Introduction

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Introduction
By the 1830s, the United States was developing its own distinct culture as illustrated by movements in literature, the arts, and education. Romanticism, a literary movement that rose in reaction to the Age of Reason, valued emotion and intuition, and stressed optimism, patriotism, ingenuousness, and, in particular, the individual as part of nature and therefore divine. America's main proponents of this thinking were the Transcendentalists, the most famous of whom were Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Both objected to society's restrictions on individuals, but whereas Emerson was apolitical, Thoreau was something of an activist, as his poll-tax protest and essay "Civil Disobedience" show. Edgar Allan Poe was not a Transcendentalist but a romantic all the same; he was America's prototype tortured genius. Other writers, such as Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne, had a romantic focus on the individual, but explored the darker side of people's struggles with guilt, sin, good and evil, and pride; Walt Whitman borrowed from the all of them to create his own most American voice by relying on his natural inclinations and using commonplace subjects and often coarse language. In architecture and the decorative arts, the Federal, Gothic, Greek, and Italian styles all gained popularity, while technology made mass production of items such as wallpaper, rugs, and furniture possible. Painters of the Hudson River school and the luminists decorated wealthy homes; the middle class embraced Currier and Ives. This mid-nineteenth-century era also saw the growth of public education throughout the country save for the South. Educators were driven not only by the beliefs that humans were "improvable" and that democracy required an educated citizenry, but also by a desire to "Americanize" immigrants and create good employees. And though exceedingly few Americans used them, colleges began to reform and create more practical curricula in the 1840s and some to educate women. In the general culture, magazine, newspaper, and book publishers flourished, as did civic cultures in cities like Boston, Philadelphia, New York, Cincinnati, Lexington, and Pittsburgh. In the hard sciences, states sponsored geological and coastal surveys. An American sense of humor also emerged in this era.

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