EDUCATION IN THE NEW WORLD

EDUCATION IN THE NEW WORLD

Some Noteworthy Examples

Abstract: This article relates to education in the first American colonies, from the 16^th century to the 18^th century. In finality it cites two important examples regarding education: Webster, author of the first American dictionary, and the Beecher family, one of the most important sagas of its epoch, due to the grand social and educative impact it had on its times.

Keywords: education, family, American colonies, school

Education in the early american colonies

Archeology maintains the theory that the first habitants of the American continent were of Asiatic origin. They are calculated to have crossed what was a great glacier, today known as the Bearing Strait, around 1500 BC.

These peoples spread throughout the entire American continent including Central and South America, establishing themselves in various regions and mounting the first indigenous societies. The early settlements were communities dedicated to hunting, although some communities later established great and complex agricultural societies.^[1]

Early Native Americans

The Mayans

The Mayans were the only Native American culture that developed a form of writing similar to the hieroglyphics of Egypt. Additionally they achieved a high level of knowledge of astronomy, arithmetic, architecture and art, which they used in the building of great cities.

The majority of Mayan children were educated in home by their parents, in customs, religious beliefs, and the necessary skills of survival. However, the sons of Mayan leaders and priests attended schools where they studied history, hieroglyphic writing, astronomy and medicine.

With the passage of time the Mayan civilization declined, the population abandoned the cities and other civilizations grew.

The Incas and Aztecs

The Incas developed a great empire in South America, which lasted from 1200 to 1532. Even though they never developed a true system of writing, they nonetheless used a system of knotting cords to record numbers.

The majority of children did not attend school but rather learned at home in the process of helping their parents. Some of the sons of nobles went to the city of Cuzco to learn the art of war, history, religion, and language. And some select girls went to school in Cuzco as well, where they were given training to serve in the palace of the emperor.

During the 15^th century the Aztecs, who were experts in medicine, music, and poetry, constructed a great empire, which extended throughout the region today known as New Mexico.

Parents educated their children up to the age of twelve, and later both girls and boys received a formal education in a school known as cuicacalli where they learned tribal songs, dances, and the customs of tribal society. The objective of Aztec education was to promote appropriate social behavior in accordance with tribal interests.

The Cherokee

The Cherokee established themselves along the river Tennessee, in the Appalachian Mountains and grew to reach Virginia.  They also built small villages with houses of wood and stone. They built canoes to cross rivers and had interchanges with other tribes. They were a people of high moral standards. In our day, they are considered the native tribe of greatest influence within the United States.

Informal education of early American Natives

Among these groups of Native Americans can be found great similarities in the manner of transmitting to their sons the experiences of survival, communal language, customs, and religious perspectives. Their education was in many aspects very similar to that of the children of Sparta (Greece), in their growth and maturation. The boys learned to be good hunters, farmers, builders, etc., and the girls learned to cook, sow, and other similar tasks.

The children of Native Americans learned from the earliest age to share their wisdom and knowledge with members of the tribe. The family was the best teacher, most of all keeping in mind that they were large families, in which the elders played an important role in education. Lessons of culture and religion were taught by incantations of history, thus passing the traditions of one generation to the next. Education, therefore, was an important part of life for these people, and not something apart or separate.

Early formal education in the American Colonies

The first European settlement of a permanent character was brought about in the territory later known as the United States, in San Agustin, Florida, in 1565. In this place arrived five ships with 600 men: 250 soldiers, 125 experimental farmers, and 26 families of various professions: carpenters, barbers, forgers, priests, and even notararies. All of them arrived with the expectation of establishing a Spanish colony at this site, which they managed to do and maintain till the year 1606.

Franciscan fathers began to establish missions all along the coast and inland. Each mission became a school of learning for the natives in the religious doctrine and moral values of the colonies. These missions reached the territories of New Mexico, Texas, Arizona, and California.

Some of the missionaries introduced themselves into the tribes, and attempted to apprehend their language, culture, and practical experience in order to help convert them to the Catholic faith.

