He became like an diplomatic
agent between the pilgrims and the natives. He himself was kidnaped by the English settlers. He had
learned English. He was very helpful in his mediation.

• Massasoit, chief of the Wampanoags

• Peace agreement between the Wampanoags and the Pilgrims lasted until 1675 (then: King Philip's
war)
• Thanksgiving: national holiday in 1863
• Squanto: interpreter, guide, advisor

 Mayflower Compact, 1620

In the name of God, Amen. We whose names are underwritten, the loyal subjects of our dread
Sovereign Lord King James, by the Grace of God of Great Britain, France, and Ireland King,
Defender of the Faith, etc. Having undertaken for the Glory of God and advancement of the
Christian Faith and Honour of our King and Country, a Voyage to plant the First Colony in the
Northern Parts of Virginia, do by these presents solemnly and mutually in the presence of God and
one of another, Covenant and Combine ourselves together in a Civil Body Politic, for our better
ordering and preservation and furtherance of the ends aforesaid; and by virtue hereof to enact,
constitute and frame such just and equal Laws, Ordinances, Acts, Constitutions and Offices from
time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general good of the Colony, unto
which we promise all due submission and obedience. (Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation)
They were creating a united Civil Body Politic, same community, same body. In order to rich these
objects. This is a statement, like inventing a new country and new political community. The puritans
believed that everything happened for a reason and everything is already written.

“There was an insolent and very profane young man, - one of the sailors, which made him the more
overbearing, - who was always harassing the poor people in their sickness, and cursing them daily
with grievous execrations, and did not hesitate to tell them that he hoped to help throw half of them
overboard before they came to their journey's end. If he were gently reproved by anyone, he would
curse and swear most bitterly. But it pleased God, before they came half seas over, to smite the
young man with a grievous disease, of which he died in a desperate manner, and so was himself the
first to be thrown overboard. Thus his curses fell upon his own head, which astonished all his mates
for they saw it was the just hand of God upon him” (Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation)

This would happen again and again if someone feel ill of Gods punishment. God gave the signs.
These diseased were part of what the Europeans imported in the new world and the natives died
because of these viruses. They were in the Great Book of Life and they were the protagonist, the
chosen people.

10 years later another group of puritans arrived, 1630, second bigger group.

The Puritans of Massachusetts Bay Colony

1629, a group of merchants, all ardent Puritans, formed “The Company of Massachusetts Bay in
New England”
1630: 700 people, 11 ships, led by the Arbella (on board of which John Winthrop gave a sermon)
Sermon: a form of communication and communion, motivational, inspirational, its purpose is to
generate emotion and faith

Group of non-separatists. They founded Boston, Harvard College and they started great migration
between 1630 and 1640. It’s a key document in a American culture.

‘Now the only way to avoid this shipwreck, and to provide for our posterity, is to follow the counsel
of Micah [mentioned the Bible, old testament], to do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with our
God. For this end, we must be knit together, in this work, as one man. We must entertain each other
in brotherly affection. We must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of
others' necessities. We must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness,
patience and liberality. We must delight in each other; make others' conditions our own; rejoice
together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission
and community in the work, as members of the same body. So shall we keep the unity of the spirit
in the bond of peace…
...The Lord will be our God, and delight to dwell among us, as His own people, and will command a
blessing upon us in all our ways, so that we shall see much more of His wisdom, power, goodness
and truth, than formerly we have been acquainted with. We shall find that the God of Israel is
among us, when ten of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies; when He shall make us a
praise and glory that men shall say of succeeding plantations, "may the Lord make it like that of
New England." For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eves of all people
are upon us’
(John Winthrop, A model of Christian charity, 1630 - "the city upon a hill")

Lexical of unity, family, which will recur later on. American Exceptionalism. In the first part you
notice utopian frame of mine, most of these writings and efforts was also based on European
narrative in utopian. There is a strong religious dimension, no mention of anyone else. They never
mentioned someone living in this new continent. Native never considered an alternative. Powerful
legacy of this foundational moment. This sermon has been mentioned by American presidents,
especially during the 20th century (Kennedy, 1961), underling the faith of these people looking for a
promise, an alternative.

We can tell the Pilgrims stories from different angles: constructive rebels, visionaries, victims of an
oppressive society, elitists, genocidal colonizers, Christian fundamentalists, bigots…

They didn’t meant to destroy the natives or civilizing them.

They weren’t the only religious dissenter group who arrived in North American, but they were the
most important in terms of legacy.

The others were:

1) Quakers: society of friends, Pennsylvania; inner light (God in every single human, they were
even persecuted in North America)
2) Moravians: Pennsylvania, Nazareth, Bethlem etc; conversion of the natives
3) Shakers: ecstasy, communalism, pacifism

 Women could be spiritual leaders (preach, read the Bible, something new in Christianity)
 Anne Hutchinson and the Antinomian Crisis (1636-38)

One of the most controversial cases was a woman as a protagonist of a religious controversy. It’s the
case of Anne Hutchinson. They believed in a more liberal form of church membership. Less on the
community, on rules. Body politic should be uniform, unity. She was more loyal to individual
experience, strong woman who started preaching in her own house to a group of women, she
received … from God. She was mistic and she started with harsh controversy in Massachusetts Bay
Colony. An internal fight between people who were truing to get the upper hand. For her, the only
thing counted was the spiritual herself. God’s grace was visible, and predestination. So the fact they
were successful, was the sign of God. They encouraged hard ethic work, you always do your best
(you are a chosen one). And they believed the unworthy would be punished. They still had a sense
of religious authority despite being a dissenters. On the other hand, people like Anne, were favour
of a more individualist form of faith. She was eventually banished from MBC, moved to another
place and she went to live near a native American settlement, at the end she was butchered (also her
family).

With the passing of the years, the puritans met the resistant of those settlers who weren’t hard
believer.

[They thought] that the taking away of property and bringing the community into a commonwealth
would make them happy and flourishing; as if they were wiser than God. For this community [this
meant] confusion and discontent […] Let none object that this is men's corruption […] God in his
wisdom saw another course fitter far them.
(Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation)
He wrote a journal. Always looking for a Gods signs. He governed the colony for 13 years. They
had in mind a form of communalism (democracy). At the very beginning they wanted to share
everything and enjoy the fruit of common work. According to him, Satan and God were fighting
their battle trough this small band of spiritual pioneers. They held property in common, united by
love. Yet, communal property was very demanded, so they were fighting, dispute over property. At
one point even his had to write this about common property. It generated too much controversy.

In the conflict between the ideal and the real, utopia and everyday life, communal property failed.
God wanted otherwise, communal didn’t work so move on with Gods plan, he has another plan for
them (the spirit of jeremiad).

“At Watertown there was a great combat between a mouse and a snake; after a long fight, the mouse
prevailed and killed the snake. The pastor of Boston, a very sincere, holy man, hearing of it, gave
this interpretation: That the snake was the devil, the mouse was a poor and contemptible people,
which God has brought hither, which should overcome Satan here, and dispossess him of his
Kingdom"
(John Winthrop's Journal)

Obsession of interpretate everything always in their favour. In every single episode of everyday life
we can see the transcendental destiny of them. Importance of personal account. Personal life was
the theatre of inner drama. Each days experience should be…
The story of individual life should be crucially important. This spiritual autobiographies created that
later shaped other statement of individualism and of self-account.

They left important marks in the American culture. Obsession with purity, start a new pure life. The
book is also America itself. Writing journal, the liked direct accounts, inspired by simplicity. They
imagined how their relationship with God should be. Importance of legacy. New fresh start.

The Puritans encouraged:

- to read ‘the book’ for signs
- personal account
- self-scrutiny
- usefulness and simplicity
- a direct relationship with God
- the jeremiad

Remember Thanksgiving, national festivity by Abraham Lincoln in 1863 (during the civil war)  it
has a political meaning. There was a political agenda behind this path, the reasons, this national
holiday was meant to embodied the true American spirit. Way to encouraged the idea that the
foundation of the US was in the North America, in New England. At that time there was a very
popular foundational narrative that was based in the south. Spread of promise land, this first
peaceful encounters between the natives and the pilgrims, unlike the reasons between Smith and his
company. Based on mutual exchange. It is a myth, but it has very deep and symbolical routes.
Society who can improve. For African Americans, the garden of Eden was a Heal on Earth. Horror
of slavery. For centuries, people were kidnap and brought to the New World.

CHATTEL SLAVERY

Chattel slavery, this make this form very different form another forms in Europe before of modern
age. Indentured servitude = servant who signs a contract, just for a period of time, they receive food
and the travel to go to the new world, but nothing more. Important for the making of America. They
accepted the give their labour force for a number of years. For example to buy voyage from Europe
to the New World (many Irish).

This type of slavery, people didn’t have any type of right (over their own minds, bodies). They
could be rape, tortured. Their name were chosen by their master, the children were taking away and
grew up as slave (no reading or to meet one another), they could not choose their partner. They just
must work from sunrise to sunset.

The first arrival of African enslaved people was an English pirates, who assaulted an Portuguese
ship. Before the arrival of the pilgrims. It’s impossible to consider American culture without
considering slavery. Even the legacy that nowadays is present.

1619: Arrival of first enslaved people in Virginia Jamestown, on board of the White Lion
“Slavery has never been represented, slavery never can be represented” (William Wells Brown,
1847).

He was thinking the slavery as a system of kidnaping this possessions and labour extraction, that
persisted for almost three centuries. The way that slavery is no known and it still not known, still
forgotten from the chronicles of the westerns world. Luckily there were many free slaves writers
who told us about slavery. They worked in plantation for the productions as tobacco, cotton, sugar.
Slave in North America had children who become slave (just in this country). The slave population
in south America form the majority of the population, there were few white people, opposite in
North America, it forms a minority. Verbal abuse. They were fragile, they had to use weapons. The
master used always very brutal methods.

