Imbolc\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Waning Moon of Winds<\/p>\n
I edited and revised American Identity today.\u00a0 It needed a paragraph indicating what I believe to be similarities between the ante-bellum USA and our current era.\u00a0 National identity was weak during the ante-bellum period and is weak now.<\/p>\n
In ante-bellum America the Unitarians William Ellery Channing and Ralph Waldo Emerson made a strong push for American letters.\u00a0 On the one hand they wanted a break with the European dominance of American literature, painting and scholarship; but more, they wanted American letters, literature rooted in the American experience, painting using American themes and flowing from the genius of American talent and scholarship trained in the new nation and carried out by American academics.<\/p>\n
American identity is weak now for several reasons.\u00a0 Increasing Mexican immigration has raised a potent challenge to the Anglo-Protestant traditional US culture.\u00a0 We are now a multiethnic, multiracial society, but our identity has only made tentative steps to say what that means.\u00a0 We lost a prime enemy in the USSR and now have no one over against whom to identify ourselves.\u00a0 Since the 1960’s there has been an erosion of trust in the basic institutions of our society:\u00a0 business, government, the church, education.\u00a0 Each of these challenges the old ethnic, racial and Anglo-Protestant consensus that underwrote US identity through the 1950’s.<\/p>\n
Like the ante-bellum USA this is a time for a new American letters, a new American literature, a new American painting and sculpture and music, a new American poetry and a new American scholarship, one that reflects the multiethnic, multiracial society we have become.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Imbolc\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Waning Moon of Winds I edited and revised American Identity today.\u00a0 It needed a paragraph indicating what I believe to be similarities between the ante-bellum USA and our current era.\u00a0 National identity was weak during the ante-bellum period and is weak now. In ante-bellum America the Unitarians William Ellery Channing and Ralph Waldo Emerson … Continue reading With Apologies to Canada and Mexico<\/span>