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Counters the view of the late Emerson's decline by rethinking his engagement with liberal education and his intellectual relation to Whitman, William James, Charles Eliot, and Du Bois.
In his 1837 speech "The American Scholar," Ralph Waldo Emerson noted, "life is our dictionary," encapsulating a body of work that reached well beyond the American 19th century. This comprehensive study explores Emerson as a preacher, poet, philosopher, lecturer, essayist and editor. There are nearly 100 entries on individual texts and their personal, historical and literary contexts. Emerson's work is placed within his relationships with family members, fellow Transcendentalists and transatlantic friends, and his commitment to ethics, self-culture and social change. This book provides the fullest possible exploration of Emerson's writing and philosophy. Far ahead of his own time, the man enthusiastically questioned institutions, communities, friendships, history, individuality and contemporaneous approaches to environmental stewardship.
This volume presents the views of Ralph Waldo Emerson regarding education. It consists of his entire essay on "Education, " and several additional selections from his other writings. By no means a complete exposition of his philosophy of education, the material presents his fundamental beliefs with regard to the proper aims and methods which should be pursued in the liberal training of men and women. With rare penetration the essayist reveals the essential nature of the problems which everywhere arise in the effort to train men.In these days when we are necessarily so largely engaged in adding to our traditional education a system of specialized vocational training in the industrial, agricultural, and commercial arts, there is a danger that we shall lose our sense of proportion, forgetting the full significance of that older liberal education which is designed to equip man for the finer uses of his manhood and his citizenship.There is no better brief for a broad, human education than that presented in the writings of Emerson. Our best American apostle of culture, he notes with precision the qualities which are the measure of a truly cultivated man. With high critical power, he describes the futility and the narrowness of much that goes under the guise of human training in the schools, and ably defends the larger cause of spiritual development, despite the failures to achieve it in the classroom. When sharp competition forces us to a serious consideration of a school training for bread winning, it is well to be told that the glorified word efficiency means spiritual efficiency as much as economic competency.
We live in an era defined by a sense of separation, even in the midst of networked connectivity. As cultural climates sour and divisive political structures spread, we are left wondering about our ties to each other. Consequently, there is no better time than now to reconsider ideas of unity. In The Ethics of Oneness, Jeremy David Engels reads the Bhagavad Gita alongside the works of American thinkers Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman. Drawing on this rich combination of traditions, Engels presents the notion that individuals are fundamentally interconnected in their shared divinity. In other words, everything is one. If the lessons of oneness are taken to heart, particularly as they were expressed and celebrated by Whitman, and the ethical challenges of oneness considered seriously, Engels thinks it is possible to counter the pervasive and problematic American ideals of hierarchy, exclusion, violence, and domination.
More than a century after his death, Walt Whitman remains a fresh phenomenon. Startling discoveries and massive transcription efforts are enabling new insights into his life and achievements. In the past few years new breakthroughs have proliferated, including the publication of a long-lost Whitman novel, Jack Engle, along with a hitherto unknown health guide for urban men and previously undiscovered poems. Myriad other documents have become more readily available, including largely unmined troves of journalism, narrative and documentary prose, and experimental note-keeping. Leaves of Grass and Whitman's literary life as a whole are thus ripe for reconsideration. The Oxford Handbook of Walt Whitman embraces this expanded view of Whitman and charts new pathways in Whitman Studies by bringing in new perspectives, methods, and contexts.
This volume reaffirms the fact that religion and culture often serve as a double-edged sword, that is, they can either obstruct or enrich African women’s flourishing. Drawing insights from African women’s experiences of religion and culture, the authors proffer gender sensitive and life-giving applications of African religio-cultural traditions.
The American Educational History Journal is a peer?reviewed, national research journal devoted to the examination of educational topics using perspectives from a variety of disciplines. The editors of AEHJ encourage communication between scholars from numerous disciplines, nationalities, institutions, and backgrounds. Authors come from a variety of disciplines including political science, curriculum, history, philosophy, teacher education, and educational leadership. Acceptance for publication in AEHJ requires that each author present a well?articulated argument that deals substantively with questions of educational history.
Thousands of men left their families for the bustling cities of nineteenth-century America, where many of them found work as clerks. The Clerk's Tale recounts their remarkable story, describing the struggle of aspiring businessmen to come of age at the dawn of the modern era. How did these young men understand the volatile world of American capitalism and make sense of their place within it? Thomas Augst follows clerks as they made their way through the boarding houses, parlors, and offices of the big city. Tracing the course of their everyday lives, Augst shows how these young men used acts of reading and writing to navigate the anonymous world of market culture and claim identities for themselves within it. Clerks, he reveals, calculated their prospects in diaries, composed detailed letters to friends and family, attended lectures by key thinkers of the day, joined libraries where they consumed fiction, all while wrestling with the boredom of their work. What results, then, is a poignant look at the literary practices of ordinary people and an affecting meditation on the moral lives of men in antebellum America.
Originally published in 1999. James Turner's biography offers the first modern account of Norton's life and its significance, following him from his perilous travels across India as a young merchant to his role as his country's preeminent cultural critic. Turner shows how Norton developed the key ideas that still underlie the humanities—historicism and culture—and how his influence endures in America's colleges and universities because of institutions he developed and models he devised.
