After the Revolution Quotes

“He had begun Democracy in America by warning his readers that “Whoever should imagine that I have intended to write a panegyric would be strangely mistaken,” adding later that “there are certain truths which the Americans can only learn from strangers. . . .”
― Joseph J. Ellis, After the Revolution: Profiles of Early American Culture

“the Revolution did not produce a single piece of imaginative literature that has endured. The generation of writers who came of age during the Revolution breathed in a supercharged ideological atmosphere; they pressed themselves and their art into the service of their country, only to discover that a republic could be as demanding a patron as a wealthy prince.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, After the Revolution: Profiles of Early American Culture

“even before the war began to provide him with material, Peale had brandished his brush as a weapon and used it with considerably greater skill than he ever used his musket. In his autobiography he called himself a “zealous advocate for the Liberties of his Country” since the time when “Great Britain first attempted to lay a tax on America.” 38 This was bragging, but it was also true;”
― Joseph J. Ellis, After the Revolution: Profiles of Early American Culture

“After Emerson the word “culture” in the modern sense became a permanent fixture in the American vocabulary. Artists and writers began to conceive of themselves as refugees from the American mainstream, the specially endowed inhabitants of a transcendent region sealed off from the hurly-burly of the marketplace, the banality of popular opinion, and the grime of industrialized society. Alienation became the customary and most comfortable posture for American intellectuals; criticism rather than celebration of the dominant American institutions and attitudes became the accepted norm.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, After the Revolution: Profiles of Early American Culture

“He became preoccupied with the inevitable limits imposed by time and circumstance. In short, his nationalistic ideology began to be affected by his personal frustration, his increasing fatalism, and the sense that his time was running out.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, After the Revolution: Profiles of Early American Culture

“When the first American colonies were founded, William Bradford—Webster’s distinguished ancestor—spelled the same word differently in the same sentence; his orthography and grammar were regarded as legitimate expressions of his personality.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, After the Revolution: Profiles of Early American Culture

“What engine is more powerful than the theatre? No arts can be made more effectual for the promotion of good than the dramatic and the histrionic. They unite music, poetry, painting, and eloquence. The engine is powerful for good or ill—it is for society to choose.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, After the Revolution: Profiles of Early American Culture

“American literary culture proved to be less like an explosion that went off with the Revolution than a tender plant that required over fifty years of cultivation before it blossomed.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, After the Revolution: Profiles of Early American Culture

“Of course Peale himself did not believe that he was imposing his order on chaos, but rather discovering the order that already existed. Creativity, originality, and virtuosity were not appropriate goals for him, because he saw himself as a recorder of the prevailing unity and order reigning in the universe.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, After the Revolution: Profiles of Early American Culture

“In the profiles that follow we should expect to encounter men who combined an incredibly optimistic estimate of America’s cultural potential with a deep distrust of their own artistic callings, hatred for the pecuniary values of the marketplace with considerable skill as entrepreneurs, intense private ambition with a genuine craving to channel their creative energies into public service. We might be on the lookout for artists who discovered that a highly developed sense of paradox was the foundation of their best creative works. We might ask ourselves if the specific ways in which these cultural pioneers reconciled tensions and fused together the disparate strands of their personalities blocked or released their creative energies.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, After the Revolution: Profiles of Early American Culture

“the historian must be part hedgehog and part fox; that is, he must know “one big thing” and several “little things,” must pursue a unifying vision while remaining sensitive to the peculiarities and the bedeviling varieties of his subject.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, After the Revolution: Profiles of Early American Culture