APUSH Thematic Review 7.1
 Key Works of Literature, Art, and Music 1776 - 1963

Please Note:  While the AP test writers rarely ask you to match a novel with its author, they will focus on why the work of literature is important and what it illustrates about the time it was written

American Identity

Views of the American national character and ideas about American exceptionalism.  Recognizing regional differences within the context of what it means to be an Americans

Culture

Diverse individual and collective expressions through literature, art, philosophy, music, theater, film throughout US History.  Popular culture and the dimensions of cultural conflict within American society

 John Dickinson, Letters from a Pennsylvania Farmer- made a case for the colonists resisting new British policies, including the taxes

“Common Sense”, 1776.In January 1776, a huge step towards the decision to declare independence was taken when Thomas Paine released his book, Common Sense, which was an instant bestseller and had an enormous impact b/c of its challenge of colonial assumptions about the colonies’ relationship to Britain.

The Federalists Papers, 1787Highly persuasive essays written for a New York newspaper by James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay. The 85 essay, later published in a book form as The Federalist Papers, presented cogent reasons for believing in the practicality of each major provision of the Constitution.

The Liberator, 1831In 1831, William Garrison began publication of an abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator, an event that marks the beginning of an abolitionist movement. The uncompromising Garrison advocated immediate abolition of slavery in every state and territory without compensating the slaveowners. In 1833, Garrison and other abolitionists found the American Antislavery Society. He argued for "no Union with slaveholders" until they repented for their sins by freeing their slaves.

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 1835
De Tocqueville came from France to America in 1831. He observed democracy in government and society. His book (written in two parts in 1835 and 1840) discusses the advantages of democracy and consequences of the majority's unlimited power. First to raise topics of American practicality over theory, the industrial aristocracy, and the conflict between the masses and individuals.

ART: The Hudson River School (mid 1800’s)
Hudson River School of Art  - In about 1825, a group of American painters, led by Thomas Cole, used their talents to do landscapes, which were not highly regarded. They painted many scenes of New York's Hudson River. Mystical overtones.

McGuffey Readers, 1836
Stories  picture children in their relationship with family, teacher, friends, and animals.
The original 1836 version of the fabled reading instruction books which for  three-quarters of a century were used by four-fifths of all American school children. Some 120 million sets were sold. No other books ever had so much influence over so many children over such a long period.

“Civil Disobedience: On the Duty of Civil Disobedience, “1849
Civil Disobedience (Resistance to Civil Government) is an essay by Henry David Thoreau that was first published in 1849. It argues that people should  avoid allowing  government to make them the agents of injustice. Thoreau was motivated in part by his disgust with slavery and the Mexican-American War.

The Scarlet Letter, 1850is a novel written by Nathaniel Hawthorne,  Set in 17th-century Puritan Boston, it tells the story of Hester Prynne, who gives birth after committing adultery and struggles to create a new life of repentance and dignity. Throughout the novel, Hawthorne explores themes of legalism, sin, and guilt.

 Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly is an anti-slavery novel by American author Harriet Beecher Stowe. Published in 1852, the novel had a profound effect on attitudes toward African Americans and slavery in the United States, so much in the latter case that the novel intensified the sectional conflict leading to the American Civil War.

 Walden( Life in the Woods) is an American book written by noted Transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau. The work is part personal declaration of independence, social experiment, voyage of spiritual discovery, and manual for self reliance.  Published in 1854, it details Thoreau's experiences over the course of two years in a cabin he built near Walden Pond, amidst woodland owned by his friend and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson, near Concord, Massachusetts.

Horatio Alger Jr. Stories  1867-1899was a prolific 19th-century American author, most famous for his novels following the adventures of bootblacks, newsboys, peddlers, buskers, and other impoverished children in their rise from humble backgrounds to lives of respectable middle-class security and comfort. His novels were hugely popular in their day.

A Century of Dishonor, 1881by Helen Hunt Jackson, chronicles the experiences of Native Americans in the United States

, focusing on examples of injustices.

The Influence of Sea Power Upon History: 1660-1783  a history of naval warfare written in 1890 by Alfred Thayer Mahan. It details the role of sea power throughout history and discusses the various factors needed to support and achieve sea power, with emphasis on having the largest and most powerful fleet. Scholars consider it the single most influential book in naval strategy; its policies were quickly adopted by most major navies.  Nice summary of Mahan's Influence (7 minutes) 

How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York (1890) Jacob Riis was a pioneering work of photojournalism by Jacob Riis, documenting the squalid living conditions in New York City slums in the 1880s. muckraking journalism by exposing the slums to New York City’s upper and middle class.  Historical Context:  Living and working conditions in the growing urban centers

“The Significance of the Frontier in American History, “1893
Historian Frederick Jackson Turner presented this paper to a special meeting of the American Historical Association at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Illinois. His assessment of the frontier's significance was the first of its kind and revolutionized American intellectual and historical thinking.

