Mention one new detail that you learned from the documentary segment that none of your classmates have commented on in previous responses.
Author: David Hoffman
The Power and the People, Part Two
Mention one new detail that you learned from the documentary segment that none of your classmates have commented on in previous responses.
Truth and Fiction in Ragtime
Many of the people and incidents that make up the the plot of Ragtime are real, even the sensational ones. For instance, Harry K. Thaw really did shot and kill architect Stanford White, and he really was married to Evelyn Nesbit. Emma Goldman really did conspire with Alexander Berkman to assassinate Henry Clay Frick.
Check the historical validity of an incident in Ragtime and post your results. Use an incident that neither I nor any of your classmates who have responded before you have mentioned. In doing so quote the passage from Ragtime, mention what chapter it is from, and provide a confirming or dis-confirming link.
Jacob Riis Resources
Link to a Collection of Robert Henri Works
Maggie, Girl of the Streets
Stephen Crane’s Maggie: Girl of the Streets has been both praised and criticized for its unsentimental and nonjudgmental style. As narrator, Crane describes events without commenting on the conduct of his character and without telling readers what they are expected to feel. He wants to give readers “just the facts” of the case and let readers form their own opinions. But now, having read the book, comment on each of the following: 1) Where does responsibility for Maggie’s fate lie? With Maggie herself? With Pete? With Maggie’s mother, father, or brother? Nellie? 2) What role do social and economic conditions play in Maggie’s tragic end? 3) Which of the characters to you feel the most sympathy for? Why?
Teacher’s Guide to New York: A Documentary Film
Follow this link to see a guide to New York: A Documentary Film prepared by PBS. An especially useful list of episodes and scenes can be found in the final pages.
Droll Dutch Genre Painting
Washington Irving’s depictions of life in New York in the 17th and 18th centuries share the sensibility of Dutch genre painting in the same period. Dutch painters in this period, which is sometimes referred to as the Golden Age of Dutch painting because it is the age of such renown painters as Rembrandt and Vermeer, painted scenes of everyday life called “genre paintings” in addition to portraits, landscapes, and mythological subjects. Genre paintings are “droll”: they often humorously characterize and mock their subjects, exaggerating negative features and qualities in a way that is similar to what Irving does in many of his stories. Below are examples of a couple a number of Dutch genre paintings that are quite could almost be scenes out of Knickerbocker’s History and “Dolph Heylinger.”
“Rhetoricians at the Window,” Jan Steen circa 1665.
“The Doctor’s Visit,” Jan Steen circa 1665.
Transcendentalism and Romanticism
Transcendentalism was an American philosophical movement set into motion by Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882). It was one of a number of “Romantic” movements of the nineteenth century–which included the romantic poetry of Byron and Shelly, the religious mysticism of The Oxford Movement and the popularity of neo-gothic architecture–which turn away from the rationalism of the Enlightenment and sought out sublime experiences in which the individual was over-awed by the grandeur of nature and the divine. The core idea of transcendentalism is nowhere better stated that in this excerpt from Emerson 1836 essay “Nature.”
The influence of transcendentalism can be seen in the work Walt Whitman and the park-scapes of Fredrick Law Olmsted. The painting of the Hudson River School artists and the writings of Washing Irving also are harmonious with the aesthetics of romanticism and transcendentalism.
The Brooklyn Bridge
The commentators in “Sunlight and Shadow,” the speeches of mayors Low and Edson, and the poems of Crane and Mayakovsky all celebrate different sets of qualities and values embodied by the Brooklyn Bridge. Compare and contrast the meaning of the Brooklyn Bridge for two or three of the above.