Creating an American Culture

Hudson River School

Nathaniel Hawthorne

James Fenimore Cooper

Alexis de Tocqueville• Democracy in America• Among a democratic people,

where there is no hereditary wealth, every man works to earn a living...Labor is held in honor; the prejudice is not against but in its favor

• Lack of aristocracy allows for American spirit

• America is a largely religious society

George Catlin

Movement West

Immigration

• Irish and Germans

Know Nothing Party

Jean de Crevecouer

• Letters from an American Farmer• What is an American?

What then is the American, this new man? He is either an European, or the descendant of an European,

hence that strange misture of blood, which you will find in no other country. I could point out to you a

family whose grandfather was an englishman, whose wife was Dutch, whose son married a french woman, and whose present four sons have now four wives of

different nations. He is an American

Samuel Slater

Eli Whitney

Samuel Morse

• “What hath God wrought!”

Lowell Girls

» “Wage slaves”

• Thus thirteen hours per day of close attention and monotonous labor are extracted from the young women in these manufactories. . . . So fatigued -- we should say, exhausted and worn out, but we wish to speak of the system in the simplest language -- are numbers of girls that they go to bed soon after their evening meal, and endeavor by a comparatively long sleep to resuscitate their weakened frames for the toil of the coming day.

Cult of domesticity

Iron Horse