Science and Technology in the Pre-Civil War Nation

1. the norton anthology american literature ninth edition Science and Technology inthe Pre–Civil War Nation

2. Science, Technology, Progress John Gast, American Progress (1872)

3. Bigelow: Elements of Technology • “The connexion of the arts with the sciences is more common and obvious in modern times, than it was in the days of antiquity. . . . The labor of a hundred artificers is now performed by the operations of a single machine. We traverse the ocean in security, because the arts have furnished us a more unfailing guide than the stars. We accomplish what the ancients only dreamt of in their fables; we ascend above the clouds, and penetrate into the abysses of the ocean.”

4. Willis: The Pencil of Nature “Sitting for a Daguerrotype” (1850)

5. The Lowell “Factory Girls” The Lowell Offering

6. The Lowell “Factory Girls” “[F]rom all the crowd I saw in the different factories that day, I cannot recall or separate one young face that gave me a painful impression.” —Charles Dickens, American Notes “Morbid dejection, and wounded sensibility, have, in these instances, produced that insanity which prompted suicide. Is it not an appropriate question to ask here whether, or not, there was any thing in their mode of life which tended to this dreadful result?” — Harriet Farley, “Suicide”

7. Hawthorne: American Note-Books Early locomotive

8. Humboldt and Poe “By uniting, under one point of view, both the phenomena of our own globe and those presented in the regions of space, we embrace the limits of the science of the Cosmos, and convert the physical history of the globe into the physical history of the universe, the one term being modeled upon that of the other.” —Alexander von Humboldt, Cosmos “[B]y the term ‘Universe,’ wherever employed without qualification in this essay, I mean to designate the utmost conceivable expanse of space, with all things, spiritual and material, that can be imagined to exist within the compass of that expanse.” —Edgar Allan Poe, Eureka

9. Humboldt and Poe “But even of treatises on the really limited, although always assumed as the unlimited, Universe of stars, I know none in which a survey, even of this limited Universe, is so taken as to warrant deductions from its individuality. The nearest approach to such a work is made in the ‘Cosmos’ of Alexander Von Humboldt. He presents the subject, however, not in its individuality but in its generality. His theme, in its last result, is the law of each portion of the merely physical Universe, as this law is related to the laws of every other portion of this merely physical Universe. His design is simply synœretical. In a word, he discusses the universality of material relation, and discloses to the eye of Philosophy what ever inferences have hitherto lain hidden behind this universality.” —Edgar Allan Poe, Eureka

10. Racial Pseudoscience From Charles Pickering, M.D.,The Races of Man (1854)

11. Nott and Gliddon: Types of Mankind “The grand problem, more particularly interesting to all readers, is that which involves the common origin of races; for upon the latter deduction hang not only certain religious dogmas, but the more practical question of the equality and perfectibility of races—we say ‘more practical question,’ because, while Almighty Power, on the one hand, is not responsible to Man for the distinct origin of human races, these, on the other, are accountable to Him for the manner in which their delegated power is used towards each other.”

12. Douglass: The Claims of the Negro “There was a time when, if you established the point that a particular being is a man, it was considered that such a being, of course, had a common ancestry with the rest of mankind. But it is not so now.” “Looking out upon the surface of the Globe, . . . and the vast and striking differences which mark and diversify its multitudinous inhabitants, the question has been raised, and pressed with increasing ardor and pertinacity, (especially in modern times,) can all these various tribes, nations, tongues, kindred, so widely separated, and so strangely dissimilar, have descended from a common ancestry?”

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