Education in the Southern Colonies

The first English settlement in North America was founded in Jamestown, Virginia in 1607, with little initial success due to the hunger and disease that affected the colonies.

In 1611 Thomas Dale arrived with 300 more men and began to divide the territory among the early colonists. One of these began an important tobacco plantation which experienced great success in its commercial sales to England; to such a degree that slowly but surely life was radically changed in this region.

In 1619 a German ship arrived with the first Africans, which in the beginning, came as slaves. At the same time 90 women arrived disposed to marry in order to form the first families and also begin certain incipient commercial relations in these developed colonies.

Education in the southern colonies was determined by the social and economic life that defined the region.  Hence the majority of the southern colonists accepted the idea that education was a matter that fundamentally concerned families. In reality, these families only taught their sons to read and write, while those of greater wealth and greater economic recourses decided to send their sons directly to England to study.

Other plantation proprietors decided instead to bring English and Scottish tutors to the other side of the Atlantic to teach their sons as well as their daughters, English grammar, reading, Latin, music, and dancing.

The majority of families could not afford the luxury of tutors residing in their homes. For this reason, some tutors began to establish themselves of their own means, augmenting their salaries by creating the first parish schools. As such, the prestigious George Washington, James Madison, James Monroe and Thomas Jefferson were educated in Reverend James Maurys boarding school, in Fredericksburg Virginia.

The hierarchy of the church was not officially implicated in directly bringing about these schools. Nonetheless in the South, the Anglican Church which dominated by means of its foundations for the propagation of the gospel, attained money and books to educate orphan children, Native Americans, and the poor in schools of charity.

In some rural areas of sufficient population density, members of the community established what were called Old field schoolhouses.  In these communities parents contributed money to pay the salary of the schoolteacher.

In other areas, however, certain benefactors established free schools open to the children of the community, which did not discriminate as to whether their parents were able to pay or not. Approximately a dozen of these schools gave instruction sufficient for entry into secondary school.

The early English colonials encouraged the tribes they encountered to trade their prisoners of war for the sale of Native Americans, which were later established on plantations as slaves. These and African slaves were trained as manual laborers which worked in the fields, or as domestic servants.

As a rule these persons were not permitted to study or learn to read and write. The plantation owners tried to educate them in their English culture, hoping in this way to civilize them and later convert them to Christianity. Normally the Native Americans responded negatively to this, being satisfied with their own culture and therefore seeing no need to copy the lifestyle and customs of the English.

No sort of formal education existed for the sons of farmers. Education opportunities existed only for families of a determined social class. This situation persisted in the South even after the Civil War.

Education in the Central colonies

In 1625, Peter of the Oriental Indies Company, bought an island at the origin of the Hudson River for Native Americans, and began a new settlement called New Amsterdam on the island of Manhattan. This was the first truly multicultural society in North America. Almost half of the population in 1600 was Dutch, German, French and Scandinavian. The people of this community professed different religions: Jewish, Catholic, Lutheran, etc., and spoke different languages including not only those of Europe, but African dialects as well. In the beginning they were established only as commercial colonies, and as such had no schools, churches or other permanent institutions, but rather, solely taverns and places to eat.

In 1638 the Dutch company of the Oriental Indies established and financed a town school in the city of New Amsterdam and encouraged other cities of the nearby region to do the same

In 1659, a typical Secondary School was opened. In 1664 the English claimed New Amsterdam and renamed it New York. Despite this, the great variety of inhabitants of this area populated by Germans, Dutch, Irish, Scotts, Swedes, Norwegians etc., maintained their particular schools, because each of them wanted to correctly transmit their language and culture to their children.

The English were the first to explore the region of Maryland and Chesapeake Bay in 1500. Precisely it was Lord Baltimore, a practicing Catholic, who established the city of St. Mary near the Potomac River in 1634 and named the region Maryland: Marys land because he wanted the region to be a place where the Catholic faith could be practiced as well as other religions. The Jesuits promptly began to establish their first schools in this region.

