Colonial American writing， Rinehart editions_图书大全
Colonial American writing， Rinehart editions
ISBN: 9780030730153
出版年: 1900
内容简介
Introduction
The selections in this volume illustrate main aspects of Amer-
ican intellectual and imaginative origins and growth through the
third quarter of the eighteenth century. Exhibiting not so much
colonial social, institutional, and political forms, as ideas and
attitudes which made for such forms, they embody the thought
and imagination of those Colonial Americans who were to be-
come Revolutionary Americans. These writings, in fact, point
immediately toward the American mind of the Revolutionary
period a mind of the Enlightenment, one which was to center
on the notion of the free, rational personality and which was to
know that freedom and rationality were embodied in the very
nature of things American.
There are represented in this volume some of the origins of
that mind and of its drive toward freedom. The Pilgrim idea of
freedom through private and separate devotion, the Puritan
idea of freedom through work and facing one s fate as a sinful
individual, the Virginia idea of freedom through the responsi-
bilities of the ruling gentleman, the Quaker idea of freedom
through the inviolable sacredness of the individual, and the
frontier idea of freedom through violent self-assertion--all these
ultimately found their largest realization in the thoughts, beliefs,
and actions of enlightened Americans of the Revolution and
beyond. In the writings here selected, we can know these ideas
as flley came into being and began to be explored and tested
and as they made for characteristic attitudes toward life and
living.
There is perhaps not enough of what we may, properly
speaking, call "literature" in this collection, as there was little
of the sustained esthetic attitude in colonial America. Colonial
Americans were determined to make a new way of life in a new