 Slave labour provided the base for European mercantile capitalism.

Daily forms of resistance + large scale forms of resistance:

- Maroon Wars in Jamaica
- Haitian Revolution (1791-1804)
- American Civil War (1861-1865)

>The Black Atlantic (effusion of cultures of countries that are on the Atlantic and had given black
culture polyphonic quality)

Black Diaspora. People from Africa forces to spread around the world. Slave traders deported them
to the new world. Sometimes this groups of people belongings to ten same community or family,
they could not speak to one another. The Middle Passage, like voyage into the dark. Where you lose
everything of you. You must work in order to make someone else rich and wealth.

Very important thinkers like Adam Smith or Karl Max, thought that slavery was a very primitive
form of organisation, an archaism. This view has been very popular and has contributed to obscure
(in part) the straggle of emancipation, to abolish slavery. The fact the for long time the idea of
American freedom went hand in hand with the experience of slavery, until 1861 when Civil War
broke out.

The Northen states abolished slavery between 1777 and 1804.

The Bible offered a model of emancipation, escape, and freedom in the story of the Exodus. The
North represented the Promised Land.
Which meant the slave states had to count of self-reproducing slave population. One of the major
problem that precipitate in the conflict was what to do with the new territories. If they had to be
slave states or free states. This was the major controversy, and another was the 1850 Fugitives Slave
Act. There was a line separated the two types of state. After this year things became even worse for
the black population, because they can ne recapture everywhere in the US. The famous bounty
hunters, they were slave hunters, catchers, to run after refugees slaves.

Frederick Douglass: writers, abolitionist, activist, and former slave. Comments on the forms and
shape of life in American modernity.
Harriet Tubman: considered “The Moses of her people”, abolitionist and activist known for
organizing the Underground Railroad, a name gave of a route of abolitionists, made of safe houses.
Thanks to which slave in the south could escape to the north.

Borth were considered like “Moses” and it goes back to the Bible. For long time religion and the
Bible have been used to justify slavery. Because in the old testament slavery was a fact and also
because there was biblical passages used to support the inferiority of dark skin people. The dark
colour was consider a symptom of a sin (Noah).
It was easy to could treat the Bible as a resource  Egypt. Of symbols, not just spiritual freedom.
Bible reading was also an opportunity to meeting together  form of political organisation.

The Pilgrims had to cross the Atlantic ocean to get to the Promised Land and the African American
had to cross Ohio River following the north = freedom. And after all of this, the new north was
Canada.

A keen observer might have detected in our singing of

O Canaan, sweet Canaan,
1 am bound for the land of Canaan,
Something more than a hope of reaching heaven. We meant to reach the North, and
the North was our Canaan
“I thought I heard them say,
There were lions in the way;
I don't expect to stay
Much longer here
Run to Jesus - shun the danger.
I don' t expect to stay
Much longer here,"
Was a favourite air, and had a double meaning. Ou the lips of some it meant de expectation of a
speedy summons to a world of spirits, but on the lips of our company it simply meant a speedy
pilgrimage toward a froe state, and deliverance from all the evils and dangers of slavery. (Life 109)
(Frederick Douglass, Cale and trees, 1881)

You can see the echo for freedom and the promises of the Promised Land myth.

“Go Down, Moses” (important singer of the 20th century)

When Israel was in Egypt land
Let my people go!

Oppressed so hard they could not stand

Let my people go!

So the God said: go down, Moses

Way down in Egypt land
Tell all pharaoses to
Let my people go!

Need for mobility. The biblical story became a mask a way to mask the desire of freedom. The
religious motive is still very popular in African American music.

Important religious feeling for them (referring also to their past).

I need you to
Take us to the promised land
Don't just make us promises
It's too late to let go of our hand
They say we need a prophet that can touch on the topics and make it hot as the tropics, well you got
it (you got it)
("Promised Land", with Malik Yusef)

This ain't "bout a dead religion

Jesus brought a revolution
All the captives are forgiven
Time to break down all the prison ("God is”)

“Rosie” (Chain Gang Blues)

Be my woman, gal I'll
Be your man
Every day's a Sunday, dollar
In your hand

In your hand, Lordy

In your hand
Every day is a Sunday, dollar
In your hand

Stick to the promise, gal, that

You made me
Stick the promise, gal, that
You made me

It is a work, prison, song. This is a secular song without references to religion. It’s sang of a group
of people, there are working rumours and then their voices. Important structure of African American
music and composition and it is called call and respond, must be made together. Also nowadays, it
is based on legacy and freedom.

Nat Turner’s Rebellion, 1831

Turner, preacher and mystic, organized an armed insurrection during which more than 60 people
were killed, most of them white slaveowners and their families. He took an eclipse as a sign from
God. It is believed that Turner and his fellow conspirators used certain songs to communicate and
organize the revolt.

It was a massive attack in Virginia of a group of armed slaves against their slave holders, and it’s an
example of how even in such cases the spiritual religion inspiration was crucial. The southern got
shocked. The rainforest laws against literacy and practise of religion of black slaves. Apparently
they communicated through spiritual songs (the importance of them).

All of this varieties tell us the desire of live life with the full in a promise land, in different forms.

1850 Fugitive Slave Act, the Constitution already included a Fugitive Slave Clause, which was
strengthened by this controversial Act. So could be captured and brough back to their slave holders.
No matter where they were, slavery was the law. They were expected to arrest of suspect. Slave was
like an institution present everywhere. Not just south, but everywhere in the states. This meant that
the land of freedom was identified with Canada as another promise land (at the end of the civil war,
slavery, ecc…)

The Great Migration, 1900-1929

There are people in the world for whom coming along is a perpetual process, people who are
destined never to arrive. (James Baldwin, Go, Tell It to the Mountain, 1953)
Of African American people from the south and moved to northern cities. There was a sense of lost,
where it usually happens in migration. Also a book about the contradiction of religion; inspiration
for those people searching a place in the world.

“The promised land topos may thus be seen as a floating signifier that was used by African
Americans to refer to various regions or territories” (Heike, 170)

Always changing, shafting. Idea of reaching out the border of the nation.
The Black Atlantic, useful to understand western modernity. Black culture can be found in many
different places along the coast and those continents that borders the Atlantic.

"In opposition to both of these nationalist or ethnically absolute approaches, I want to develop the
suggestion that cultural historians could take the Atlantic as one single, complex unit of analvsis in
their discussions of the modern world and use it to produce an explicitly transnational intercultural
perspective." (Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 15)

Beyond but also behind, you grasp the movement of people, trades, relationships, which give us a
picture of what Black Atlantic has been, but also the history of transformation. Western modernity
own a lot of this massive movement of people and African diaspora.

History of America is not only just based on the religion, story of exploration, ideal of common
people perseverant. History of employment. Narrative of movement, encounter, struggle.

Back-to-Africa movement
A radical inversion of the puritan myth, took place in the end of the 1920, Marcus Garvey propose a
migration back to Africa, across the Atlantic. He founded a movement, Garveyism. Radical critic of
US society, antifoundational because he rejected the US narrative, that America could be a promised
land. He imagine Africa as a place of belonging, a site of liberation and cultural and political
autonomy.

During the 20s: Garveyism, from Marcus Garvey. Africa as a place of belonging, a site of liberation
and cultural and political autonomy

Second half of the 20s, another level, version of the promised land myth. The discourse freedom,
emancipation, equal rights headed by Martin Luther King Junor; where in many occasions he
compared himself as a Moses for his people.
“I just want to do God’s will. And he’s allowed me to go up to the mountain, and I’ve looked over
and I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not go there with you. But I want you to know tonight that
we as a people will get to the Promised Land. So, I’m happy tonight. I’m not worried about
anything. I’m not fearing any man. My eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”
(M.L.King Jr., 1968)

He was quoted the Bible, also a way to connect to his people and to inscribe the fight into
something more important and reasonable, spiritual than the actual physical fight (which was still
there). More important than politics.

Remember the floating signify of the promised land during US history and that is interesting of how
cultural identities invented and reinvented.

“Cultural identities come from somewhere, have histories. But, like everything which is historical,
they undergo constant transformation. Far from being eternally fixed in some essentialized past,
they are subject to the continuous ‘play’ of history, culture and power. Far from being grounded in a
mere ‘recovery’ of the past, which is waiting to be found, and which, when found, will secure our
sense of ourselves into eternity, identities are the names we give to the different ways we are
positioned by, and position ourselves within, the narratives of the past”
(Hall, Theorizing Diaspora, 236)

There is nothing fixed in cultural identities, in the idea of the nation. A way to imagine the other as
fixed and different, just depends on cultural differences. Past waiting to be found. It’s about the
way we relate to each other, the way we relationships with the past, we build both our identities and
identification, projection and fantasies of ourselves. This is why history is so important, narratives
and myths, fictions, literary works, sources of self-understanding and self-empowerment (even if
they isn’t about power).

THE FOUNDING FATHERS

One of the most powerful massive narratives in US history. They were a group of statement
politician, activists, who fought for the independence and the foundation of the new country. Very
cultivated people (educated in Europe). Democracy as a high debated. Not always sure of what they
were doing, they didn’t know if the republic was a good idea.

For the first time we are in front of a political myth of origin. They didn’t called themselves
“Founding Fathers”, they became them much later in the 20th century. But their vision of fathers
suggests the idea of a family, loving union, cohesion of the nation. Love and paternity. The first who
decide the did not longer wanted to depend on the British. The idea of revolution, fighting for
freedom.