The Dutch also began to establish private schools in the region of New Amsterdam where reading and writing in Dutch was taught as well as Reformation Christianity. When the English arrived they established various schools of charity. They began Secondary Schools as well, where youths were educated in subjects related to commerce such as geography, mechanics, and book making. Some of these centers for education were later called Academies, after Benjamin Franklin founded the Academy of Philadelphia in 1731.

Education in the English Colonies

In November of 1620, one hundred and twenty persons, including twenty women and thirty-two children arrived from Plymouth, England to an area named for the same in Massachusetts. The majority of them were of the Puritan religion which, unsatisfied with the Anglican religion of England, tried to purify England without success and for this reason decided to immigrate to the New World. Even though only half of this first group managed to survive the first winter, new immigrants continued to arrive in the following years.

These people established a new colony in the Massachusetts Bay where they could freely practice their religion. People of various professions came, and as they were an educated people, they established schools as well. Thus, in 1635 the Grammar School of Boston opened, considered the first formal public school of the colonies. This center was maintained by State taxes and was under State control, and as such all children of the local community were able to attend the school. This type of school was rapidly imitated in other cities throughout the State of Massachusetts.

In 1642, The General Tribunal of Massachusetts established a law which recognized as primary, the responsibility of parents in the education of their children, and encouraged them to ensure that their children learned to read, write, and understand the principles of religion as the fundamental laws of the country.

Children whose parents were illiterate could attend what were known as a Dame Schools, which were not in reality an authentic schools, but rather a places where women of culture taught children to read, write, and recite the catechism. These women received a small salary for their work teaching these children, alongside the teaching of their own children.

In 1647 the General Court established that all towns that had 50 or more families must seek and pay a teacher to teach reading and writing, and additionally where there were more than 100 families for one teacher, they had to acquire a school as well where the teacher could hold classes.

Thus began the first rural schools in the colonies of New England for boys and girls from the age of six to the age of thirteen or fourteen. The teachers salary was paid by the parents or by the community. The little ones only attended school a few months a year because of the necessity in their homes to work the fields. The curriculum taught in these schools consisted of reading, writing, arithmetic, catechism, and religious songs.

Students who wished to continue on with advanced studies after the rural grade school, attended Latin Grammar Schools (the equivalent of high-school). There they learned European culture in like manner to the schools of Humanities during the Renaissance; studying Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. Students read classic authors such as Homer, Cicero, or Virgil. History, geography, mathematics and writing, completed the curriculum of seven years and the attainment of a bachelors degree.

In 1636 the General Tribune of Massachusetts approved the establishment of the school of Harvard, after John Harvard died and left the whole of his library of 400 books, to the school. This school began as a school attended by those who later would become ministers or occupy a position of leadership in American society. Harvard students read and wrote perfectly in Latin, and read the Tritium of grammar, logic, and rhetoric in addition to learning to express their very own convictions and thoughts in a clear and persuasive manner.

In 1701 the school of Yale began in Connecticut, and Dartmouth in 1769. Each of them had a similar curriculum. Students began as theological seminarians and later entered into other professional programs such as Law, Medicine, and Science.

The first American Dictionary and the history of its author:

NOAH WEBSTER

Noah Webster was born on the 16^th of October in 1768 in the city of Hartford in the State of Connecticut.^[5] His family was of colonial origin, his father a farmer worked as a weaver, and his mother was a housewife. His brothers Charles and Abraham helped their father with the work of the farm. His sisters helped his mother with chores in the home.

In those times few children attended college, however Noah was enchanted with learning new things and his parents allowed him to attend Yale College. In 1774, at the young age of sixteen, he left for New Haven. The years he spent there studying coincided with the War of Independence. Noah graduated in 1778. He wanted to go on to study law but his parents could not afford the expenses of University. Noah therefore had to give classes in various cities such as Glastonbury and his very own Hartford, in order to pay for University housing and thus be able to study the career that he desired.

