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Posterity: Letters of Great Americans to Their Children - Softcover

Lawson, Dorie McCullough

 
9780767909044: Posterity: Letters of Great Americans to Their Children
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0767909046 ISBN 13: 9780767909044
Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2008

Inhaltsangabe

An elegantly designed, beautifully composed volume of personal letters from famous American men and women that celebrates the American Experience and illuminates the rich history of some of America’s most storied families.

Posterity is at once an epistolary chronicle of America and a fascinating glimpse into the hearts and minds of some of history’s most admired figures and storied families. Spanning more than three centuries, these letters contain enduring lessons—in life, love, character and compassion—that will surprise and enlighten.

Included here are letters from Thomas Jefferson to his daughter, warning her of the evils of debt; General Patton on D-Day to his son, a cadet at West Point, about what it means to be a good soldier; W.E.B. Du Bois to his daughter about character beneath the color of skin; Oscar Hammerstein about why, after all his success, he doesn’t stop working; Woody Guthrie, writing from a New Jersey asylum, to nine-year-old Arlo about universal human frailty; Eleanor Roosevelt chastising her grown son for his Christmas plans; and Groucho Marx as a dog to his twenty-five-year-old son.

Here are renowned Americans in their own words and in their own times, seen as they were seen by their children. Here are our great Americans as mothers and fathers.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Dorie McCullough Lawson graduated from Middlebury College, where she majored in history. She works and lives in Rockport, Maine with her husband and three children. This is her first book.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

William Henry Seward to William Henry Seward, Jr.


"How good and virtuous and just ought we to be and how thankful to God that we have blessings secured by the virtue and sufferings of our ancestors."


One of the most important political figures of the mid-nineteenth century, William Henry Seward was governor of New York, then senator, then secretary of state under Abraham Lincoln. As a leading voice in the condemnation of slavery, it was he who delivered the courageous line on the floor of the Senate evoking a "higher law." Later, in 1867, it was Seward, the ever devoted proponent of American expansion and progress, who secured the purchase of Alaska for the United States. With thick, disheveled hair and a prominent nose, Seward, according to Henry Adams, looked like a "wise macaw." Charming and relaxed, he was a welcomed guest and a favorite among the Washington hostesses.

In the fall of 1848, he was running for the first time for a seat in the United States Senate. He campaigned in his home state, New York, and traveled about the East Coast speaking on behalf of the Republican Party. Here, with his characteristic broad sense of time, William Seward, the grandson of a Revolutionary War colonel, writes to his son Willie, a nine-year-old boy at home with persistent eye troubles.



[October 7, 1848]
Wilmington in the State of Delaware, Monday



My dear Boy

I am very much obliged to you for your letter which gives me much interesting information. I will try to procure in New York a filter which will purify the water of the new pump.

I have been at many places in Pennsylvania where I wished that you were strong enough to be with me. When you grow strong enough I shall want you to travel with me. I saw on the banks of the Schuylkill, Valley Forge the place where General Washington had his camp during one of the most severe winters which occurred during the American Revolution. His camp extended four miles long with two entrenchments in front and high mountains on the one side and a deep creek on the other. From the mountain in rear he could see with his spy glass the British army in Philadelphia seventy miles off. He was almost destitute of ammunition to protect himself. The Congress was not able to supply him with money, the army was in deplorable want of bread and meat clothes and shoes. They suffered exceedingly. The poor horses and dogs died of hunger and diarrhea and death extended to the men, a dozen were buried in a day and in one place, scarcely beneath the frost in the surface of the ground. The farmer now often turns up the bones of the lost men when plowing his fields. Mrs. Washington was a good woman, she spent the winter in the camp and she served and consoled the sick and dying. It was by such sacrifice that Liberty was obtained for the American people. How good and virtuous and just ought we to be and how thankful to God that we have blessings secured by the virtue and sufferings of our ancestors. I hope you will get Peter Parley's history of the Revolution and ask Ma to read to you the account of the Revolution and then I hope you will resolve to be a good man like General Washington that all people may love and bless you.