Who were the Founding Fathers? Obviously there are controversies even here, of how many they
were. They are all these people who participated for the independence and was on the American
side in the world. Had a role on the origin in the county.

164 – delegated who signed the Declaration, the Articles of Confederation, the Constitution and the
Bill of Rights.
99 – the signers of the Declaration and the members of the Constitutional Convention
3 – Washington, Adams and Jefferson
7 – Seven, Who Shaped Our Destiny, a 1976 book by Richard Morris: Franklin, Washington,
Hamilton, Jay, Jefferson, Adams, Madison

‘Canonization’ began in the 20th century.

Brillant men, genius men. Ideology behind the vision as divine figures, politicians. American Civil
Religion. Washington represented as God.

George Washington
The first, probably the most well-known, was George Washington. He was from Virginia, very good
general and he was the owner of slaves (he was the one asking for the right to chase his own slaves
if they were to run away). He is mostly known for being the general guiding the American troops
during the war for independence and for being the first president (the presidential ballots were
formed for his presidency, to make sure he would get in power).

Under him, many ritual aspects of today's presidents, also many formal and regulations concerning
the election of the president. [In the presidential election one vote doesn't count, so one citizen does
not actually vote directly for the president → the citizen of a State votes for an elector, who votes
for the president So this all started during the very first election.]

The first fighting was in the 1775, considered the start date for the American Revolutionary War. It
ended in the 1783. Washinton was the first president of the USA, he was voted in not a very
democratically election, a number of electors decided he should be the first president. Even today
American citizens do not vote directly for the president, they cast vote for an elector, a
representative for their state and he vote for the president. At the very beginning they were afraid
that democracy could turn into a tyranny, of the majority of people who were not inform enough to
the right choice. During his election they also made some elements present nowadays, for example
the president speech.

Benjamin Franklin
The oldest member. He’s was a writer and a publisher and he’s important for American literature
with his autobiography. Also a scientist and an inventor, he experiment with electricity. The perfect
example of American man, the model of self-made man. Puritan spirit, favour of hard work, honest,
full of faith. He never became president.

He was one of the leading intellectuals at the time and a man of true American Enlightenment.
An inventor, but also a printer and a newspaper director. He was a necessary figure to spread the
American spirit and to advertise what they were doing. He was a good and intelligent representative
of the founding fathers and of intelligence.

Thomas Jefferson
He’s probably the most enigmatic among the seven. The governor of Virginia, for a time a
diplomate in Europe. He became the third president. He drafted the Constitution and wanted to add
a paragraph against slavery. Actually he had to cancel it because there was too slave holders at the
convention. They decided to leave out the question of slavery in the Declaration until a solution was
found. He imagine that a solution could be send the black slave population back to Africa. After a
couple of century in the US they were not Africans anymore. He was the one who wanted to abolish
the slave trade, 1807. He was considered a benevolent father, but one of the problems was the
relationship he had with one slave. They had this affair when she was 15, 6 children together.

Thomas Jefferson is a good representation of the incoherent ideas that brought about the
declaration: he was first of all a slave owner, but was also the governor of Louisiana, expanding its
territory by buying land from Napoleon. He was one of the first to send out an exploration to not
only discover the land, but also to actually map it.
He is also called the “American Sphinx”, because he embodies many contradictions of the period.
He was elected the third president.

*The United states as a nation is expanding* = Jefferson is one of the main characters in this
function. He also supported an expedition by two explorers Lewis and Clark (they wrote maps
because the president did not know the land, the territories. They wrote about the country).

James Madison
He was the 4th president. He was another Virginian plantation owner and a slave holder. He was in
favour of the strong national government and mentioned the idea of tyranny of the majority. He was
also the father of the constitution. In favour of strong federal government to protect the country and
also individuals from this tyranny. He was one of the most important author of the Constitution,
perhaps the primary author. Sometimes is also called the Fathers of the Bill of Right.

John Adams
He was a lawyer. He came up with the idea of have two houses in the Parliament. He was a delegate
for Massachusetts and an important diplomat in the way he tried to deal with anti-British sentiment.
Because Europe was always considered the creator of civilisation and America was considered far
from their past, and organized and civilized. So a diplomat between the two nations.

He is mostly remembered for his wife Abigail. He had an extraordinary family, both his son and
grandson became president. He was a lawyer and a political theorist. He theorized the government
of the nation there was no way that women could be included in the political arena.
A TV series on him was produced and this contributed to mythologising his figure.

John Jay
He served as an ambassador in Spain. He was from the north. He was the least famous of all. He
drafted the New York constitution and also became governor of New York. He was one of the few
figures in power to ban slavery at the time (under his lead, slavery was abolished in New York). The
first secretary of USA. One of the authors of the Federalist Paper.

Alexander Hamilton
He was the most controversial figure of the founding fathers because he was born abroad, in the
West Indies (Caribbean) → he came to the United States to study. He joined the Philadelphia
convention that drafted the constitution. Being foreign born was considered a suspect, an -
unamerican thing. A famous musical was dedicated to him.
“Alexander Hamilton” was the title and it has a colour blind cast= here for example he’s
impersonated by an African American actor.
Important for the economic policy and one of the authors of the Federalist Paper.

All of them were just men of that time and they were not really sure of what would became. They
were good propagandist, with letters, declarations, speeches, autobiographies and so many other
things. We need to consider the Founding Fathers in a critical way. If we romanticise the vision of
them as hero, something of our historical knowledge is missed, is lost. When they wrote the
Declaration etc… they wrote something that didn’t exist. The American people did not exist and
then the Declaration created the people. They themselves were full of doubts. For example slavery,
in the way they illuded it. Even very personal relationships, much racism. There were many laws
regulating the life of slave people, which meant that slavery wasn’t neutral at all as someone
claimed, it was the result of a political decision, that contradicted what was expressed by the
Founding Fathers in the Declaration.

LITTLE RECAP

American exceptionalism includes the beliefs in (the concept):

- The special role the US is meant to play in world history
- The unique way in which the US was founded (promise in the conquest and the foundation)
- Individual success as a condition for the common good (economic exceptionalism, wealth of
your community)
- The distinctiveness of the US from the Old World
- The resistance of the US to the laws of history (the rise to power and inevitable fall that has
afflicted all previous republics)
- A classless society
- Egalitarianism

There was no birth rights. We are not talking about the absolute truth, just the American identities
and how they see themselves.

What would you consider the most important image of Pocahontas, i.e. the part od Pocahontas
narrative most useful to understand the US national beginning?
- Romantic encounter
- Mediator, translator
- Bridge between cultures
- Symbol of ethic power
- Assimilation
- The rescue scene
- Genocide
- She’s a missing person (we don’t know her voice or pint of view)

Give the nature of their faith, do you think the Puritans were interests in converting the Natives?
- The puritans were just not interested

Lincoln made Thanksgiving a national holiday in 1863: why did he choose to do that during a
vicious civil war?
- To establish a sense of nationhood based on the North as opposed to Southern narratives
- To relieve the spirits of soldiers and their families
- To renew the sense of mission first embodied by the Pilgrim Fathers

The declaration reads: "We hold these truths to be self-evident. that all men are created equal, that
they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty
and the pursuit of Happiness." We know that many among the Founding Fathers were slaveholders
and argued against the inclusion of an anti-slavery clause in both the Declaration and the
Constitution while using slavery as a metaphor for their condition in the British Empire. Does this
contradiction invalidate the Constitution as the founding document of American democracy? Is the
existence of slavery a 'stain' to be erased from American history, or is it not inextricably woven into
the fabric of the nation?
- Inextricably woven
“The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America”
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political
bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the
separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent
respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to
the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by
their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, liberty and the pursuit of
Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just
powers from the consent of the governed, -That whenever any Form of Government becomes
destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it […] when a long train
of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them
under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to
provide new Guards for their future security The history of the present King of Great Britain is a
history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an
absolute Tyranny over these States. […]

We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress,
Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in
the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare,
That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are
Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them
and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved.

This meant a total break with the king of Britain. This Declaration became a model for the
following declarations, in which someone who claims the same inalienable rights given to human
nature, would use the Declaration as the basis for a demand for freedom.

Second Treatise of the Government, by John Locke, 1689

“Section 87. Man being born, as has been proved, with a title to perfect freedom, and an
uncontrolled enjoyment of all the rights and privileges of the law of nature, equally with any other
man, or number of men in the world, hath by nature a power, not only to preserve his property, that
is, his life, liberty and estate, against the injuries and attempts of other men; but to judge of, and
punish the breaches of that law in others"

>Essay on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion, by Lord Kames, 1751

There was a clause that wasn’t included: Jefferson’s passage on slavery removed from the
Declaration
He [King George] has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights
of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying
them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither.
This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian King of
Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where Men should be bought & sold, he has
prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this
execrable commerce. And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die,
he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which
he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he has obtruded them: thus paying off
former crimes committed again the Liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to
commit against the lives of another.

Many founding fathers were awarded that slavery was a violation, not just a human right, but a
revolutionary ideal of liberty. But there was committed to something else (independence). Here
Jefferson was condemning most of slave trade and he was blaming the presence of un-slave people
in North America on a greedy British colonial policies. The only one to blame was the Christian
King of Great Britain. In some way he was absolving the American from its sins (like they were
forced to have a slave by the king, who promoted the slave trade for Britain’s interested).
The Congress rejected the paragraph, they refused to include it against the slave trade and slavery.