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz  (1900 ) is a children's novel written by L. Frank Baum and illustrated by W.W. Denslow. It was originally published by the George M. Hill Company in Chicago on May 17, 1900,  and has since been reprinted countless times, most often under the name The Wizard of Oz, which is the name of both the 1902 stage play and the extremely popular, highly acclaimed 1939 film version. The story chronicles the adventures of a girl named Dorothy in the Land of Oz. Thanks in part to the 1939 MGM movie, it is one of the best-known stories in American popular culture and has been widely translated. Its initial success, and the success of the popular 1902 Broadway musical Baum adapted from his story, led to Baum writing thirteen more Oz books. Historical Context

ART: The Ashcan School of Art (early 1900s) 
Group of U.S. painters who reacted against the traditions of the National Academy of Design. The original eight — Robert Henri, Everett Shinn (1876 – 1953), John Sloan, Arthur B. Davies (1862 – 1928), Ernest Lawson (1873 – 1939), Maurice Prendergast, George Luks (1867 – 1933), and William Glackens — were later joined by George Wesley Bellows. In 1908 they exhibited together in New York City. Saloons, tenements, pool halls, and slums were among their favorite subjects, and their style was rough and realistic. Their careers took various directions, and a few years later they were absorbed into the Ash Can school.  Example of Ashcan Art

The Jungle, 1906 novel written by author and journalist Upton Sinclair. Sinclair wrote this novel to highlight the plight of the working class and to remove from obscurity the corruption of the American meatpacking industry during the early-20th century.

The Lost Generation of the 1920’s
The "Lost Generation" defines a sense of moral loss or aimlessness apparent in literary figures during the 1920s. World War I seemed to have destroyed the idea that if you acted virtuously, good things would happen. Many good, young men went to war and died, or returned home either physically or mentally wounded (for most, both), and their faith in the moral guide posts that had earlier given them hope, were no longer valid...they were "Lost."  F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway

The Harlem Renaissance refers to the flowering of African American intellectual life during the 1920s and 1930s. At the time, it was known as the "New Negro Movement", named after the 1925 anthology Alain Locke. It was centered in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City, many French-speaking black writers . 

The Grapes of Wrath is a novel published in 1939 and written by John Steinbeck, who was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1940 and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962. Set during the Great Depression, the novel focuses on a poor family of sharecroppers, the Joads, driven from their Oklahoma home by drought, economic hardship, and changes in the agriculture industry. In a nearly hopeless situation, partly because they were trapped in the Dust Bowl, they set out for California  (video) along with thousands of other "Okies" in search of land, jobs and dignity.  Video of the Dust Bowl

Beatniks are part of a sociocultural movement in the 1950s and early 1960s that subscribed to an anti-materialistic lifestyle in the wake of World War II.  Author Jack Kerouac introduced the phrase "Beat Generation" in 1948, generalizing from his social circle to characterize the underground, anti-conformist youth gathering in New York at that time. 

The Organization Man Whyte wrote a 1956 bestseller titled The Organization Man after Fortune Magazine sponsored him to do extensive interviews on the CEOs of corporations such as General Electric and Ford.

On the Road, 1957 a novel by American writer Jack Kerouac, written in April 1951, and published by Viking Press in 1957. It is a largely autobiographical work that was based on the spontaneous road trips of Kerouac and his friends across mid-century America. It is often considered a defining work of the postwar Beat Generation that was inspired by jazz, poetry, and drug experiences. While many of the names and details of Kerouac's experiences are changed for the novel, hundreds of references in On the Road have real-world counterparts.

The Other America  (1962), by Michael Harrington. This book was a major force behind the so-called War on Poverty of the Lyndon Johnson era. Harrington called attention to what he called the “invisible land.” Forty or fifty million souls, “somewhere between 20 and 25 percent of the American people,” were living below the poverty line, he claimed. Most of them were crowded into inner-city slums, “invisible” to the middle class.

Silent Spring  (1962), by Rachel Carson. By showing how pesticides such as DDT affected birds and other animals, and indirectly humans, too, Silent Spring caused a public furor that led to the banning of many such substances and to the modern attack on all forms of pollution.

The Feminine Mystique  (1963), by Betty Friedan. If this work did not give birth to the modern feminist movement, it surely raised it to maturity. Friedan argued that most of the opinion-shaping forces of modern society were engaged in a witless effort to convince women of the virtues of domesticity. By so doing, they were wasting the talents of millions. Women should resist these pressures. “The only way for a woman … to know herself as a person,” wrote Friedan, “is by creative work.”

The Letter from Birmingham Jail or Letter from Birmingham City Jail, is an open letter written on April 16, 1963, by Martin Luther King, Jr., an American civil rights leader. King wrote the letter from the city jail in Birmingham, Alabama, where he was confined after being arrested for his part in the Birmingham campaign, a planned non-violent protest conducted by the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights and King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference against racial segregation by Birmingham's