Most Popular Books by John Seelye

Long celebrated as a symbol of the country''s origins, Plymouth Rock no longer receives much national attention. In fact, historians now generally agree that the Pilgrims'' storied landing on the Rock never actually took place_the tradition having emerged more than a century after the arrival of the Mayflower. In Memory''s Nation, however, John Seelye is not interested in the factual truth of the landing. He argues that what truly gives Plymouth Rock its significance is more than two centuries of oratorical, literary, and artistic celebrations of the Pilgrims'' arrival. Seelye traces how different political, religious, and social groups used the image of the Rock on behalf of their own specific causes and ideologies. Drawing on a wealth of speeches, paintings, and popular illustrations, he shows how Plymouth Rock changed in meaning over the years, beginning as a symbol of freedom evoked in patriotic sermons at the start of the Revolution and eventually becoming an icon of exclusion during the 1920s.

Jane Eyre''s American Daughters is about the influence of Charlotte Bronte''s romance on North American writers, including Susan Warner, Louisa May Alcott, Martha Finley, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Kate Douglas Wiggin, Jean Webster, Eleanor Porter, and L M Montgomery. John Seelye demonstrates that the reception of Bronte''s Gothic romance in America was filtered through Elizabeth Gaskell''s biography of the author, published shortly after her friend''s death in 1855. A sentimental classic in its day, Gaskell''s book promoted an image of Charlotte as a long-suffering creative genius with high moral standards. Her biography necessarily overlooked Bronte''s obsessive love for her Belgian professor. Constantin Heger, an older and married man. Though Heger did not return Charlotte''s affection, he was the model for the lovers in Bronte''s novels, including the passionate, adulterous Edward Rochester, who inspired censorious reviews questioning the moral character of the author when Jane Eyre was published in 1847, a reputation that Gaskell''s biography successfully countered.

Shows that out of the attempts of colonial writers to give symbolic form to the river-centered landscape metaphoric patterns emerged which endured on American literature.

The second volume in Seelye''s series on the rivers of America in the American imagination, Beautiful Machine explores a critical, transitional period in American history, taking as its starting point the French and Indian War -- the event that determined domination of North America by an Anglo-American presence -- and ending with the opening of the Erie Canal -- the event that determined the geopolitical alignment that would guarantee a northeastern hegemony as the new nation moved West. Both George Washington and Thomas Jefferson figure prominently as visionaries, who saw American rivers as agents of national unity with the promise of linking Virginia''s Potomac to the wealth of the Ohio Valley. - Jacket flap.

An analysis of the beginnings of American imperial rhetoric; This is a study of the early writings of Richard Harding Davis, the premier American journalist of the 1890s, best remembered for his coverage of the Spanish-American War. The emphasis of the book is on Davis''s reporting - including several volumes of travel writing, covering trips to the Near East and South and Central America. Some account is also made of his fiction, most especially Soldiers of Fortune (1897), which critics have seen as a romantic treatment of the imperialist elan. As such, the novel serves as a prolegomenon to the war in Cuba, which Davis covered during its insurrectionist stage. He later accompanied Theodore Roosevelt''s Rough Riders when U.S. forces invaded the island in 1898, an action he had urged and may have in part inspired. John Seelye argues that Davis, rather than supporting the notion of an American empire on the Roman or British plan, advocated what would become U.S. strategy over the next century: a limited engagement in support of embryonic democratic movements in the Caribbean, followed by withdrawal of armed forces once a stable government had been established. While approving British m

An astute and ambitious lad climbs the wheel of fortune while evading the mishaps that befall his crooked and luckless colleagues.