America's Indomitable Character Volume III

Book excerpt: Volume III of America's Indomitable Character concerns itself with: American character identity as represented by ten selected Colonial female authors, among them the early Colonial authors of religious freedom Anne Hutchinson and Anne Dudley Bradstreet; the Colonial adventuress Sarah Kemble Knight; Anne Cotton and her eye-witness accounts of the history of Virginia; Mercy Otis Warren, a contemporary historian of the American Revolutionary Period; Abigail Adams who gave her husband John Adams, the second President, political advice; Judith Sargent Murray, a Colonial feminist; the African-American poet Phillis Wheatley; Hannah Webster Foster, an early advocate of female education; and Susanna Haswell Rowson, America's first professional female novelist. How the Thirteen Original Colonies became states. The American Constitution and American character identity. Attempts to destroy the American Constitution. The Monroe Doctrine and American character identity. The origin and essence of Romanticism and its importance in America. A presentation of Nature, human nature, society, the social contract, and education in selected works of William Hill Brown, Philip Morin Freneau, Charles Brockden Brown, Washington Irving, William Cullen Bryant, David Crockett, James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe. The Bill of Rights. David Crockett's Not Yours to Give Speech. Why Colonists and immigrants came to America and how they became Americans. Individualism and anti-elitism in America's character. America as a place where individuals form and decide of their own destiny; where, as Don Fredrick says, society "means nothing more than a collection of many individual citizens in the same place; where there exist not many rules telling a person what he is permitted to do, but only a few rules telling him what he cannot do. Or, at least, that is what America was when the aforementioned authors wrote about the nation."