Word: 1850s
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...singer and a dancer, may have had their careers bolstered—or indeed wholly founded—on the strength of the gorgeous daguerreotypes of them and the lithographs copied from these, but they are overwhelmed by the star of this show. Edwin Forrest, an actor from the 1850s, was renowned for his portrayals of theater’s great heroic figures, and his huge twelve-inch-by-ten-inch daguerreotype reflects in faithful detail that summation of his character. Huge and hulking, his portrait seems to extend beyond the planar surface to surreally three-dimensional proportions...
...catalog entry particularly caught his eye: A manuscript entitled “The Bondwoman’s Narrative,” a fictional novel purportedly handwritten in the 1850s by an escaped female slave named Hannah Crafts...
...been said that in America during the fractious 1850s, before the Civil War, Walt Whitman entertained the wistful, urgent conceit that his great poem "Leaves of Grass" might save the Union. It would show Americans that despite their divisions they were one great nation. Montaigne, almost three centuries earlier, worked a variation on the theme. Rising above dogma and abstraction, he would pursue the general human truth by studying himself - and such generalized self-knowledge, the recognition of their human selves, might relieve people of their inclination to kill one another for religious reasons...
...Third parties, since the 1850s at least, have mostly served one function: to stand for something, and force the Democratic or Republican parties (usually both) to co-opt it. No major party will ever co-opt the Libertarian party stance, and arguably, no major party ever should. But the Libertarians make an excellent magnet for both...
...course in Whitman's 1850s the United States was a ship on the rocks, breaking apart. The Civil War, the first modern war, with its industrial carnage, was imminent. Whitman cherished a magnificent illusion that he could save the union with a poem - an act of imaginative cohesion that would resolve the great American paradox of individual dignity in democratic mass. His "I" was an immense ego joined to an even larger "we," so that he wrote in Leaves of Grass, "[I am] one of the great nation, the nation of many nations," and in the embrace of his rhetoric...