Slavery violated the ideal of liberty, but…

- Commitment to private property
- Limited government
- Unity
- Slave-based agriculture
>Franklin, Jay, Hamilton: served in anti-slavery societies
>Washington managed to manumit most of his slaves
>Jefferson was against slavery but did not believe that white and black people could live together

 Very ambiguous legacy

 This meant that slavery could be imposed in the south
 Atlantic trade was banned, but flourished in the south

The children who slave women would became slave, not matter who the father is. The system is
shocking.

Fugitive Slave Clause  slaveholders can capture the slave that escape, fugitives. Responsibility of
singular state, not federal law, so state law.

Three-fifth Compromise  3/5 of the slave population would be counted for determining taxation
and representation in Congress. The people who represent you in the Congress depends on the
number of people who lives in those southern states. They were counted even if they had no rights.

See your Declaration Americans!!! Do you understand your own language? Hear your language,
proclaimed to the world, July 4th, 1776-"We hold these truths to be self-evident -- that ALL MEN
ARE CREATED EQUAL!! that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights;
that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness!!" Compare your own language
above, extracted from your Declaration of Independence, with your cruelties and murders inflicted
by your cruel and unmerciful fathers and yourselves on our fathers and on us--men who have never
given your fathers or you the least provocation!!!!!! Hear your language further! "But when a long
train of abuses and usurpation, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them
under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to
provide new guards for their future security." Now, Americans! I ask you candidly, was your
suffering under Great Britain, one hundredth part as cruel and tyrannical as you have rendered ours
under you?
(David Walker's Appeal, 1829)

There is much anger in this text and he criticized Jefferson and his texts. Walker found in the
Declaration a model for claiming freedom, independence and a right to rebel. Model of resisting
and empowerment. Another important figure was Douglass.
Slaves didn’t know well who they were. They didn’t know about their birthdays and they assumed
the surname of their master. Slavery was based on this, on the trade and like they were objects.

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all
other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him,
your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling
vanity, your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass
fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns,
your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere
bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy a thin veil to cover up crimes which would
disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking
and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.
(F. Douglass, "What to the slave is the 4th of July?" 1852)

Douglass was renamed as The North star (running away for freedom, running away to the northern
states). He gave this very famous speech in the state of New York, in the 5th of July in front of a
group of women and he exposed the hypocrisy of the Declaration and many other aspects of it and
slavery, but at the same time he subscribed to the spirit of the Declaration and Constitution. He
exposed the betrayal of the republican ideas. He had no formal education, but he became so
eloquent to talk about these topics. More than any other his narrative show us that literacy and
freedom were really colligated. Literacy was fundamental.

Slavery was an institution, a system. It was based on European philosophical, scientific notion,
based on racism. Based on bias interpretation of the Bible. Many of them though that being white
meant be responsible for the people inferior of you. So they considered slavery as a charity work.
Labor force for at very cheap and low cost. Jefferson himself wrote the consequences of
emancipation unclear. The un-slave people could become dangerous, out of control, who would
work. At this time it is very difficult to this the US as a multicultural country. The progress
depended on slave labour. The founding fathers decided to differ to issues to later time, because the
end of slavery put at risk the stability of the country. In a some way, they were right.
Later they show up that slavery wasn’t an economic constitution, much less a duty of white man for
the darker brothers.

Douglass was witness and he managed to become a very articulate witness. He was born into
slavery, in the south. He studied that he could impress his audience with his skills. He was a writer,
showing the slavery from the point of view of the kids, and commenting on it with the eyes of an
adult who become a thinker and an activist.
Universal value, republican value, spiritual value. Liberty and equality. The construction become
more and more intense. Reasonable piece of writing (he mentioned blood, shock, a dimension of
horror). Later on he compared himself with the founding fathers (and them to King George and the
English). We are the real interpreters of the republican ideas.

Women empathised with Douglass because they couldn’t vote and had no political rights and feel
empathy for this luck of freedom and right.

SELF-MADE MAN

American Exceptionalism = the belief in the special and unique role the US is meant to play in
world history, its sense of having a mission, its distinctiveness from the Old World, its resistance to
the laws of history (the rise to power and inevitable fall that has afflicted all previous republics),
what it offers in terms of possibilities for each single individual, its ideals of egalitarianism

“The position of American is quite exceptional” (A. de Tocqueville, Democracy in America,

1835/40). He was a French diplomatic who worked in the US for years and who wrote this
monograph of democracy in America. America as a social experiment.

o The absence of feudal hierarchies

o The alleged absence of class conflicts
o The absence of a socialist labour party and trade unionism
o The tolerance for diversity
o The opportunity for upward mobility
o The immigration that has shaped the country’s population
o The faith in the Constitution as a touchstone one can always turn
o The faith in liberal individualism

A nation is an imagined political community (Anderson 1983)

Each one was just an individual and not a member of a class. Dream of a classless society.

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 1835-40:

"Individualism is a word recently coined to express a new idea. Our fathers only knew about
egoism."

"Aristocracy had made a chain of all the members of the community, from the peasant to the king:
democracy breaks that chain, and severs every link of it. As social conditions become more equal,
the number of persons increases who, although they are neither rich enough nor powerful enough to
exercise any great influence over their fellow-creatures, have nevertheless acquired or retained
sufficient education and fortune to satisfy their own wants. They owe nothing to any man, they
expect nothing from any man; they acquire the habit of always considering themselves as standing
alone, and they are apt to imagine that their whole destiny is in their own hands. Thus not only does
democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants, and separates his
contemporaries from him; it throws him back forever upon himself alone, and threatens in the end
to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart"

Centred just one selves. He was an aristocrat. The individual was alone, his own destiny and hand
but on the other hand he could have only himself.

Self-made : made such one’s own actions

Especially: having achieved success or prominence by one’s own efforts

The self-made idea perform as cultural work, closing the gap between the mythical and the real.
You have always the opportunity to overcome your life problems, difficulties. Even if them are
established by the social system. Getting property and material success, but the traditional standards
are about money and status. According to this traditional view. One only needs to be lucky enough.

o First occurrence: 1832, Henry Clay: “Kentucky is in the hands of enterprising self-made
men, who have whatever wealth they possess by patient and diligent labour”
o The billionaires: Carnegie, Rockfeller, etc.
o Horatio Alger, Ragged Dick series of novels: a poor boy (optimistic, hard-working, full of
good will) + a benefactor and he became rich (middle class). They were set in the far west,
 in the metropolis, a farm or whatever. They became iconic especially in the first half of the
20th century and met a lot of migrants from Europe. They were also a form of propaganda in
form of individualism.

They made it for the common good. You get to your goals just if your improve yourself, even there
is a lot of competition. If you improve yourself you inevitably ended up improving the world
around you. No boundaries and you can always move up. You should believe, know the skills and
then improve your business.
It has countless variations, exploring the feeling of loss and delusional.
Arthur Miller  Death of a Salesman
Movie  Joy (women)
Self-made man can also be someone who reach success in other terms, spiritual fulfilment for
example in a very unconventional way.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)  a spiritual version of American individualism and self-
made. The most important philosopher of American history in 19th century and an inspiration for
poets, wristers and abolitionists as well.
In this version of individualism (that isn’t material), he exposes it as a resource for fulfilment of
oneself, not really about social inequalities, but soul searching. Every men are divine reason, or all
men are created capable of soul doing. You can actually the echo of the Declaration. This is the only
quality of all men, be true to yourself. So inspirational, but not focused on society, government,
social justice, only on the individual. Against dissenters, maybe because they were also against what
the government represented. Against this form of institution and society. To protest, in many cases
they formed their form of utopian communities (their dream of freedom).

(Journal Entry, 1833)

"Democracy, freedom, has its roots in the sacred truth that every man hath in him the divine
Reason, or that... all men are created capable of so doing. That is the equality and the only equality
of all men. To this truth we look when we say, Reverence thyself; Be true to thyself."
"Self-Reliance", 1841

 Don’t call me a self-made man: Arnold Schwarzenegger

(California governor, actor, bodybuilding champion) in many occasions he described
himself as a self-made man but here he is saying that there's nothing like a self-made man
there's just a man who has been helped by his friends, colleagues and family. He said that
despite being a foreigner he could do it. He is suggesting that the American dream does not
depend on citizenship but just on enthusiasm, if you've got friends etc. Forcing the Horatio
Alger myth: have someone who helps you and you will help somebody else. Friends helped
him to reach his goal. He also played the immigrated card. Enthusiasm.

 Forrest Gump is a film which gives an ironic version of the self-made man. “If you are
crazy enough to believe in yourself even if you are a very simple, innocent person… you
can do it!”. There is a common man behind every American man under taking. Figure of
optimism.

 The Pursuit Of Happiness shows the story of an African American man who's going
through a very difficult period and he is left in charge of the five year old son. One day this
man meets the manager of an important company and impresses him by solving the Rubik's
Cube in a few seconds: this guy is brilliant, he just needed a chance. The film never poses
the problem of racism, it doesn't consider African Americans' historic exclusion from the
 educational system or the health care system, and it suggests that everything depends on
self-awareness and perseverance. “Don't let anyone tell you what to do, if you have a dream
just go and get it”, this is the logic behind the movie. The movie is directed by Muccino,
because they tough that just a foreign could understand the signific of the movie and the
American dream. Everything about opportunity and faith, not how it is organised.

 Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, they are often described as centric but the hyper
competitive system on the loud step then to become a multi-millionaire is never really
analysed.

 The Wolf of Wall Street: this film is about another self-made man type: the one in the
financial system. The main character (Di Caprio) is the new young guy, restless and full of
good intentions, he has lunch with his mentor gentlemen but the character supposes he has
to show off his good qualities but the manager has long experience in dissipation certainly
not with virtues, but extreme vices . “Doing this job without cocaine is impossible, forget
the clients, just take your money and make it yours, relax” here the self-made man is the
focus of many anxieties, it has to do with realizing himself in a very competitive society, to
do with questions of the structure of this society.

