During 1840 and 1860 many Americans believed that technology was a God’s chosen instrument of progress. Ralph Emerson, and influential spokesperson, thought the contrary. Emerson believed that,“Machinery is dangerous. The weaver becomes the web, the machinist the machine.” Emerson thought that technology would eventually control us instead of us controlling the machine. There were many technological improvements such as the steam engine, the cotton gin, the sewing machine and the telegraph. John Deere was the inventor of the steel plow and Cyrus McCormick the inventor of the mechanical reaper. Sophisticated machines increased the production level. The first transcontinental line was completed in 1860, telegraph companies and strung lines had stunning speed. Technology didn’t just improve life but it lowered prices as well.
Technology transformed the lives of ordinary Americans. Technology made it possible for middle class to enjoy luxuries formerly reserved for the rich, but it did widened the division between the middle class and the poor. This was also a time where epidemic diseases struct society. Physicians were seen negatively by the people because they weren’t able to explain what was occurring. The public image of surgeons was improved by the discovery of anesthesia. The relieve of pain during childbirth and menstruation was cured with the water cure. There was also a popular phenomenon during the time called Phrenology which was the belief that one can read a person’s character by examining bumps on the skull.
Along with new technology there was also new entertainment for Americans. The penny press was developed by James Gordon Bennett and it was cheap newspapers. Theater was a huge way of entertainment. The presence of prostitutes in the audience was only one of many factors that made theaters have a bad reputation. The audience enjoyed not having to behave and being able to throw garbage to the characters or acting they didn’t like. There were also forms of entertainment that reinforced negative stereotypes of African Americans such as the Black minstrel shows.
There was a new philosophical movement which was romanticism. Romantics emphasized emotion and inner feelings being able to focus on the individual and his or her unique response to nature and emotion. Ralph Emerson emerged as the most influential spokesperson for those who sought a national literature and art. Emerson contended the ideas of God and freedom were innate, not the result of reason. Emerson’s influence attracted others such as Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau was both a thinker and a doer. He wrote Civil Disobedience during his experience in jail because he didn’t want to pay poll taxes that would support the Mexican War. Like Emerson, Thoreau was a transcendentalist as well. During a retreat he took, Thoreau learned that anyone could satisfy his material wants with only a few week’s work each year of preserve the remainder of his time for examining life’s purpose. Thoreau stated that the problems with American’s was that they turn themselves into “mere machines” to acquire pointless wealth.
Literature was on its rise as well. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville and Edgar Allan Poe wrote fiction that paid little attention to Emerson’s call for literature treating the everyday experience of ordinary Americans. Their works preoccupied with analysis of moral dilemmas and psychological states fulfilled Tocqueville’s prediction that writers in democratic nations, while rejecting traditional sources of fiction would explore the abstract and universal questions of human nature. There was the Hudson River school where landscape painting took place that emphasized greatness and emotion. The 1840s through the 1860s was a time of great improvement and new ideas on the rise.
No comments:
Post a Comment