Noah did not like the American colleges of his times. Frequently seventy children of varying ages were huddled in places which pretended to be colleges, without desks, few and bad books, and unprepared teachers. Noah thought that Americans should be taught with American books, and hence in 1738 he wrote the Grammatical Institute of the English Language.

Throughout a hundred years, Noahs book served to teach American children to read, spell, and pronounce words correctly. It was the American book of its epoch, and Benjamin Franklin used it to teach his granddaughter.

In 1789 Noah married Rebecca Greenleaf, with whom he had eight children. For some time they lived in New Haven, but later they moved to Amherst where he collaborated in the establishment of the College of that locality.

When Noah was forty-three years old, he began writing his first American dictionary. He did this because in every part of the country people pronounced and wrote differently the English language, and he thought it should all be made the same.

Noah began to write certain American words in a different way from that which existed in the English of England, such as color instead of colour. Additionally he included vocabulary that was completely new. He took 27 years to write his book, which he completed in 1828 when he was already seventy years old.

Noah did not do many things in his life: he worked as a copywriter of laws, wrote books, and edited magazines.

Nonetheless, the house of Noah Webster is visited by hundreds of American children and youths throughout the year because this man is considered by all to be one of the greatest personages of American history.^[6]

The example of a prestigious American family of the 19^th century:

The BEECHERS

A short history of the epic during which the Beechers lived

It was said that in the city of Hartford, in the State of Connecticut, much alcohol was consumed. There, there were many poor houses that served as homes for 48 very miserable persons. In this age electricity still had not been invented and at night people had to write by candlelight. The majority of people moved from one place to another walking, and the most common form of travel was by horse. Families were large and the children moved with their parents from place to place.

The women wore large thick skirts that were hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It was common to take tea every afternoon.

Just like the Kennedy family in Massachusetts in the 20^th century, the Beecher family in Connecticut was the most famous in America in the 19^th century. The Beecher fame was not so much economic as intellectual; Lyman Beecher came to be known as the father of the brighter than any other in America.

Lyman Beecher married Roxana Foote Beecher with whom he had eight children: Catherine, William, Edward, Mary, George, Harriet, Henry, and Charles. Roxana was brilliant even if her values and intelligence remained hidden because she died very young at the age of 41, having passed almost all of her life occupying herself with her large family, which grew rapidly. A year after her death, her husband Lyman remarried with an elegant youth of 27, Harriet Porter Beecher, who never fully managed to integrate fully into the original family and remained on the margin of the family eccentricities.

Harriet added four new children to the Beecher generation, one of these being Isabella.

In their day, the Beechers were loved and hated for being considered excessively radical because they involved themselves in all the problems of the epoch such as the liberation of slaves, or womens rights.

Lyman Beecher was a Calvinist minister with a very dominant personality who exercised a strong influence over all of his children. For him, religion was not just something for Sunday, but rather something which concerned as much the church as the family home, especially in the gaining of souls. Everything in the home was subject for discussion, and every idea or thought had to be contested, discussed, or debated among all the members of the Beecher family. This intellectual energy united with a refined sense of humor was always the hallmark of the Beecher family, as can be proven in the exhaustive documentation of letters, conserved in the library of the Beecher Store Center at Nook Farm.

In this rich documentation appear references of daily life, curious and charming such as; one of the brothers molars hurt as well as his heart, or that Catherine got into a great metaphysical discussion over breakfast, which lasted the whole day.

The boys followed their father in the religious state, but the women encountered their own careers in proposing social reforms, which they brought about during their lives.

As such, Catherine was a pioneer in the promotion of the idea of academic education for women. Harriet revolutionized the treatment given in those times to slaves with her famous novel, Uncle Toms Cabin. She was also one of the first students of her sister Catherine. On the other hand, her fiery half sister, Isabella helped lead the womens suffrage movement. Bossy was lively and intelligent.