So the narrative has to do with promise of economic success and individual agency, independence,
hope, fulfilment. No matter what your origins are or where you come from. It’s a dream of social
mobility. Vertical mobility and horizontal mobility: success and expansion.

“Aristocracy has made a chain all the members of the community from the peasant to the king:
democracy breaks that chain, and serves every link of it”
(A.de Tocqueville) = vision of a classless society.
We know that it wasn’t true, but at that time there was this vision. High standard of living.
American product, hope of really expressing themselves.

Far from the truth because we know there were divisions. The self-made man was linked to this
vision of society without classes, usually a white American man freed to his destiny. It doesn’t
matter if he failed, the fact that one could make it offer the illusion that everyone could make it. The
exception became the rule. The equality became the key word. At the beginning of the race.
Individualism was not just the bases of individual success, was the bases of the common good, of
the national project.

Competition, ambition , hard work, simplicity, sacrifice  patriotic values

They were not in contrast with Christian values or puritan ethics, because material success was the
sign of being a chosen one. It made you a visible saint (American Civil Religion). It went hand in
hand with capitalism.

“In competition, individual ambition serves the common good” (Adam Smith)

The ideal type of the common man was embodied by Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790). The model
represented the American dream (remember that it didn’t become popular until the 20 th century,
1930s). His autobiography was and is still a national best seller and it was about his achievement,
career from a very poor child to printer to business man, inventor and then stateman and of course
founding father. It’s also kid of a guide book, an advice book for other people, citizens who need to
know how to improve their lives. He (in general, that type of men) inspire many other people. If one
can flourish, everyone can. The prototype of self-help books.
This can be a prototype of American fairytale, this mix of the trust of capitalism system and trust in
protestant ethics, bit of luck, good with optimism. In literature there are many stories of success, but
also about failure. Sometimes there are very doubts, motives and desires, ambitions, but
traditionally they were excused as minor flows in view of the accumulation of wealth.
- Andrew Carnegie
- John D. Rockefeller
- John Jacob Astor

o Nathaniel Hawthorne, James Kirke Paulding, James Fenimore…. Washington Irving,

Herman Melville: more ambivalent
o Henry James, Edith Wharton, Theodore Dreiser: implications for one’s integrity

They were writers not satisfied as Franklin about social mobility, wealth, embracing the myth of
economic success. They were more ambivalent than Franklin, for example they didn’t believes that
social hierarches abolished that the US was done with social classes. And they could see that the
national idea of equality was not available to everyone. Later on in the century, other writers
explored American upper class society and its working all those settle conditions that made one
success and at the same time unmade one’s morality. They showed that in many cases, choosing
money and status meant losing integrity and love.

There were also women, but it was difficult to them. They worked not in the economic way, in a
way that she can control her body to the right husband. More about the exercise of biologic function
and reproduction, means to reach social respectability. Successful woman, find the right guy that
access to marriage and to have children (consuming angels). Their positions and narratives were
very different. The project was about become a mother, a homemaker. Being a successful woman
can be associated with find the right and successful man and having access to consumption. Symbol
of powerful man. Women upward mobility depend on their relation with men. She doesn’t became
independent and successful, or just because she can highlight successful men.

George Elgar Hicks, “Woman’s Mission: Companion to Manhood”, 1863

 I Can Be Smart When It’s Important: Marilyn Monroe plays a silly role but at the end
resultful. She managed to persuade her boyfriend’s father to their marriage. She can use her
looks to export her power over the rich man and to make him shine is a sense.

 Pretty Woman: typical Cinderella story. Vivian is a prostitute and here she went out with
his money to buy a beautiful dress for the night but she seems not really self-confidence, she
doesn0t know how to behave and she didn’t manage to find anything. She goes back to the
hotel and find her magical assistant to the way to become that kind of woman that a man can
fall in love with. There are the unscrupulous unhappy manager who makes money just by
making companies and selling them, and the innocent pretty girl comes from the province
and into prostitution, she manages to become a real woman so she receives help from the
hotel manager. The manager teaches her how to use her money, how to buy the right clothes,
how to have a good relationship with shop assistants, how to behave: she's got bad manners
that are not properly feminine but then she becomes extremely feminine. This is the story of
how a girl can become a woman and becoming a woman means being able to manage
money and to marry the rich guy.
In these classic Hollywood movies you can see this circulation of economic values, social capital
and sexual energy. In the end there always the idea of romantic love. There is no cemetery and
there’s also something really unconventional that sometimes allows to become fans of these women.
Even if they are without scruples, this representation runs counters of the representation of the self-
made man. What we see here is perverted work ethic. They do not have to work, they are
encouraging women spending their time, energy and forces in the task of managing their body and
beauty. For example Cinderella was ignored when she worked a lot, and just with her beautiful
magic dress she was saw by everyone.

Self-improvement. Self-made woman and self-made man form a couple where they are not specular
but complementary. They organise a world of promises divided into two genders. If we look at them
critically, we’ll be able to questioned of the self-made man narratives. Woman, rewriting this logic
of growth accumulation, reproduction gain success. The success main capitalism can be rewritten.

Another way to offer a critic of this individual narrative of capitalism is offered by this
transcendentalist writer: Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854). One of the most important exponent
of transcendentalism. He connected the idea of the self-made man to spiritual fulfilment. Self-
making was not about material success, social mobility, it was about finding an inner light, fulfilling
the individual potential. The central doctrine of transcendentalism was developed by Ralph Waldo
Emerson (1803-1882).

(Journal Entry, 1833)

“Democracy, freedom, has its roots in the sacred truth that every man hath in him the divine
Reason, or that. . . all men are created capable of so doing. That is the equality and the only equality
of all men. To this truth we look when we say, Reverence thyself; Be true to thyself.”
“Self-Reliance”, 1841

Transcendentalists valued the self above all, against conformism and also against individualism.
They believed that the divine existed in each human soul, and natural fact as well. There’s nothing
here of the acquisitive of individualism of the era of capitalism. There was the realising the
potentiality of human freedom and believing in human mind.

“Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. […] Great men have always . . . confided
themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying their perception that the Eternal was
stirring at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their being. And we are
now men, and must accept in the highest mind the same transcendent destiny . . . let us advance and
advance on Chaos and the Dark.” (“Self-Reliance”, 1841)

“Whoso [whoever] would be a man must be a nonconformist.”

“Whence then this worship of the past? The centuries are conspirators against the sanity and
majesty of the soul. Time and space are but physiological colors which the eye maketh, but the soul
is light; where it is, is day; where it was, is night; and history is an impertinence and an injury”
(“Self-Reliance”, 1841)

Thoreau was one of Emerson disciple. He has a very electrifying personality. He was one of the non
-conformists invoked by Emerson. He was born in Concord, Massachusetts, he was a student of
Harvard, and he believe in reforming society, life. But he also believed that this reform should begin
by the individual. He was in favour of civil disobedience, a form of passive resistance. In 1845 he
began an adventure of spiritual independence and he went to Walden Pond, a lake, where he
decided to live there in a cabin for 2 years, months and days without anything. Reversing Franklin
paths, he wanted to demonstrated that one could get from rich to poor and find oneself in their light,
the meaning of life, one’s place in the world. In his practice and meditation, many things of
transcendentalism, for example the rebellion against conformism, traditions. The quest for a more
authentic reality, something went beyond material success. Also looking for a renewed with nature.
You can see how he cherries isolation rather than society. As a form of reaching pure rest states.
“Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.”
“I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best,
is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone.”
“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life”
“The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be bad, and if I repent of
anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior. What demon possessed me that I behaved so
well? You may say the wisest thing you can, old man,—you who have lived seventy years, not
without honor of a kind,—I hear an irresistible voice which invites me away from all that. One
generation abandons the enterprises of another like stranded vessels.”

In 2007 there was a movie called Into the Wild, which is based on the true story of the life of
Christoper McCandless. Chris is the main character, and is dissatisfied with his life and future, not
wanting to bring with him the burden of his family’s mistake (the father has a mistress). He rejects
all that is materialistic and that people offered to him, as he started to rebel against society and what
he was supposed to do.
Thoreau also wrote about being a rebel in his book “civil disobedience” saying that he was sorry for
not being sufficiently rebellious in his life and for choosing to just forget about things. He hears an
irresistible voice that draws him away from everyone. This rejection of society also becomes his
own tradition that could be described as the tradition of finding one’s own way. It still is a kind of
self-made man, just a different one.
Chris wants to go as far as possible from society, trying to look for something by himself because
he chose so. This idea of choosing can also be connected to Thoreau saying that common people are
sleepers who choose to remain asleep, while those who are awake are the strongest of them all.
Being awake requires only the will to do so.
Chris is looking to simplify his life, as Thoreau believed. Thoreau also criticizes money and
products of society, saying that those things are not enough to satisfy him, as he wanted nothing
more than the truth. Freedom, in a way, becomes the objective for these people and to reach it they
are able to scarify everything, as the truth can only be discovered at its roots.
Live in a very simple life and live with just few things. He looks for a new true way of life. Truth
rather than anything else, getting the meaning of life. The protagonist here is a young rebel, a figure
that appears many time in American literature. Contact with nature, way of renewing oneself and
fulfilling oneself and become different from the standard of American hegemony and economic
success.

The self-made narrative became very popular for immigrants. all of whom had another problem
with this idea: self-made man requires a man, who at the time was only white. Becoming self-made
men meant reaching the right “whiteness”.

