美国文学(同名8654).pdfVIP

The literature of romanticism In 1810 the population of the seventeen states totaled little more than 7,000,000. Fifty-one years later, at the beginning of the Civil War, the number of states had doubled, and the number of Americans had increased to more than 31,000,000. American pioneers had pushed the frontier line of settlement beyond the Mississippi to the Great Plains, and the nations center of population had shifted westward from the eastern seaboard, across the Appalachians, Ohio. The West had risen as a sectional power to challenge the political dominance of the East and the South. In 1828 the election of the frontier hero Andrew Jackson as the seventh President of the United States had brought an effective end to the Virginia Dynasty of American Presidents. By the 1840s the age of the Common Man had arrived. Voting restrictions were ceased. The Jeffersonian concept of a natural aristocracy had been replaced by the egalitarian belief that all white men were literally equal, and most were capable of political leadership. Before 1860 the United States had begun to change into an industrial and urban society. The word technology was coined in 1829. A form of automation had come with construction of a one-man flour mill in Virginia; American had invented the cotton gin, the sewing machine, and the telegraph; the principles of assembly-line mass production had been established the beginning of a technology that would bring vast material benefits and cause overwhelming social disorders. The United States had been a republic of small landholders, without sharp contrasts of wealth. Now the nation became a land of contrasting riches and poverty. The number