Revelations

I have to return What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815 – 1848 (Daniel Walker Howe) to the library–I’ve renewed it twice.

It’s a great book. Here are some revelations I’ve stumbled across:

  • The Star-Spangled Banner didn’t become our national anthem until 1931. Until then, our anthem was “My Country ‘Tis of Thee.” However, it seems Americans were dissatisfied with a national anthem set to the same tune as England’s national anthem, “God Save Our King.”
  • In the 1840’s, there was a woman named Dorothea Dix who traveled all over the colonized U.S. advocating for state-provided services for the mentally ill. In 1854, after years of Dix’s lobbying, Congress put through a bill to fund insane asylums–via 10,000,000 acres of preserved public lands. Why have you never heard of these lands and this bill? The power of veto, by Franklin Pierce.
  • In the nineteenth century, with no international copyright laws in existence, U.S. publishers reprinted free (pirated) the works of British authors, like Dickens, Scott, and the Bronte Sisters. Howe remarks: “Ironically, the United States today strongly protects intellectual property and insists that other countries observe international copyright rules.” p. 635
  • Lastly, it seems in the early nineteenth century women writers began to enjoy a season of commercial success. Nathaniel Hawthorne, disgruntled by the competition, referred to them as “a damned mob of scribbling women.” (p. 633)

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