From immigrant writers we can find 4 archetypes of the self-made man:

1. Rocky Balboa: affirmative ones that tend to mimic older rags-to-riches narratives. The story with
a happy ending, in which the immigrant manages to reach his own success and becomes part of
society.

2. Mildly affirmative ones that often substitute material gain with nonmaterial notions of success.
The second one is less connected to the myth. It does present upward mobility, but it presents a
more bitter-sweet idea, for example “The house on Mango Street”, in which a Mexican American
young girl grows up in a poor neighbourhood. We could say it is a coming-of-age story, where there
are both shadows and shades, but that presents just a mild comment on how one may become an
American.

3. The Jungle: highly critical ones that mostly focus on failure (caused by adverse circumstances
and discrimination) rather than success. It is a critical take on it. Bartleby doesn’t talk about a self-
made man, but rather about a self-unmade man. It is about a copyist who works for a law street
lawyer, the narrator. This copyist, out of nothing, starts to refuse any kind of activity, always
replying with a “I would prefer not to”. It’s a metaphor of life in the USA in the 20th century,

4. The Godfather: and mildly critical ones that sidestep the legal framework of the success myth but
champion material success nonetheless. The most critical story even if they usually end up focusing
on the person’s success. It is the self-made man through illegality and criminal activities. Many had
to resort to this kind of opportunities because of racism or other forms of discrimination that made
assimilation impossible. Success among criminals.

The self-made man was the result of a series of ideas and visions (coming from Europe). Put
together the concept of the individual subject, it was a novelty, one who could one oneself, free
from the control of the king, pope, lord.
How to govern society, not in the way of a theocracy, by a king or God himself, but social compact,
for example the Mayflower compact or the Constitution, imperfect but with advance and compare
the form of life of the middle ages. This came together with the dream of a classless society. New
vision of religion of a something more personal than institutional. So this sense of possibility
combined very well with the puritans (idea of election, choosiness).
It was shaped of the huma subject who was male and white, the narrative was flexible that could be
appropriate by minorities.

Self-made men/women and African Americans

Slavery to success, freedom. More about self-empowerment, emancipation, self-reliance, and
autonomy: crucial in the Afro-American imagination.
Usually emancipation and freedom are more important than upward mobility and wealth.
In our days there are people like Oprah Winfrey, who have managed to combine self-emancipation
and self-empowerment with enormous success (financial economic) and fame as well.
Frederick Douglass was one of the first black leaders who used the self-made man narrative as a
powerful symbol to articulate his own story. The slave narrative, kind of a his autobiography,
managing his freedom. It is a success story, from being nothing to being free human being. Freedom
and emancipation is more important to class mobility and than economic affluence.
The African American self-made man became not just independent, but a model for his people, a
model to follow for his community. He demonstrated that change is possible and that black slave
can share main stream American values (based on a very white vision, so there was some
contradiction). In many occasions he subscribed to the myth, he recognised the myth as valid. He
reacts ambivalently to this vision. He received help and support.
So sometimes there is this vision of not just self-made man, but with the help of the community.

“I have sometimes been credited with having been the architect of my own fortune, and have pretty
generally received the title of a "self-made man;" and while I cannot altogether disclaim this title,
when I look back over the facts of my life, and consider the helpful influences exerted upon me, by
friends more fortunately born and educated than myself, I am compelled to give them at least an
equal measure of credit, with myself, for the success which has attended my labours in life."
(Narrative)
There others Douglass’s passaged where his vision of the self-made man became more patriotic,
more showiness, less based on communal activity and more on American individualism.

“ I seldom find anything either in the ideas or institutions of that country, whereof to glory. [.] But
pushing aside this black and clotted covering which mantles all our land, as with the shadow of
death, I recognize one feature at least of special and peculiar excellence, and that is the relation of
America to self-made men. America is, most unquestionably and pre-eminently, the home and
special patron of self-made men. In no country in the world are the conditions more favorable to the
production and sustentation of such men than in America."
("The Trials and Triumphs of the Self-Made Men ")

You find this morality of success, based on the special position of the country. He goes on
mentioning all these traits characterized of the self-made man position. Hard work, integrity,
industry, support of other people, being an inspiration, It’s a paradox that it was supporting an ideal
that was so white base, or he was doing it to be recognised as an interlocutor by white powerful
men, or this appropriation functional to his work as a black leader. Functional to advertising the
possibility of being completely free and empowered over oneself.

Contemporary version. Barack Obama gives a more political and cultural version. He appropriates
the myth, but he also challenges it. Things a little bit more complicated.
He is criticizing the self-made man myth.
Interesting of how these narratives are made also by discourse that challenge them. He’s reinforcing
what it is behind this vision of exceptional opportunity, providing by the country. The power of the
myth. The need of protest to move on from the old way to the new way.

"I know that I don't look like the Americans who've previously spoken in this great city. The
Journey that led me here is improbable. My mother was born in the heartland of America, but my
father grew up herding goats in Kenya. His father - my grandfather - was a cook, a domestic servant
to the British.” (“World”, 2008)
July 18, 2013, Obama seems to take issue with a simplistic interpretation of the myth

This is a narrative of individual success.

THE MELTING POT

Narrative of collecting success

 Myths of discovery
 Christian millenarism
 American Civil Religion
 The Self-Made Man
  The Melting Pot: a model of national unity and cohesion thru participation in an organic
community

People are welcome to join and participate to this organic community. That offers its members a
chance, sometime the second one, a new beginning. And this community, America as the USA,
unity is in the name. New race.

19th century > a woman symbolizing the country standing up the pot, excepting the Irish.
Early 20th century > the idea was that the America was too welcoming, even if too people who were
communist etc. or more inferior
Today > ingredients, with poison (Trump)

Writers and thinkers could talk about melting, religious division, wars, class conflicts. The ideal
new world was just a free land where natives did not use, not own it.

“A nation of immigrants”
The country was not finished, there was more land for settlers etc. they came especially from
northern and western Europe (Scandinavia and Germany). During the era of industrialisation,
second half of the 19th century, the ethnic composition of the USA changed and there were people
from southern Europe and eastern as well. In the second half most of these people settled in cities
and there was a demographic boom in them. Italians, Greeks, Russia etc. escaping from persecution.
Here between 1944 up to the 60s there was what is called an immigrational, not many people
immigrated to the US because of the Second War World. After 1965 once again the numbers of the
immigrated sky rocked (from Asia and Latin America).

Reasons for the Europeans to immigrate to the USA. If you analysed colours, origins and reasons it
push people immigrate to the US, you have an idea of how country was change really. It was a
terrible pressure on the way the country tough of itself.

John de Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer, 1782

I WISH I could be acquainted with the feelings and thoughts which must agitate the heart and
present themselves to the mind of an enlightened Englishman, when he first lands on this continent.
[…] He is arrived on a new continent; a modern society offers itself to his contemplation, different
from what he had hitherto seen. It is not composed, as in Europe, of great lords who possess
everything and of a herd of people who have nothing. Here are no aristocratical families, no courts,
no kings, no bishops, no ecclesiastical dominion, no invisible power giving to a few a very visible
one; no great manufacturers employing thousands, no great refinements of luxury. […] We have no
princes, for whom we toil, starve, and bleed: we are the mast perfect society now existing in the
world. Here man is free, as he ought to be; nor is this pleasing equality so transitory as many others
are.

[W]hence came all these people? they are mixture of English, Scotch, Irish, French, Dutch,
Germans, and Swedes. [...] What then is the American, this new man? He is either a European, or
the descendant of a European, hence that strange mixture of blood, which you will find in no other
country. I could point out to you a family whose grandfather was an Englishman, whose wife was
Dutch, whose son married a French woman, and whose present four sons have now four wives of
different nations. He is an American, who leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and
manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new government he
obeys, and the new rank he holds. [...] He becomes an American by being received in the broad lap
of our great Aimo Mater. Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men, whose
labours and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world. Americans are the western
pilgrims, who are carrying along with them that great mass of arts, sciences, vigour, and industry
which began long since in the east, they will finish the great circle. The Americans were once
scattered all over Europe, here they are incorporated into one of the finest systems of population
which has ever appeared.

He was a French aristocrat, who moved to America, in 1755. He established a farm. After some
adventures he moved back to Europe and published a book, that established the ideal vision of what
America was, according to a European immigrant. He decried as an anonymous simple American
man, the American way of life, nature, culture, political organisations to Europeans. For determined
what America was about. The myth of the farm is also very important for the US, where one could
be happy and in peace.
There was this idea of going and moved to the west, somehow like the sun, like a transcendental
mission, or also called manifest destiny. Americans were Europeans. Here he gave an archetype of
American identity; people who not care about the past.

U.S. population:
• 1870; 38.5 million
• 1910: 92 million
• 1920: 123 million

From 1880 to 1920: 20 million immigrants, much needed labour force, often met with hostility
• From other workers
• From the protestants
• From the nativists (racial purists)

Restrictions:
• 1882: Chinese Exclusion Act
• 1917: literacy test
• 1924: quotas are introduced: only two per cent of the total number of people of each nationality in
America (according to the 1890 census) is allowed to enter the country

In many ways there was a conflict around these ideals of unity.

The Melting Pot  an ideal of unity and cohesion: differences were melted away
It was ambiguous because it forces assimilation.

Opposing criticism from the most progressive elements of the society:

 Against assimilation: identities shouldn't be melted down, but safeguarded and cherished
(cultural pluralism)
 Against 'impurity': mixing deteriorates 'the purity' of the nation (nativist ideology)

In between: many nuances...

Multi culturalism > the idea that all different kinds of people, cultures, religions, languages and
customs can coexist.