At the end of the 19^th century however, the social revolutions changed and Catherine was forgotten while all praised and exalted her two sisters, Harriet and Isabella.

Catherine Beecher Stowe (1800-1878)^[7]

Catherine was born in East Hampton Long Island, later known as Connecticut. She received her early education in the family and later in Miss Pierces School for young ladies. Here she learned the good manners required of girls, and a refined manner of speech.

She learned from her mother to be an agreeable person, optimistic and caring, and to have a great sense of justice. When her mother died, being still very young, she left school to take care of her father and brothers and sisters for one year until her father remarried.

In 1818 she began to give classes at Pierces School and some time later went to another college for girls in New London, Connecticut. There she taught sowing, drawing, and painting, to her students.

In 1822 her life changed radically when she became engaged to the young and eminent professor of natural philosophy and mathematics at Yale, Alexander Fisher. The wedding was to be celebrated when Fisher returned from a trip to Europe to visit certain universities. The ship set sail the first of April and five weeks later he died in a maritime accident on the coast of Ireland.

At first Catherine Beecher was completely devastated by the death of her love, and in fact never recovered from this hard blow, deciding to never marry or have children.

Some time later however, reading the papers of Alexander, she returned to an awakened interest in culture, and began to think about establishing her own school to encourage women to pursue studies, and not only those materials that up to this point were considered specifically feminine. In fact, Catherine came to change the culture of a nation when she affirmed, a woman should study, not just to shine, but to rather to act.

She converted, therefore, into a professional woman with a completely full life dedicated to teaching. This way of thinking was tremendously revolutionary for her epoch, in which the habitual was that a young woman who had become widowed remained in her home mourning the death of her husband, and it was inconceivable that later she would have an active social life in the locality. However, Catherine used her home as a place for meetings and discussions on current events.

In May of 1823 there appeared, on the front page of the newspaper Connecticut Courant, a large announcement which read: Womens college, Misses C&M Beecher will open in this place a college dedicated exclusively to those who wish to attain the highest branch of womens education: geography, grammar, rhetoricNo one under 12yrs of age admitted, unless she has an unusual level of education for her age. (M. Beecher referred to Catherines sister, Mary, who was a professor at the College)

The College opened at the end of the month in a rented room, to which seven girls walked in line with their large heavy skirts down the main street of Hartford to the place where the education center was located in White Horse. There, the daughters of merchants and factory owners began attendance. Even if at first they were able to do little more than embroidery, they soon learned to calculate sums of money, and write more than just their names.

Catherine, as the daughter of a Calvinist minister, had had access to a life of greater culture that the majority of the girls of her times. But before she could offer the girls of her school a curriculum similar to that offered to boys, she said, I was obliged to form myself, and give more formation to my professors as well as myself.

Hence, she studied the books of her betrothed on mathematics and sciences, and asked her brother Edgar who had studied at Yale and who directed a boys college in Hartford, to give night classes in Latin. Soon the college grew considerably to support more than two hundred students, and moved to a new building in Pratt Street designed in the style of a Greek temple. It then began to be recognized for its academic curriculum.

In 1829, Catherine aspired to build a residence where the girls who came to study from outside Hartford could be housed. This novel initiative was highly criticized in the local press that wrote in its editorial; that in this college young ladies only augmented their vanity thinking they were better than others for studying subjects as useless as philosophy that was good for nothing.

Despite all these oppositions, Catherine persevered in her projects, time and again more ambitiously, and in 1832 emigrated to the west to the frontier city of Cincinnati where she opened the Womens Institute of the West. Harriet quickly followed in the footsteps of her sister in the civilization of the West, with the recruitment of professors from New England. In the end this college failed due to problems within the community.

With little money in the bank Catherine decided to tackle the situation by writing articles for womens magazines. Thus she increased her influence on society and made known her ideas on the education that the women of her time should receive, which should be similar to that received by men.

