The Popular Mind of the Pre-Civil War Generation and its Relation to Sophisticated Thought

FAIN: FB-10494-70

Lewis O. Saum
University of Washington (Seattle, WA 98195-1016)

Study of popular thought in the pre-Civil War period (1830-1860) and its relation to intellectual thought in the same period to test the assumptions that intellectual thought reflects and/or guides the thought of society at large and that ideas "trickle down" from the intellectual formulators to the classes below them. ABSTRACT: Study relating popular thought in the pre-Civil War period (1830-1860) to the views of intellectuals in the same era. Fellow to use firsthand writings (diaries and letters) of commonplace people of the period to test two assumptions: 1) that an intellectual elite reflects and/or guides the thought of a society at large, and 2) that ideas "trickle down" in more or less diluted form from the intellectual formulators to the various levels of society intellectually beneath them. The period of 1830-1860 provides an interesting test of these assumptions since it was both an "age of the common man," in the Jackson administration, and an age of intellectual awareness, fostering such movements as Romanticism and Transcendentalism.