{"id":5135,"date":"2026-01-09T01:42:16","date_gmt":"2026-01-09T01:42:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-117pinsker\/?page_id=5135"},"modified":"2026-01-09T01:42:16","modified_gmt":"2026-01-09T01:42:16","slug":"american-voices-1860s-to-1880s","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-117pinsker\/course-syllabus\/american-voices-1860s-to-1880s\/","title":{"rendered":"American Voices: 1860s to 1880s"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3>TEXT:\u00a0\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/fys-pinsker\/texts\/walt-whitman-i-hear-america-singing-1860\/\">Whitman, \u201cI Hear America Singing\u201d (1860<\/a>)<\/h3>\n<ul>\n<li>Eleven line free verse poem added to the 1860 edition of\u00a0<em>Leaves of Grass\u00a0<\/em>in a section entitled, \u201cChants Democratic\u201d<\/li>\n<li>Whitman identifies multiple occupations across the emerging industrial American order:\u00a0 mechanics, carpenters, masons, boatmen, deckhands, shoemakers, hatters, wood-cutters, ploughboys, mothers, wives, sewing women, and washer women<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.blackpast.org\/african-american-history\/harper-frances-ellen-watkins-1825-1911\/\">Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825-1911)<\/a>\u00a0was one of the most prolific black writers, poets and activists of nineteenth-century America.\u00a0 She was born free in Maryland in 1825 but orphaned at a young age and raised by her aunt and uncle.\u00a0 Harper began publishing poetry in her early 20s.\u00a0 By the 1850s, she had become a leading abolitionist poet and lecturer., based mostly in Philadelphia.\u00a0 During the Civil War, Harper married and raised a family in Ohio.\u00a0 After the war, she became involved in a number of reform movements and continued her career as a writer.\u00a0 In May 1866, Harper spoke at the National Woman\u2019s Rights Convention in New York, the eleventh in a series of national woman\u2019s rights gatherings which had been first launched in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1850.\u00a0 This was the movement primarily organized and presided over by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony.\u00a0 Harper\u2019s speech electrified the convention, calling out as it did both sexism and racism and contributing to the creation of the American Equal Rights Association (AERA) a few weeks later.\u00a0 The AERA helped lead several suffrage fights in places like Kansas in 1867 before it disbanded over disagreements among the reformers about whether they needed to prioritize the struggles ex-slaves about the general call for more women\u2019s rights.\u00a0 \u201cWe are all bound up together,\u201d Harper had wisely observed in 1866, but the spirit of that admonition proved difficult to sustain.<\/p>\n<p><strong>SOURCE FORMAT:\u00a0<\/strong>\u00a0<strong>Public speech<\/strong><\/p>\n<h3>TEXT:\u00a0\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/fys-pinsker\/texts\/emma-lazarus-the-new-colossus-1883\/\">Lazarus, \u201cThe New Colossus\u201d (1883)<\/a><\/h3>\n<ul>\n<li>The poem takes a Petrarchan sonnet form, which means it has two divisions:\u00a0 eight lines or octave followed by six lines or sestet with a change in rhyme scheme and turn in thought or volta between them<\/li>\n<li>Hirsch also emphasizes the importance of meter to Lazarus \u2013how the poem rejects iambic pentameter and instead \u201cechoes\u201d traditional Greek epic meter (dactylic hexameter) (p. 73)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>TEXT:\u00a0\u00a0Whitman, \u201cI Hear America Singing\u201d (1860) Eleven line free verse poem added to the 1860 edition of\u00a0Leaves of Grass\u00a0in a section entitled, \u201cChants Democratic\u201d Whitman identifies multiple occupations across the emerging industrial American order:\u00a0 mechanics, carpenters, masons, boatmen, deckhands, shoemakers, &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-117pinsker\/course-syllabus\/american-voices-1860s-to-1880s\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":373,"featured_media":0,"parent":11,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"class_list":["post-5135","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-117pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/5135","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-117pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-117pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-117pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/373"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-117pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5135"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-117pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/5135\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5136,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-117pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/5135\/revisions\/5136"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-117pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/11"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-117pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5135"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}