Public Lives, Private Virtues: Images of American Revolutionary War Heroes, 1782-1832

ISBN-13: 9780815334828 / Angielski / Twarda / 2000 / 200 str.

Christopher Harris

Opis

This study surveys portraits of American Revolutionary heroes in books, magazines and school texts from 1782 to 1832 and relates these sketches to cultural changes of the period. Faced with rapid and sometimes unsettling change, historians, biographers and editors of the period offered their readers narrative and visual portraits of heroes, hoping to promote classical civic virtues during a time when business-minded Americans increasingly pursued individual gain. The 50 years following the Revolution saw biography shift from historical narration to description of private experience. During this period, magazine editors in the mid-Atlantic and New England states provided readers with examples of virtue through original graphic portraits. Some magazine illustrators copied portraits by American painters, others fashioned elaborate allegorical pieces. Brief narratives of Revolutionary heroes met the needs of the growing number of New England schoolbook authors especially well. By reading descriptions of the war's heroes and their adventures, authors believed children would learn virtue as well as rhetorical skills.

Spis treści

List of Illustrations; Preface; Chapter 1: Bright Examples: Biographies of Revolutionary Heroes. Chapter 2: Domestick Subjects: Revolutionary Heroes in American Magazines. Chapter 3: Forming Republican Citizens: Schoolbook Accounts of Revolutionary Heroes. Chapter 4: Portraits of Virtue and the Advent of Realism; Notes; Illustrations;Index

O autorze

Christopher Harris