The Industrial Revolution of the mid 1800s produced great tension and chaos within all of American family life, especially that of middle class white women. Machines entered the family home and women converted into consumers who were pressured by their husbands to buy food, clothes, or furniture. Catherine took advantage of this new social situation writing a book that spoke of the new economic responsibilities of women, and the importance of being sufficiently valued for this by society. Her publication became an authentic best seller.

This manual for women was not simply a compendium of recipes or simple advise, but rather aspired to be a book to train women in their work as housewives, that is to say, to form them to do housework successfully, the same as men needed formation for their work outside of home in the business world.

Catherine encouraged women to always work with great order, in order that they would always be able to control the circumstances which life presented, avoiding as such that circumstances controlled them. The book also included some tips on health; warning of the dangers of the use of charcoal in the kitchen, which could be toxic. Diagrams were made to show a system of kitchen ventilation.

The success of this book encouraged Catherine, after the failure of the college in Cincinnati, to fund the American Association of Education for women. And she crossed the whole nation giving conferences traveling primarily by caravan, other times by horse, and later in ships and trains.

Some years later she returned to the state of Maine where she spent a year helping her sister Harriet and her husband Calvin in caring for their seven children, in order that Harriet could finish her book. This in time required a great effort, considering her nephews, because she was a very sensitive person who did not easily tolerate noise and the fighting and squealing of children. She had to take refuge in her room in order to keep living in that place with such a numerous family.

At the end of her life, she went to live with her brother Tom and his wife Julia, in Elmira, New York.

Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896)^[8]

Harriet was born in Litchfield, on the 14^th of June 1811 and was the seventh of nine children born of the marriage of Roxana Foote and Lyman Beecher. Her mother died when she was only five years old. (She was named Harriet, after another sister that was also called Harriet that had died at the age of two)

From a very early age, when she was only seven or eight, instead of doing the pranks proper to her age of stealing cake from the kitchen, Harriet kept to her room reading the Nights of Arabia. When she was only nine she began to write her first weekly essays, and at the age of twelve she wrote, Can the immortality of the soul be proved by natural law?, which was selected to be read at a literary conference in Litchfield.

Her father was soon surprised by the strange habits of Harriet and recognized that his daughter possessed some extraordinary talents, and thus wrote in a letter when she was only eight years old: Harriet is a great genius. Id give ten dollars if she were a boy.

In 1824 when Harriet was thirteen, she went to live in Hartford in order to work in the womens seminary of that city, one of the first womens secondary schools in the country, which had been founded by her sister Catherine. Soon the college began to acquire great national prestige and Harriet was contracted to help in the teaching, even though she was only one year older than her students.

In Hartford, under the academic instructions of her sister Catherine, she forged her talent for writing. She heightened her talents studying Latin, geography, and mathematics; subjects that were considered inappropriate for women in those times, because they were considered incapable of learning such things. (Experts said that their cerebrals were too small.)

In 1832, when Harriet was only twenty-one, she left with her father and her sister Catherine to live in Cincinnati. There she worked as a professor in a new college established by her sister, and also came to know other cultures, and other religions, making her more American.

There also, both sisters were invited to form part of a literary society called the Semi-Colon Club, which offered Harriet an agreeable audience for her first writings as well as friends.

In this part of the country there was a great debate over slavery because it was located between the slave State of Kentucky and that of Ohio, the opposite of the same. The city was full of tensions and political debates in all parts over this topic. For example, in 1836 there was ruin in the abolitionist paper The Philanthropist, when its director refused to stop publication and some of the more significant citizens of Cincinnati planned to have him thrown out of the city.

Therefore, Harriet, who had married a professor and minister named Calvin Stowe and was pregnant with twins, was scared to defend her ideas against slavery. As it was not convenient for a woman in her condition to defend her ideas, she decided to begin her career as an anti-slavery writer using the pseudonym Franklin in a letter directed to the editor of Cincinnati Journal.

