Royall Tyler

Royall Tyler (b. 1757–d. 1826) was born to a prominent merchant family in Boston and came of age in the decades leading up to the American Revolution. He entered Harvard College in 1771 and earned his bachelor of arts degree three months after the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776. Tyler then enlisted in the Revolutionary Army, although he remained in Boston and Cambridge studying law. His active military service seems to have been limited to serving as a brigade major during the unsuccessful 1778 attempt to capture Newport, Rhode Island. As the war continued, Tyler earned his master of arts degree from Harvard in 1779 and engaged in a failed courtship of Abigail Adams, the daughter of future president John Adams. After the war, Tyler became involved in the suppression of Shays’ Rebellion in 1786. When Daniel Shays fled to Vermont, Tyler was assigned to negotiate with authorities in New York, which still laid claim to the territory, to ensure that the rebel did not find safe harbor. In New York City Tyler launched his literary career; in April 1787, The Contrast began its run in New York as the first professionally produced American comic drama and one of the first successful American plays. Months later Tyler produced a second play, May Day in Town, that is no longer extant. In 1790, Tyler returned to Boston and married Mary Palmer, who would later publish the first American manual for infant care. They relocated to Vermont, where the couple remained for the rest of their lives. In the years to follow, Tyler published numerous poems and essays, including a popular series of essays in collaboration with Joseph Dennie under the title of “Colon & Spondee.” In 1797, Tyler published the novel The Algerine Captive, which achieved moderate success and was one of the first American books to be republished in Great Britain. In the 1800s and 1810s Tyler served for six years as the chief justice of the Vermont Supreme Court and launched a failed bid for the U.S. Senate. He completed several new plays, including his biblical dramas and the epistolary satire The Yankey in London (1809). At the time of his death in 1826 he was rewriting the first half of The Algerine Captive as a New England picaresque titled The Bay Boy, which would remain unpublished until 1968.

Increase Mather: The Foremost American Puritan

The classic biography of preeminent colonial Massachusetts minister and President of Harvard College, Increase Mather (1639-1723). This is the work that re-started Puritan studies in America. “A book which will be indispensable to students of early American history.” —Times Literary Supplement “It is a book to welcome and appreciate.” —American Historical Review “The available sources have been used carefully, and the story is told with great literary skill.” —The Sewanee Review “[Murdock’s book] opened the sluice gates to powerful streams of scholarship that in the next two decades revised our understanding of American Puritanism.” —Philip F. Gura, in A Concise Companion to American Studies

Horatio Alger

Raised in rural Massachusetts, the son of a Unitarian minister, Horatio Alger Jr. (b. 1832–d. 1899) graduated from Harvard College in 1852 and from the Harvard Divinity School in 1860. Expelled from the Unitarian pulpit in Brewster, Massachusetts, after confessing to a charge of pederasty, Alger moved to New York in April 1866 to begin a career as a full-time writer of fiction for juvenile readers. He published a serialized version of Ragged Dick in 1867 and a revised and expanded book version of the novel, his only bestseller, in 1868. During his career he twice traveled to Europe (1860 and 1873) and to California (1877 and 1890); he was also active in the Harvard Club of New York. To supplement his income from writing, he tutored the children of several prominent Jewish families in New York, including E. R. A. Seligman (b. 1861–d. 1939), later a professor of political economy at Columbia University and a founder of the American Economic Association; Benjamin Cardozo (b. 1870–d. 1938), later an associate justice of the US Supreme Court; and Lewis Einstein (b. 1877–d. 1967), later a career diplomat. Alger was the author of dozens of essays, poems, and short stories, and 103 books for young readers, and toward the end of his career he estimated his total book sales at eight hundred thousand copies. Despite the persistent notion that his heroes rise “from rags to riches,” only a few of his characters earn fabulous wealth. His young heroes normally rise not to riches, but to a secure middle-class respectability. Beginning in the late 1870s, Alger’s juvenile stories came under fire from ministers and professional librarians for their alleged sensationalism. Of 145 libraries surveyed by the American Library Association in 1894, over a third proscribed Alger’s books. Alger died of congestive heart failure at his sister’s home in Natick, Massachusetts, in July 1899. Early in the new century, his popularity began to skyrocket. By 1910, cheap editions of his moral tracts were selling at the rate of about one million annually because, in their idealization of a preindustrial order, they appealed to a nostalgic desire to reform business through a return to principles of equal opportunity and fair trade. The phrase “Horatio Alger hero,” denoting an honest and successful entrepreneurial type, obtained popular if inflated currency in the language in the 1920s, with Alger’s popularity at its peak. Though Alger’s books largely lapsed from print during the Great Depression, the Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans, Inc., cofounded by Norman Vincent Peale (b. 1898–d. 1993), inaugurated the annual Horatio Alger Awards in 1947.