Ellis Island, N.Y. (an immigrational point, where transatlantic ships land with immigrants, and these
people were sorted out according to criteria. So they were accepted to the US or send back [for
example being ill, having a disorder])
> Nuovomondo

Many of them were from Italy and they were employed in manufactory. East era. It was supposed
that people leave everything behind them. The melting pot was a very powerful symbol of
assimilation, uniformity, harmony. It can be used to describe the historical immigrational era, as a
political program, a plan to organize society. Also as an analytical concept, behind the numbers.
Italians were considered people of colour, not white.
Cultural differences were considered size of racial inferiority. Of course they were ignorant,
illiterate, but in a way they were looking for a generation deviants. They already shared in the same
expectation. Italians were considered a lower level of humanity and defined as loud, dirty as
criminals but in an innate way.

“Models of American Ethic Relations”, G. Frederickson

o Ethnic hierarchy
o One-way assimilation
o Group separatism
o Cultural pluralism > Multiculturalism

Who deserved what. Immigrants were welcomed with suspension or rejection. However the nation
needed these people, workers for their factories, building stuffs, and to organise a society that was
up of the task. There was one immaterial thing that they could shared and it was the idea of America
as a shelter, a promise, a dream. That is why it was so powerful at that time. When the first English
settlers moved in the British colony of America, the model of ethnic relations that they adopted was
the one of superiority. These had consequences (for example in African people).
They were inspired by a social Darwinism view, popular at time. Basically they tough that all these
people coming, they had to complied to the standards, obey to the rules and complied to the norms
set by the superior class of men (white Americans).

The second model. Assimilation was considered in a different was. The goal was equality, cohesion,
harmony. In this case there is a way for those weren’t ready, to became ready. This was also for the
native Americans (asked to assimilate with the white norm, or disappear). They had to change their
way of life, sell their land, their children had to go in boarding school or adopted by civilized white
people (cut hair and forgot their native language). Of course it produced alienation. It was about
becoming homogenous, even if this meant forcing people to adapt. The melting pot narrative is
included in this model, an inclusive narrative (maybe too inclusive), but in the other hand it was a
very conservative reaction approach, repressive in many ways.

The third model is characterized by this believe in the American promise of harmony. This is the
desire of not having anything to do with other ethnic groups. This comes out of a sense of
superiority, sometimes this sense stands for disillusionment with the functioning of American
democracy, especially with the marginalized community from the others. Here African American
nationalism is good example of this desire for complete autonomy and separation, because it was
too risky to live with the others.

Last model, maybe this is the only progressivist model in the list. It celebrates the difference of
ethnic groups. In the last part of the 20th century, this was develop by the people... who were
thinkers etc. Everything considered a barrier (skin colour, religion) should not prevent of enjoying
the common good, life of the nation, what Americanness is. You must share the same background.
The nation is full of imagine qualities, symbols, something that has to do with geography, legacy.
The idea that America was so welcoming, to leave everyone in peace, without even transforming
them in someone else. This is what cultural pluralism suggests, to not give your identity, and you
can take part of the life of the nation. Tricky and complex project, especially of this time of history.
Not trying to run after white standards.

The melting pot was more about play down differences.

The Melting Pot  an ideal of unity and cohesion: differences were melted away
Opposing criticism:
-Against 'impurity': mixing deteriorates the purity' of the nation (> nativist ideology: Ross,
Stoddard, Fairchild)
-Against assimilation: identities shouldn't be melted down, but safeguarded and cherished (>
cultural pluralism, Kallen Bourne)

In between: many nuances..

These nativists had nothing to do with native Americans. Here refers to people who dissentiences
from the population of the original 13 colonies. They were against the assimilation of migrants and
some of them ended up in those suprematism movement (KKK), not just racists against black
people, they were against anyone who was not raised there, protestant, etc. So anyone could be
targeted, and they persecuted Irish, Jewish, Italians and so on. Their identities were not definite as
we might suppose. Many of them exposed views of life:

Scientific racism in the US: eugenics

Roots are in: conquest of Indian land + enslavement of African people (the Vanishing Indian, Jim
Crow, etc.)

It’s important because among the other thinks, it inspired Naz-ideolog, in final solution. If you are
born in the US you are an American citizen, no matter who your parents are.

Eugenics is the believe that you can improve the population by selecting the people who should
have children and exclude the others, the inferior one, who shouldn’t breathe and have children.
This was persuade as a believe, it became a policy, sometimes to the point that people who were
inferior, were sterilized. So there were a federal program of sterilization inferior people.
Transformation of native people who must completely disappear of assimilation. It has also to di
with enslavement of African people. These two issues come with cultural products, the resulted of
the creation of an imaginary figures that were tropes and stereotypies, recording motives in
American cultures. The ideas that Indians were so backwards, not modern, weak and not up to
American modernity. This became a common assumption at the end of the 19 and early 20 century,
it combined very well with Darwin theories.

Slavery, racism, segregation (also called Jim Crow era), they were interconnected but do not always
overlap. They have many things in common, but they can/need also be analysed as different
categories.

Classification of racism
Scientific racism:
Eugenics  phrenology  physiognomy
They were considered forms of science. Used for described and classified human beings.
Phrenology is the believe that the shape of the skol can tell you something about a person character
and behaviour and physiognomy is about the shape of the lips or the nose. They believed that facial
and physical traits can give you about qualities, vices and so on.

Racism
-At first: religious prejudice, ignorance, fear, etc.
-Later: 'rational arguments'
-Early Africans: indentured servants, until about 1640
-'race" first presented as a set of somatic features then: elusive concept. (one drop rule, 1662 in
Virginia, partum sequitur ventrem doctrine, the civil state of a child depended on the mother)
- "race": inevitable, natural
-1916, The Passing of the Great Race, by Madison Grant (fear of many white old stock in America)

Classification of human being (something similar for nature, naming organisms). And many started
to believe that this could be replaced also for humans as well. You can classifies objectively and
scientifically humans. The people who were in favour of slavery, welcomed enthusiastically this
idea. Race was developed as a concept. First of all semantic figures, then more and more elusive. It
was spiritual and psychological differences, so much that even one drop of black blood would
define the person as black. Race became a scientific concept, first based on appearance and then
later (not so much, just few years) a question of blood. And then this idea developed in something
not just in physical appearance. Blood is really a symbol, so much a symbol that it worked also for
defining different ethnicities.

The Melting Pot, The Great American Drama, play by Israel Zangwill
Wrote by an English Jewish. His family migrated from Russia to England, considered an interpreter
of Jewish life. He was considered also a controversial figure because of his marriage with a non-
Jewish woman. He was not in America, but he wrote it in a very American idea. America could
regenerate the people who lived there. The place where peace were possible, future harmony. Very
sentimental place.

«a play touched with the fire of democracy, and lighted radiantly with the national vision»
The main characters were David Quixano and Vera Ravendal - Like Romeo and Juliet, victims of a
family feud, but this time no tragedy: the American crucible melts the immigrants' differences into a
new ideal..
“It is the fires of God round His Crucible. There she lies, the great Melting-Pot - listen! Can't you
hear the roaring and the bubbling? There gapes her mouth […] Yes, East and West, and North and
South the palm and the pine, the pole and the equator, the crescent and the cross - how the great
Alchemist melts and fuses them with his purging flame! Here shall they all unite to build the
Republic of Man and the Kingdom of God. Ah, Vera, what is the glory of Rome and Jerusalem
where all nations and races come to worship and look back, compared with the glory of America,
where all the races and nations come to abour and look forward! Peace, peace, to all ye unborn
millions, fated to fill this giant continent - the God of our children give you Peace.”

Other visions:
- Waldemar Ager, On the Way to the Melting Pot, 1917
- Henry Roth, Call It Sleep, 1934

The Melting Pot had an enormous impact on literature of imagination of the 20th century. The
concept was contested from many different sides and it was very sentimental, melodramatic. Giving
something function of Americanness.
Indianness was considered uncivilized and negative. Same for African Americans. The Melting Pot
myth was not available for them, even after emancipation that established the end of slavery. They
remained second class citizen.

"Kill the Indian in him, and save the man. (Capt. Richard H. Pratt)
"Separate but equal": U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) > Jim Crow Era
(of segregation = it was legal to have separate school, hospitals, etc.)
"In all things purely social we can be as separate as the five fingers, and yet one as the hand in all
things essential to mutual progress." (Booker T. Washington, AA leader)

Critics of the melting pot: from the left

Progressivist and pluralists (Horace Kellen, Randolph Bourne)

Critics of the melting pot: from the right

Eugenicists; suprematists; nativists

In any case, the melting pot myth is a very metropolitan narrative. It is set in the big and modern
cities of the east coast. For example New York with its skyscrapers (icon representing American
modernity). Of course there was the other side of the coin, showing how immigrants lived in New
York. There was segregated clubs, white people entertained by black people. So the melting pot was
a myth in the sense that it was unreachable, but at the same time for many others it represented hope
for Americanisation.

Key concept
• Race
"[Race] has established who can be imported and who exported, who are immigrants and who are
indigenous, who may be property and who are citizens; and among the latter who get to vote and
who do not. who are protected by the law and who are its objects, who are employable and who are
not, who have access and privilege and who are (to be) marginalized," (D.T. Goldberg, 1993)

• Ethnicity • Language, religion, rituals, patterns of behavior: «cultural traits»

• Class?
"As an analytical tool and historiographical category, class has an important place in American
cultural studies, if only because so many have thought it irrelevant to the study of the United States”
(Lott, 2007)

THE WEST

Most of the narratives that we saw, were between America and Europe. Now about the west, the
frontiers, the far west. A physical frontiers, but for us a symbol, an imaginary space. The east and
the west prospective. It comes in a full view in the 20th century when the concept of the frontier and
the far west, virgin land, life of the pioneers became popular and Hollywood popularized them. It
was a vision celebrating the US, US promise, vision of democracy.