It was also in Cincinnati, one of the dirtiest cities in the nation, where pigs idled in the streets, and where cholera roared in every part, that Harriet for the first time listened directly to the stories of slaves. As such, her cook related to her how she had been sold to a slave owner in Kentucky who fathered all of her children. She explained the sexual reality of a slave woman, and told how slave women were unable to help themselves.

With the passing of time, some of these accounts became part of the collected stories in her work Uncle Toms Cabin.

Those first years of marriage were hard for Harriet. Her little children required a lot of attention, and neither did they dispose of a buoyant family budget because her husband Calvin earned little money. He was a Calvinist minister who taught in the seminary, and even though he liked to write, he wasnt as good a writer as his wife.

Harriet found herself exhausted from so much domestic work, which she did along side her literary work, and as such, wrote a letter in 1838 to her friend Georgiana in which she related that she spent three hours a day writing because they needed the money and because she decided not to just be a domestic slave. There came a time when she fell ill from depression and later felt sick due to certain medicines prescribed by the doctors. In the end she had to be secluded in a spa in Brattleboro, Vt., where some months later she was able to recuperate her health and energy.

Nine months after returning home, she gave birth to her sixth son, Samuel Charles, in January of 1848. The child suffered in the epidemic of cholera, which scourged the city in the summer of 1849, and died shortly after. She later wrote: I have learned how a poor slave mother must feel when they take away her son..I felt oppressed and of broken heart for the sadness and injustice which I have witnessed.

Harriet still had to suffer certain persecutions in Cincinnati for her clear opposition to the existence of slaves, and as such life became more and more complicated for the whole family. Finally, thanks to a new job, which her husband attained, they were able to return to Maine, which is where she wrote her great work, Uncle Toms Cabin that brought great editorial and economic success.

However, the financial success of the Stowe family did not last long, and Harriet had to return to being a slave of the pen as she liked to say, in order to feed, clothe, and educate her large family. She wrote another nine novels, more than a hundred short stories, and many magazine and newspaper articles.

Despite this great editorial productivity, her family life continued to be full of tragedy. Several of her sons died violent deaths in their youth, from accidents or from drugs.

At the end of her life, Harriet and her husband returned to Hartford, the place where she lived her early years of childhood. There she continued writing till the age of 70. At the age of 78 one of her children wrote that his mother was beginning to weaken of mind, and seemed to have returned to her infancy. Despite everything, she had moments when it seemed that she became better, and passed the greater part of the day visiting her innumerable friends. She died July 1 of 1896, two weeks after completing 85 years of age.

Her novel: Uncle Toms Cabin

Harriet revolutionized the genre of fiction in America with her work, Uncle Toms Cabin and at the same time transformed public sentiment with respect to slavery with her style of writing which exhibited the duality of her personality: introversion and extroversion, logic and viscerality. She knew how to mix her highest objectives with a colloquial style that gained a great immediate impact on her readers.

Mark Schenker, deacon of Academic Affairs at Yale College said: The whole world imagined there were horrible slave owners, but no one considered their affect on the very family. The book engendered readers who asked if the children of families were sold and thus separated.

He is book was considered the first great American novel for the theme that it addressed and the influence that it had in all parts of the country. It was the envy of all writers who thought that despite all their great literary efforts, they didnt even compare with the sole of the shoes of the great writer Harriet Beecher

Harriet was a very religious woman and always thought that her book was the fruit of an inspiration from God, because after some time praying in a church she had a vision of heaven and began to write, almost racing, that which was to be her masterwork. The stories that she related proceed from her very own observations and research, as we indicated earlier. Her words awoke the consciences of the majority of Americans and accelerated the beginning of the Civil War and the end of slavery.

As such, it can be said that this novel helped to change the course of history, as President Lincoln acknowledged when he met with Harriet in 1862: And you must be the little woman who wrote the book that provoked this great war.

This work was first published in the newspaper, and later issued as a book on the 20^th of March, in 1852. It put the lives of the Stowes in danger, because they were pursued by slave owners who intended to do them harm solely for having related the truth of what was taking place in American society.

