Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin: The Price of Representative Personality

Philip F. Gura; Mitchell Robert Breitweiser

doi:10.2307/365055

Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin: The Price of Representative Personality.

Eighteenth-Century Studies ◽

10.2307/2739118 ◽

1987 ◽

Vol 21 (2) ◽

pp. 268

Author(s):

Ormond Seavey ◽

Mitchell Robert Breitwieser

Keyword(s):

Benjamin Franklin ◽

Cotton Mather

Download Full-text

M. R. Breitwieser, Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin: The Price of Representative Personality. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985, £22.50). Pp. 309. ISBN 0 521 26768 A. - A. Heimert and A. Delbanco (eds.), The Puritans in America: A Narrative Anthology. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985, £6.15). Pp. 438. ISBN 0 674 74066 1.

Journal of American Studies ◽

10.1017/s0021875800005727 ◽

1987 ◽

Vol 21 (1) ◽

pp. 136-138

Author(s):

Colin Brooks

Keyword(s):

Harvard University ◽

Benjamin Franklin ◽

Cambridge University ◽

Cotton Mather

Download Full-text

Show Thyself a Man: A Comparison of Benjamin Franklin and Cotton Mather

The New England Quarterly ◽

10.2307/363490 ◽

1969 ◽

Vol 42 (4) ◽

pp. 620

Author(s):

David Levin ◽

Phyllis Franklin

Keyword(s):

Benjamin Franklin ◽

Cotton Mather

Download Full-text

Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin: The Price of Representative Personality

The Yearbook of English Studies ◽

10.2307/3508239 ◽

1988 ◽

Vol 18 ◽

pp. 297

Author(s):

Sargent Bush ◽

Mitchell Robert Breitwieser

Keyword(s):

Benjamin Franklin ◽

Cotton Mather

Download Full-text

The Rebirth ofAllAmericans in the Great American Melting Pot: Notes Toward the Vindication of a Rejected Popular Symbol; or: An Ethnic Variety of a Religious Experience

Prospects ◽

10.1017/s0361233300003148 ◽

1980 ◽

Vol 5 ◽

pp. 79-110

Author(s):

Werner Sollors

Keyword(s):

American Revolution ◽

Benjamin Franklin ◽

Jewish State ◽

Melting Pot ◽

Cotton Mather ◽

Nation States ◽

Constant Change ◽

The Social ◽

American National Identity ◽

Indian State

When it comes to discussions about the term “melting pot” our minds seem to be made up. “The point about the melting pot…is that it did not happen,” Glazer and Moynihan conclude in their widely read study, significantly entitledBeyond the Melting Pot(1963). Michael Novak's book with the equally telling titleThe Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics(1972) agrees that the melting pot “did not exist,” although “meltingpot ideology” according to Novak “has dominated the social sciences for three decades.” Yet, as Philip Gleason has demonstrated, the term “melting-pot” has been met with rebuttals by conservatives and liberals alike, from the time it was popularized by Israel Zangwill's playThe Melting-Pot(1908) to the present. Poetic advocates and sociological opponents of the term, however, shared a certain vagueness in defining themeaningof “melting pot” while embellishing and elaborating the imagery. Attempts to interpret the image in strict social terms range from “Americanization of newcomers” to “constant change and regeneration of Americans through ethnic interaction and/or intermarriage.” Isaac Berkson, Edward Saveth, Milton Gordon, and Andrew Greeley have drawn up elaborate models that distinguish the melting pot “concept” from such alternatives as “Americanization,” “Anglo-Conformity,” “Federation of Nationalities,” or “Cultural Pluralism.” Of course, the meaning of the image has also changed historically from the idealistic concern with an American national identity at the time of the American Revolution to the different practical versions of the melting pot during the period of the New Immigration. Apparently, the opposition to the melting pot is at least as old as the notion itself, and includes such luminaries as Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin. In 1785, for example, three years after Crèvecoeur first evoked the melting imagery in defining an American national character, a pseudonymous “Celadon”'sThe Golden Age: or Future Glory of North-Americamapped out the future United States as a confederation of nation-states and specifically listed “Nigrania” and “Savagenia”—a black and an Indian state—in the Southwest as well as the establishment of “a French, a Spanish, a Dutch, an Irish, &c. yea, a Jewish state.”

Download Full-text

The Dissemination and Reception of Isaac Watts’s Hymns and Psalms in the British North American Colonies to 1748

Negotiating Toleration ◽

10.1093/oso/9780198804222.003.0012 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 231-252

Author(s):

Jane Giscombe

Keyword(s):

North American ◽

Great Awakening ◽

Benjamin Franklin ◽

American Colonies ◽

Cotton Mather ◽

The North ◽

British North American ◽

George Whitefield ◽

Psalms Of David

The hymns and psalms of the Congregational minister Isaac Watts circulated in the North American colonies prior to the revivals of the 1730s and’40s. Watts's transatlantic links are clearly evident in his regular correspondence with ministers and academics including Cotton Mather and Benjamin Colman. He gave forty-nine of his own books to Yale and many of these survive. Watts exchanged many letters with Benjamin Colman, pastor in Boston and an overseer of Harvard. Watts has often been regarded as having been first published in America in 1729 when Benjamin Franklin reprinted his Psalms of David. This paper examines two earlier publications of Watts's work, both printed in 1720 in Boston, and Cotton Mather’s reception of Watts’ early work. In so doing, it seeks to understand better Watts's influence in the American colonies before the arrival of George Whitefield and the Great Awakening of mid-century.

Download Full-text