United States

Birth of American Culture

“In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book?” asked an English satirist early in the 1800s. Had he looked beyond the limits of “high culture,” he would have found plenty of answers. As a matter of fact, the period between 1815 and 1860 produced an outpouring of traditional literary works now known to students of English-language prose and poetry everywhere—the verse of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Edgar Allan Poe, the novels of James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville, as well as the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson—all expressing distinctively American themes and depicting distinctly American characters such as Natty Bumppo, Hester Prynne, and Captain Ahab who now belong to the world.

Melville, HermanHerman Melville, etching after a portrait by Joseph O. Eaton.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (Digital File Number: cph 3c35949)

A detail of a page from William Clark's expedition diary, including a sketch of evergreen shrub leaves.North Wind Picture Archives

Lewis and Clark ExpeditionMap of Lewis and Clark Expedition by William Clark and Meriwether Lewis, 1804–06.Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division, Washington, D.CBut setting these aside, Nathaniel Bowditch’s The New American Practical Navigator (1802), Matthew Fontaine Maury’s Physical Geography of the Sea (1855), and the reports from the Lewis and Clark Expedition and the various far Western explorations made by the U.S. Army’s Corps of Engineers, as well as those of U.S. Navy Antarctic explorer Charles Wilkes, were the American books on the desks of sea captains, naturalists, biologists, and geologists throughout the world. By 1860 the international scientific community knew that there was an American intellectual presence.

P.T. Barnum's mammoth tent housing his menagerie and exhibits.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Stephen Foster, 1859Courtesy of the Foster Hall Collection, University of Pittsburgh

Whitman, WaltWalt Whitman, photograph by Mathew Brady.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.At home Noah Webster’s An American Dictionary of the English Language (1828) included hundreds of words of local origin to be incorporated in the former “King’s English.” Webster’s blue-backed “Speller,” published in 1783, the geography textbooks of Jedidiah Morse, and the Eclectic Readers of William Holmes McGuffey became staples in every 19th-century American classroom. Popular literature included the humorous works of writers such as Seba Smith, Joseph G. Baldwin, Johnson Jones Hooper, and Artemus Ward, which featured frontier tall tales and rural dialect. In the growing cities there were new varieties of mass entertainment, including the blatantly racist minstrel shows, for which ballads like those of Stephen Foster were composed. The “museums” and circuses of P.T. Barnum also entertained the middle-class audience, and the spread of literacy sustained a new kind of popular journalism, pioneered by James Gordon Bennett, whose New York Herald mingled its up-to-the-moment political and international news with sports, crime, gossip, and trivia. Popular magazines such as Harper’s Weekly, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, and Godey’s Lady’s Book, edited by Sarah Josepha Hale with a keen eye toward women’s wishes, also made their mark in an emerging urban America. All these added up to a flourishing democratic culture that could be dismissed as vulgar by foreign and domestic snobs but reflected a vitality loudly sung by Walt Whitman in Leaves of Grass (1855).

Bernard A. Weisberger