This book soon had great success, reaching the sale of 10,000 copies in one week and various printing presses had to stay in production for 24hours in order to attend to the great demand for copies, 150,000 in only six months. Sales of Uncle Toms Cabin were of the highest, comparing only with sales of the Bible, not only in America, but in other countries as well. It turned into the best seller of the 19^th century.

Soon Harriet, at only 40 years of age, converted overnight into the most famous woman in America, and began to travel throughout all of Europe. In these travels her husband Calvin, who always spoke in her name while she listened in silence, accompanied her.

At the end of the Civil War, as slavery began to wind down in history, criticism began against Uncle Toms Cabin. Harriet was accused of creating slave characters that were excessively good and even saintly.

In the 30s of the twentieth century, the book was criticized as being simple trash. In the 60s, the words of Uncle Tom were considered pejorative, as insults given by black people against white culture, and in the 70s mention of the book was reduced to a few short paragraphs in history classes and even ignored altogether in classes of literature.

Despite all this, in the last decade, certain academics have begun to give a different view of this book, and the ideas that it holds with respect to racism. Recently, Store Centre is unrolling an important campaign to return introducing this book in education programs, so that the new generations may know and value it. Despite everything, Uncle Toms Cabin is not an easy book to read, for Americans of African decent.

Isabella Beecher Hooker (1822-1835)

Isabella was the eldest daughter or Lyman Beecher and his second wife, Harriet Porter. She was born in Litchfield, as were her sisters mentioned earlier.

When she was very young, at the early age of 13, she left to live at Hartford to attend the Womens Seminary, which was directed by her older sister Catherine. There she learned to read and write. At the age of 17 she met John Hooker, a lawyer who was working with one of his cousins and descendent of one of the founders of Hartford. After two years of many doubts, she married him and moved to live at Farmington until finally her family established itself in a large house in Hartford where she met with many friends and where important discussions were held on topics of the greatest contemporary interest for that epoch, such as slavery and feminism.

Isabella had four children, one of which died within a year. We know from the letters she wrote to some of her brothers that she would have liked to continue studying and have had more of an intellectual life like her sisters, but attention to family and home impeded her. Nonetheless, she wrote with her husband John, various articles against slavery in favor of its abolition, anticipating her sister Harriet.

At times Isabella had certain supernatural visions such as conversations with persons already dead, such as for example, her brother Henry Ward Beecher who had been dead for three years or with her sister Catherine. She also said on various occasions that she had correspondence with Napoleon, Joan of Arc, and Beethoven, in the last years of her life.

Not all the Suffragettes were spiritualists however spiritualism embraced a certain universal equality, and was the popular religion among the first feminists.

Isabella organized the Liberation Movement of the women of Hartford promoting various political meetings in which they advocated for their right to vote and their intervention in public life.

In 1870 she wrote along with her husband John, a proposition of law in order that a womans right to own property might be recognized for the first time in Connecticut.

She died at the age of 86 of a cerebral hemorrhage with out having seen the realization of the womens vote, something that she had fought so hard for all of her life.

Bibliography:

Comnell, M. (1988) Indian Education in American Colonies 1607-1

Albuquerque, University of New Mexico, p.43.

Finholm, Valerie, Cabin Fever, Ibidem.

Megan, Kathleen, From Bookworm to Victorian Oprah, Ibidem.

Morgan, T. (1993) Wilderness at Dawn: The Settling of the North American Continent. New York Simon & Schuster, p.19, 23, 33.

Shaver, R. (1994) The Ancient Mayan. Palo Alto CA. Stanford University Press

Townsend, R. (1994) The Ancient Mayan. Palo Alto Ca. Stanford University Press.

Web Pages Consulted:

Information acquired from https://noahwebsterhouse. org/biography.html

Information acquired from Noah Webster House in West Hartford, CT 06107, USA tel. 860 521-5362