I found taking an online course both interesting and challenging. I thought that the freedom to do work on my own time was excellent for me, but I also found that I missed being in a classroom in some ways. The professor did an excellent job integrating technology with traditional learning, however, and I feel I got a lot out of this course.
I found Rowlandson a fascinating character, both for her historical account of what happened to her when she was taken captive and for her insight into the religious views of the time. Religion is of particular interest to me, so it was very interesting when I was able to see what happened to Rowlandson and how she reacted in her faith when she was taken captive; to the Puritans, it seems that God and the Bible were things that they could turn to no matter how crazy or terrifying the situation. It also was interesting to me that she chose to write what we may call “memoirs” today, although they take a different form; she presents her experiences, thoughts, and feelings in a way that is quite unique for the time period, which is another thing I found both interesting and humanizing about her work as a whole.
Jonathan Edwards has a very “hellfire and brimstone” method of imparting his religious views on people who are reading his work, while Benjamin Franklin is much more tolerant and laid back in his religious views. The religious views of Franklin are certainly more appealing—Edwards seems like a zealot, unwilling to compromise on anything and completely unwilling to admit that he could ever be wrong. There is a sense of moral absolutism in Edwards’ work that is also distasteful—for Edwards, it is either his way in a religious sense or it is wrong. Franklin takes a much more middling path, and that is why his work remains so powerful to this day, in my estimation, while Edwards is no longer a household name.
Transcendentalists built the foundation for many important political and social movements for the next century. They taught that there is inherent goodness in nature and in people, and that to maintain goodness, people have to revert back to relying on nature and communing with nature. Elements of this belief can be seen in a number of different movements, including the hippie movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Emerson wrote extensively in his journals, and provided us with information about his thoughts and beliefs regarding nature and people; he also provided us with one of the foundational essays of transcendentalism, Nature. These beliefs regarding the corruptive power of politics and society have contributed to the American cultural value of distrusting authority—Emerson taught that there is no guarantee that authority or politicians have one’s best interest at heart, and that the natural state is the only good state for human beings.
There is no doubt that Frederick Douglass was an amazing man. Despite all the odds, he was educated as a slave in a very difficult time in American history; he was able to express to future generations the reality of being a slave from the point of view of a slave, something none of the white abolitionists could do. In addition, he was remarkably well-spoken and well-written, and his work is engaging and forces the reader to feel sympathy for Douglass as he tells the story of his escape from slavery and his eventual life as a free man. It is an incredibly depressing read, but like so many books about depressing topics, a fundamentally important one.
Whitman and Dickinson present us—as all poets do—with a different and unique way of viewing the world. They may not be looking at anything completely new or different, but the way that they are looking at it is different. When Whitman wrote Leaves of Grass, he was not exploring nature for the first time in history, but he was exploring it differently and with a different lens. Modern poets do the same thing; although many people are exposed to poetry only through song lyrics, these poets give us a sense of life and love through the use of rhythm and diction.