The Burden of Christendom

The Founding of Harvard was a first order of business in Puritan Massachusetts. The Puritans had inherited not only the university tradition from Christendom, but also a strong emphasis, as part of their heritage from John Calvin, on educated clergy and educated lay leadership. Harvard College was designed to serve both church and state. It adopted the standard classic university curriculum, supplemented by theological training and Christian worship. William Ames, who had hoped to come to Massachusetts, proposed alternatives that would have better integrated theology with more secular learning, such as treating both metaphysics and ethics as subdisciplines of theology in the arts curriculum and removing Aristotle from these parts of the curriculum while retaining Plato.

Trust in the Lord and Do Good, 1876‒1886

This chapter begins by exploring Roosevelt’s four years at Harvard College. The death of his father in 1878 prompted extended religious musings and the clearest evidence of youthful evangelical faith. Roosevelt married Alice Lee in 1880 and launched his political career in 1881. As a state assemblyman, Roosevelt advocated for reforms in economic and social life. The tragic death of Alice Lee and Martha Roosevelt on the same day in 1884 drove Roosevelt to the Dakota Badlands, where he became a rancher. In these years Roosevelt said much less about personal faith, a marked contrast from his upbringing. The chapter ends with his engagement to Edith Carow in 1886.

Una entrevista con Antonio Gilman Guillén. Primera parte

Antonio Gilman Guillén, Profesor Emérito de la Cali­fornia State University-Northridge (EE. UU.) nació en New­ton (Massachusetts, EE. UU.) en 1944 del hispanista Stephen Gilman y Teresa Guillén, hija del poeta Jorge Guillén. Se educó en Harvard College (Grado en Filología Clásica, 1965), Cambridge University (Grado y Master en Arqueo­logía Prehistórica, 1967 y 1971 respectivamente) y Harvard University (Doctor en Antropología, 1974). El profesor Gilman es un autor de referencia en los EE. UU. sobre la Prehistoria Reciente europea desde hace 40 años. Su dedicación particular a la península ibérica des­de la década de 1970 ha influido en la investigación de este territorio en un doble sentido. Por una parte ha favorecido de manera significativa la internacionalización de los yaci­mientos peninsulares y de los arqueólogos que los estudian en la comunidad académica de lengua inglesa. Por otra, ha mostrado que hay alternativas a la arqueología histórico-cultural, predominante en las universidades europeas. Un buen ejemplo es su interpretación económico-política del registro arqueológico de la Prehistoria Reciente, cuya unidad de análisis es el surgimiento de la desigualdad social. La incorporación del Análisis de Captación de Recursos, entre otras estrategias de la investigación en Geografía, ha sido fundamental para mostrar la viabilidad del proyecto alterna­tivo. Su influencia debe mucho también a su disponibilidad a incorporarse tanto a equipos liderados por arqueólogos locales, como a tareas de evaluación y asesoramiento en organismos públicos de investigación y revistas científicas, como Trabajos de Prehistoria. La Junta de Andalucía así lo reconoció concediéndole en 2012 la Medalla Menga. La entrevista con Antonio Gilman aprovechó su estancia en la Residencia de Estudiantes (Madrid) durante noviembre de 2019 y se publicará en dos entregas. Este primer artícu­lo se centra en los aspectos biográficos de su formación intelectual y muestra el entrecruzamiento del azar y, por tanto, de la decisión individual, con las redes familiares, de clase, culturales y académicas en una trayectoria científica de excelencia.