I saw canal boats on railroad cars in Pennsylvania loaded with freight, and what is very strange is that as the boats are too long for the curves of the Rail Roads, they build the boats into three pieces, and when they get on the mountains they put them together with hooks and let them down into the Canal and float them to Lake Erie. Yet they do not take in a drop of water. Can you guess how this is done?

Your affectionate father
William H. Seward.



Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Margaret L. Stanton


". . . I feel that . . . I am making the path smoother for you and Hattie and all the other dear girls."



Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a plump and jolly mother of seven, was a revolutionary. Dressed in yards of black silk and lace, with her white hair curled neatly beneath her bonnet, she charmed and excited audiences across the country. She often began with talk of children and motherhood and then deftly moved on to property rights, divorce reform, and the right to vote. "You may never be wives, mothers or housekeepers," she explained, "but you will be women."

Nineteenth-century American women could not vote, could not sign a contract or serve on a jury. Married women were not permitted to own or inherit property, or to earn or invest money, and in the case of a divorce, the custody of the children automatically went to the father. For fifty-four years, from 1848 until her death in 1902, Elizabeth Cady Stanton fought vehemently for overall social justice for women. In organizing meetings and writing speeches, she was tireless; for eight months of each year during the 1870s, she toured the country lecturing. Spreading the word and earning a living, Stanton delivered one speech a day and two on Sundays in town after town. Here, describing a typical day on the road, she writes from Austin, Minnesota, to her twenty-year-old daughter, a student at Vassar.



To Margaret L. Stanton
Au[st]in, Minnesota, December 1, 1872



Dear Madge:

Imagine me to-day sitting in a small comfortable room in the railroad hotel about a half mile from this little Minnesota town, where I do not know one soul. But as everybody is polite and attentive, I suppose they all know me. I spoke last evening at Waterloo, and in order to reach here, my next place, I was obliged to leave at midnight. So after my lecture, I had an oyster supper, packed up my finery, and, all ready to start, took a short nap on the sofa. I was called at two. But as the horses were sick and I was the only guest going from the hotel westward, I was toted, I and my baggage, in a little cart drawn by a mule through a fearful snow storm, the wind cutting like particles of glass. Having arrived safely at the depot, my escort, a good natured, over-grown boy, deposited me and mine beside a red-hot stove. Learning then and there that the train was two hours behind, I rolled my cloak up for a pillow, laid down on the bench and went to sleep, listening to a discussion in an adjoining room on the merits of my lecture. One man vowed in a broad Irish brogue that he would leave the country if the women voted. Gracious, I thought to myself as I dozed into slumber, what would become of our experiment if one "white male" should desert the flag! In due time I was waked by some gentle Patrick,--perhaps my very critic--tickets bought, valise checked and I transferred to a sleeping-car, where, in a twinkling, I at once "flopped" asleep again, without even taking my bonnet off. At eight, I was roused by an African for this place, where, it being Sunday, the train lies over. So I ordered a fire, washed my face, ate breakfast, undressed regularly, went to bed and slept soundly until one, when I arose, took a sponge bath, had dinner, read all the papers I could procure and now sit down to answer your letter, which was the only one I received at Waterloo. I read it alone at midnight, and, though I am always advising you to write short letters, I did wish this time you had written more at length. You ask if it is not lonely travelling as I do. It is indeed, and I should have enjoyed above all things having Hattie with me. But you see, dearest, that would double my expenses, and as I am so desirous of making money for the household, I must practice economy in some direction. And above all considerations of loneliness and fatigue, I feel that I am doing an immense amount of good in rousing women to thought and inspiring them with new hope and self-respect, that I am making the path smoother for you and Hattie and all the other dear girls. You...

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Verlag
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2008
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0767909046
ISBN 13 
9780767909044
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
336
Kontakt zum Hersteller
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