Grizzly @ Adams

In class today we tried to identify and understand the relationships between several of the more prominent elements of nineteenth century American culture: Romanticism, Manifest Destiny, the Second Great Awakening, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Self-Reliance,” Joseph Smith’s Book of Mormon and King Follett Sermon, William Cullen Bryant’s poetry, etc. We wound up with the whiteboard scribblings above.

So — to reiterate the questions I left you with at the end of class: Do the elements-plus-the-relations-between-them amount to some “thing,” some movement or cultural phenomenon? Or (as Gertrude Stein once said of Oakland) is there “no there there”? If there is something there, does it already have a name? If there is something there but it hasn’t already been named, what name might we most appropriately give it?

BTW, for more info on Joseph Smith and the Mormon scriptures, see the link at right for “Notes on the Mormon Scriptures.” Read more!