Monument valley. An area in Colorado, it has this characterised high hills with a plan top. They
were typical setting for many western classic movies. With these movies, a huge number of figures
emerged: cowboys, the Indians, the miners, the outlaws.

The key of the far west was logic. Logic of expansionism; the idea that the US as a nation has
arrived to expand and in many ways this collective destinies parallels with personal destinies has
this attitude to expand, to make oneself, to fulfil one potential. The other part of the myth is made
up of the agrarian myth, narrative of free land, the idea that there’s free land available for everyone,
who is brave enough to go and get it.

Expansionism = Manifest Destiny

"The American claim is by right of our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of
the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty
and federative self-government entrusted us"
(John L. O'Sullivan advocating the annexation of Texas, 1845)

Agrarianism
The image of this vast and constantly growing agricultural society in the interior of the continent
became one of the dominant symbols of nineteenth-century American society - a collective
representation, a poetic idea [..l that defined the promise of American life.
(Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth, 1950, p. 138)
Texas was of the Mexico, but white settlers tried to take it and make it American. It was a right
given by providence, the right to overspread to expand and to develop the values of liberty etc. But
then there is also the notion of the pastoral life. More independent way of life offered by the land.
These are two very different type of quotation. The first one, has an ideology of the making, and the
other one was described what was going on in the 19th century. In any case, it was important the
fusion of these two options, visions  expanding or live a peaceful life.

You can expand without violence. It’s also a change of regeneration, of course in the mythical form
of it.

1956 The Searchers, classical western movie.

First scene  welcome home  the prodigal son, sentimental family scene, it was not expected. He
was in the confedered army. He come back home after losing the war. He’s already a loser, so he
goes back to redeeming himself and find another and look for a new change.
Second scene  cowboys vs Indians  they were brutal killed by a group of Indians and then they
are searching for the niece of the family. War crimes. Ritual component and shaping the fight.
Third scene  stand aside!  the small kid was kidnaped at the beginning of the movie and then
they are trying to find and rescue her, but in a way she grew up with the natives but she remembers
her family and here they meet again. He was scared and then he found courage again and he
managed to protect her and his uncle. Using violence for oneself interest. They embodied civic
virtues. This was quite advanced as a vision of the frontier. This was pretty shocking for that age,
showing this loyalty for the savage and a nostalgic way to represent the frontier as a place of
change, renewal. The brother grows up and he became a man, thanks to a violence in way and learn
using weapons.

In the end he’s able to redeeming himself. For that time was kind of a progressive movie. After the
60s and the 70s there was this new wave of western movie called New Western movies. Shot from
the point of view of the natives. Soldier Blue, it showed a massacre and for the first time the war
against natives was represented with violence and the reasons. 1970, it was a movie that exposed
the violence of the war made in the name of civilization and democratic American values.
Brokeback Mountain (2004-2005) there is the pastoral ideal again because this is a love story,
romantic drama, between two cowboys in the space of the west. Because it is the place that can
offer epiphany, illumination of understanding themselves.
Presence of the motive of the western movies, even if they are not western. For example Thelma
and Louise, Nope. There’s always this pastoral dream, trip holiday with friends, beautiful farm in
the countryside, and the violence as a need to protect themselves, of transformation. Violence with
handgun, horse…

Agrarianism
- De Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer (1782)
- Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (1785)

Both of them are instrument of portrayed the US as this land of virtues, self-determine, independent
farmers, autonomous. Type of man that best embodies the form of equality offered by the US. There
is no rank among farmers, no classes. Interdependence between equality and republican values and
land ownership, the experience of American nature, land. Classical narrative.
The myth still resist and survive under other forms, for example Interstellar. The protagonist at the
beginning of the movie is a farmer. The ethic of hard work for the land in countryside has to do with
the contributing of the life of the nation (survival of it). The setting is also cosming time and space,
the renewal of life in earth through voyage in the space, the new frontier.
“We stand today on the edge of a New Frontier--the frontier of the 1960s, the frontier of unknown
opportunities and perils, the frontier of unfilled hopes and unfilled threats. […] I'm asking each of
you to be pioneers towards that New Frontier. My call is to the young in heart, regardless of age.”
(J.F. Kennedy, 1960, Los Angeles)

Conquest of the space. Competition of the US and the Soviet Union, who was going to land on the
moon and so on . More space, more wars. Vietnam became a nightmare for the US, a point to
rethink of the American values. The parallels between the Indian wars and the Vietnam war were
made again and again. There was no logic creating this connection. At the same time this habits was
finally questioned, something unspeakable in what was going on in Vietnam.

The invocation of the Indian war and Custer's Last Stand as models for the Vietnam war was a
mythological way of answering the question, Why are we in Vietnam? The answer implicit in the
myth is, "We are there because our ancestors were heroes who fought the Indians, and died (rightly
or wrongly) as sacrifices for the nation." There is no logic to the connection, only the powerful
force of tradition and habits of feeling and thought. (Slotkin, Fatal Environment 19)

First scene of Apocalypse Now, interesting way to represent their vision of American values
(courage, self-determination, frontier myth embodied). Representation of this dark continent, dark
position of history. The reference of all the narratives is pretty clear here. Cycling returning of
violence. Invite us to see things from a different prospective. The legacy of the memory coming up.
Fire, probably purify or damming. Mystery of this wild land represent. Very clear what the direct
are trying to tell us. Somehow he came back to past, to war, to violence and asks us to reconsider
their reasons, vision of the frontiers and the new one.

F.J. Turner, The Significance of the Frontier in American History (1893)

"The peculiarity of American institutions is, the fact that they have been compelled to adapt
themselves to the changes of an expanding people- to the changes involved in crossing a continent,
in winning a wilderness, and in developing at each area of this progress out of the primitive
economic and political conditions of the frontier into the complexity of city life.”

Remember that in the 1890s the frontier was officially closed, no more free land. They had reached
the Pacific Ocean. He articulated the meaning of the frontier. The speech summarize his view on
how the idea of the American frontier shaped the American character in term of democracy,
vocation of land for everyone, also violence, the way that Europeans met the wilderness. Unlimited
opportunity that helped shape individualism, also other traits, hope for regeneration , new way of
life, opposition to the government control. The way that progress and expansion are linked together
in a very greedy way sometimes. But also the way many people went after this ideal of moral Fenty
way of life. Being touched with simple primitive way of life. The traits of the frontier represent a
cultural idea that still very powerful, all over the political aspects. Sometimes it can be used against
the ideology of manifest destiny as a quest for revelation of another form of life.

“Thus American development has exhibited not merely advance along a single line, but a return to
primitive conditions on a continually advancing frontier line, and a new development for that area.
American social development has been continually beginning over again on the frontier. This
perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, this expansion westward with its new opportunities,
its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society, furnish the forces dominating
American character. The true point of view in the history of this nation is not the Atlantic coast, it is
the great West.”
“The American frontier is sharply distinguished from the European frontier—a fortified boundary
line running through dense populations. The most significant thing about the American frontier is,
that it lies at the hither edge of free land. In the census reports it is treated as the margin of that
settlement which has a density of two or more to the square mile. The term is an elastic one, and for
our purposes does not need sharp definition”

“The result is that to the frontier the American intellect owes its striking characteristics. That
coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn
of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but
powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism, working
for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom— these
are traits of the frontier, or traits called out elsewhere because of the existence of the frontier. Since
the days when the feet of Columbus sailed into the waters of the New World, America has been
another name for opportunity.”

The myth of the west express regeneration with the American space, wilderness purify from
European affectation, artificiality, and makes people strong. The ideal of the farm out there in the
middle of nowhere represent the possibility to became self-made. Carrying out a greater destiny
having access a more authentic form of life.
In many way the west confirmed the puritan narrative of being chosen, and the sense of mission.
Self-interest and property, common good of the republic was founded. This kind of ideology is
called Agrarianism. The hero is a farmer inspired by nature and hard work and egalitarian
principles.

America was a good alternative to Europe. Where there was no rules for autonomous farmers. Both
of them advertised America, they made it desirable for those Europeans who felled depressed,
oppressed by their authoritarian government.

There was a Northen version of the myth, the narrative, with the typical property for everyone. And
there was also a southern version (probably embodied by Jefferson) where the farmers looked more
of a plantation owner. Part of an aristocracy value.

Lincoln signed the Homestead Act, 1862

Under this legislation, the promise could come true, the promise of a new life of property and
independence, because of any auld citizen who would apply. The Homestead Act, enacted during
the Civil War in 1862, provided that any adult citizen, or intended citizen, who had never borne
arms against the U.S. government, could claim 160 acres of surveyed government free land. Year in
the middle of the civil war, Lincoln and his government made the choice of politically relevant in
their fight against the south, culturally relevant like when they established Thanksgiving as a
national holiday. In the way they offered free land to everyone, also to black people who had not
fought against the union. It was a way to outnumber southern planters. This land was not as empty
as it looked and it was not egalitarian. Many of them lost their land because of financial or natural
problems.
A chattel mortgage in the West Is like a cancer on your breast; It slowly takes your life away, and
eats your vitals day by day (Kansas folk song). Migrant Mother, 1936, by Dorothea Lange. After the
Dust Bowl.
They migrated, usually to California, because of the extremely radical exploitation of land, had
caused civier erosion of the land itself.
We can see the both extremes: the disillusionment and the promise land.
“a direct corollary the doctrine of Manifest Destiny. . . the grid exercises authority over space by
applying a ruler to it in all senses of the word” (W.Fox, 2000)