The development of an American culture | AP US History | Khan Academy

From Enlightenment Reason to Romantic Feeling

Early U.S. cultural work in painting, architecture, literature, and philosophy largely borrowed from or imitated European models.

The founding generation was influenced by the Enlightenment, which emphasized reason, evidence, and rational government. The Declaration of Independence reflects these ideas in its arguments for natural rights and government by consent.

By the early-to-mid-1800s, Romanticism had gained influence. Romantics reacted against the Enlightenment’s focus on reason and the scientific method, placing greater value on emotion, imagination, individual experience, and the unseen or spiritual.

This shift helps explain both the religious intensity of the Second Great Awakening and the emergence of artistic and literary movements seeking to express a distinctively American culture.

Architecture for a Republic

American architecture moved away from the Georgian style borrowed from Britain. The Federal style incorporated Roman features, such as arches, into earlier building forms.

From the 1820s, Greek Revival architecture became prominent, especially for monumental buildings. It used features such as Greek columns and triangular pediments.

The U.S. Capitol combined a central dome modeled on Rome’s Pantheon with a Greek-temple façade. These classical references presented the United States as heir to Greek democracy and the Roman Republic, and helped architects define a style they considered suitable for a republic.

American Landscape Art

Early American painters such as Gilbert Stuart studied and began their careers in Europe, and their work followed established European conventions.

In the 1820s, the Hudson River School began to develop a more distinctively American subject: the country’s landscapes. Its painters drew on Romantic ideas, especially the sublime—the awe and fear inspired by untamed nature.

Thomas Cole’s The Oxbow (1836) contrasts a stormy, rugged wilderness with a settled river valley of farms, homes, and grazing sheep. The painting captures the tension between nature and settlement, a subject shaped by the vast American landscape and the expansion of settlement and industry.

Writers and Transcendentalism

Early American fiction writers gained international audiences by depicting distinctive aspects of American society and folklore:

• Washington Irving became known for The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and tales connected to the Dutch culture of upstate New York.
• James Fenimore Cooper created Natty Bumppo, also known as Hawkeye, a white frontiersman raised among the Delaware people.

In New England, Romantic ideas informed Transcendentalism, a movement whose writers and thinkers held that truth and spiritual meaning could extend beyond what could be observed through the senses and could be found in nature. Transcendentalists also valued individuality and freedom of thought.

• Henry David Thoreau wrote about living simply for two years in a cabin at Walden Pond, on Ralph Waldo Emerson’s property.
• Emerson encouraged Americans to think independently rather than follow the crowd.
• Margaret Fuller wrote about women’s lives in the 19th century and edited the Transcendentalist magazine The Dial.
• Emily Dickinson and Louisa May Alcott are also sometimes associated with the movement.

Transcendentalist emphasis on individual conscience helped make its adherents strong opponents of slavery. Thoreau protested the Mexican-American War by refusing to pay taxes and wrote “Resistance to Civil Government,” also known as “Civil Disobedience,” arguing that people should not obey unjust laws. His ideas later influenced Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.

Speakers and Sources Featured

• Presenter/narrator: The video’s presenter, identified in the video metadata as Kim Kutz Elliott.
• Texts and works discussed: The Declaration of Independence; Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven; Thomas Cole’s The Oxbow; Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow; James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales; Henry David Thoreau’s Walden and “Resistance to Civil Government” (“Civil Disobedience”); Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essays; and Margaret Fuller’s writing and The Dial.