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"...anti-Catholic parties have been failures. Nobody wants to drive away his neighbor of another faith...It remains to ask how far religion is still a vital force. Many Americans prefer to offer up their prayers in private and to keep their spiritual life to themselves..." 1907!
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"...Yet the interest in the occult has not been diminished...he distinctly mystical churches have a large and increasing following...but outside such organizations the highly emotional type of religion is confined chiefly to the negroes and to the frontier."
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"Undoubtedly the religious motive has altered: hell-fire has paled and ceases to make afraid. Perhaps for lack of the old-time terrors many parts of the rural regions have gone backward, religiously and morally."
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"...the moralist, whose attempt to gain salvation 'through filthy rags of works' once enraged the Puritans, walks the earth unabashed; a surprising number of people...send their children inside no church... knowledge of Scripture has already been lost by the rising generation."
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The next chapter is on American Intellectual Life, titled "I Want to Know!" "The quaint and disappearing Yankee elocution 'I want to know!' means not so much inquiry as sympathy and admiration for another's mental processes." ?
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Speaking of the sudden appearance of a national literary tradition after 1820: "It was the day of the essayist, most of whom are obscured by the greater brilliancy of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the nestor and the culmination of American literature..."
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"...In every direction but one, since the Civil War, the nation's intellectual ideals have been enlarging, but the sad decline is in literature. As the great figures of the earlier period moved off the stage, few arose to replace them..."
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By 1907, conventional wisdom among American intellectuals was that we'd just dropped the ball when it came to literature and political leadership since the Civil War. Several decades had passed, and despite all the apparent progress in other areas, there was just a void.
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To me, this suggests that national and even regional identities were so fragmented and incoherent as to effectively not exist. That real communities had largely failed to perpetuate themselves in a stable way, or had become rapidly overwhelmed by artificial ones. No big picture.
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Neat :) Kerry -- as a comparative example you may enjoy this thread on how the idea of modern "India" came together in an incredibly messy way in 1947
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18. There is even a list of "aspiring" states. If you look at this map, you will find the old boundaries and divides. The old yearnings. They don't go away. They fade for sometime and then they come back ...
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