American Lit Context Quiz

Colonial America and the Revolution 1565-1783

When was the first English settlement established?

What sort of buildings did the colonies have?

What was the dominant culture?

When did a wealthier upper class emerge?

What is Treaty of Paris?

3rd August 1492- first voyage of Christopher Columbus

In 1607, colonists established the first permanent English settlement at Jamestown, Virginia.

By 1640, England had multiple colonies in New England, Maryland, and Virginia. Seventeenth-century colonists continued vernacular European building traditions, though they adapted them to harsher American climate. While thatched roofs and half-timbering were soon abandoned, New England house builders retained English medieval techniques such as an overhanging second story.

English was dominant culture.

A wealthy upper class intent on emulating the latest English fashions arose in America during the eighteenth century. Inigo Jones brought the architecture of the Italian Renaissance, which was inspired by the classicism of Ancient Rome, to England during the seventeenth century.

Postal service established by Franklin- more connected.

Treaty of Paris was signed two years later on September 3, 1783 and Britain formally recognised the United States.

Declaration of Independence

• When was it signed?

• What does it say?

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

Congress officially adopted the Declaration on Independence on July 4, 1776.

What is the motto of the US (hint its on a coin) also when was it made?

E pluribus Unum- out of many, one

What is the US Constitution? When was it signed?

1789

"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."

Manifest Destiny? When?

1845

West Expansion

The use of the term “Manifest Destiny” did not enter conventional conversation until 1845, when journalist John Louis O’Sullivan wrote that it was “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 federated self-government entrusted to us.”

The Homestead Act? When? What?

1862

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 land. Claimants were required to live on and “improve” their plot by cultivating the land. After five years on the land, the original filer was entitled to the property, free and clear, except for a small registration fee. Title could also be acquired after only a six-month residency and trivial improvements, provided the claimant paid the government $1.25 per acre. After the Civil War, Union soldiers could deduct the time they had served from the residency requirements.

‘The New Colossus’ what when where

1883 (Written by Emma Lazarus to raise money for the pedestal for the Statue of Liberty)

“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!”

W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk - what when?

1903

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. (Chapter One)

Prohibition, what when where?

1920 – 1933

The Prohibition era was the period from 1920 to 1933 when the United States prohibited the production, importation, transportation, and sale of alcoholic beverages.^[1] The alcohol industry was curtailed by a succession of state legislatures, and Prohibition was formally introduced nationwide under the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified on January 16, 1919. Prohibition ended with the ratification of the Twenty-first Amendment, which repealed the Eighteenth Amendment on December 5, 1933.

The Jazz Age

• what when where?

1920s and 1930s

The Jazz Age was a period in the 1920s and 1930s in which jazz music and dance styles gained worldwide popularity. The Jazz Age's cultural repercussions were primarily felt in the United States, the birthplace of jazz. Originating in New Orleans as mainly sourced from the culture of African Americans, jazz played a significant part in wider cultural changes in this period, and its influence on popular culture continued long afterwards.

The Jazz Age is often referred to in conjunction with the Roaring Twenties, and overlapped in significant cross-cultural ways with the Prohibition Era. The movement was largely affected by the introduction of radios nationwide. During this time, the Jazz Age was intertwined with the developing youth culture. The movement would also help in introducing jazz culture to Europe.

Wall Street Crash

The Wall Street crash of 1929, also known as the Great Crash, was a major stock market crash in the United States which began in late October 1929 with a sharp decline in prices on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and ended in mid-November. The crash began a rapid erosion of confidence in the U.S. banking system and marked the beginning of the worldwide Great Depression, which lasted until 1939.

The Great Depression

1929 – 1939

The Great Depression was a severe global economic downturn from 1929 to 1939. The period was characterized by high rates of unemployment and poverty; drastic reductions in liquidity, industrial production, and trade; and widespread bank and business failures around the world. 

‘Let America Be America Again’, Langston Hughes

1935

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

[…]

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath—
America will be!

The Epic of America

1931 by James Truslow Adams

Coined the phrase the American Dream—‘that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement. It is a difficult dream for the European upper classes to interpret adequately, and too many of us ourselves have grown weary and mistrustful of it. It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.’

Willa Cather on the different ethnicities of immigrants that came to Nebraska

Slavonic, Germanic, Scandinavian, Bohemian and Latin “spread across our bronze prairies like the daubs of colour on a painter’s palette

Willa Cather said in her later years about Nebraska

“that country was the happiness and the curse” of her life.

My Antonia resonates with Homeric and epic themes.

Land and life on prarie

The land is a richly complex symbol representing great hardships and great rewards. It serves as a natural and vital force that begins and sustains all living things in rich abundance—if one works hard enough cultivating it. Yet, the land is also a source of back-breaking labor, sacrifice, and deprivation during bad years. The pioneers felt challenged by the prairie land because of the packed grass and sod that covered it. In order to plant corn, wheat, sorghum, winter fodder, and other crops, they had to break up the sod with axes and hand plows. After the land was planted with crops, plagues of grasshoppers and locusts could destroy them and cause severe privation. Drought, prairie fires, and frost could also attack their hard-won planted fields.

Cather once remarked that the city robbed man of his roots, heritage and continuity of feeling with the earth and mankind. The land of the Nebraskan country symbolized permanence, freedom of spirit, timelessness, and a sense of endurance. She viewed earth and nature as the personal, primeval force that enriched and sustained life and creativity.

Homesteaders

 Most of them had to build their houses out of the prairie sod as there were very few trees. Or, they could dig into a ravine and make a “cave-like” dugout with a “shed-like shelter, with a door and window set into a front wall of sod and a roof of sod supported by handhewn poplar logs.” 

Autobiography aspect

My grandfather’s homestead was about eighteen miles from Red Cloud—a little town on the Burlington . . . We drove out from Red Cloud to my grandfather’s homestead one day in April. I was sitting on the hay in the bottom of a Studebaker wagon, holding onto the side of the wagon box to steady myself—the roads were mostly faint trails over the bunch grass in those days . . . As we drove further and further out into the country, I felt a good deal as if we had come to the end of everything—it was a kind of erasure of personality. I would not know how much a child’s life is bound up in the woods and hills and meadows around it, if I had not been thrown out into a country as bare as a piece of sheet iron. 

Nebraska and the Great American Desert

Nebraska was once considered the “Great American Desert.” One of the themes of My Antonia is the heroic idealism of the settlers. Nebraska was the first state and settlement beyond the Mississippi after the Civil War. 

James Schroeter has written: “Within a single decade, half a million people—Yankee settlers, sod-house pioneers out of the Lincoln Country, Danes, Norwegians, Bohemians, Poles—pulled up stakes or emigrated from the farms of northern and eastern Europe to settle on the plains of a region [Nebraska].” 

Mr Shimerda’s death being true

One of Cather’s early stories in the Hesperia is the one called “Peter,” the tragedy of the lonely, sensitive Frances Sadilek who becomes disheartened and disillusioned with Nebraska and takes his own life. ¹¹ This true event made such an indelible impression on Cather when she first came to Nebraska that she changed his name to Mr. Shimerda, the Bohemian, and included the episode in My Antonia . Here Mr. Shimerda breaks his precious fiddle angrily across his knees and then shoots himself with his gun. His son, Ambrosch, carries the bow to town to sell before his father’s funeral.

What is Sentimentalism?

• tends to feature a young girl