About America:
1. It was better to be a slave in the North than to be a slave in the South.
2. Plantations in the olden days were joint stock companies.
3. In the Salem Witch trials, women could accuse other women based on almost no information at all (in terms of being a witch) and even if they just didn't like the other woman.
4. Martin Luther King, Jr. was inspired by Henry David Thoreau for ultimately achieving social change.
5. The United States was founded upon Protestant values, but now, it has become very controversial because of the separation of church and state.
About American Literature:
1. Emily Dickinson - very sad little woman who lived in her own world, and her poetry reflected that lack of human contact.
2. Feminist literature obviously taught women to be proactive in taking the right steps to make a difference for women. What I didn't know was that some women, like Margaret Fuller in "The Great Lawsuit", tended to be so strong-minded about women's independence from men that she suggested to women that marriage is not a good thing. If all women were to take this literary piece to heart, every woman would be isolated and lonely.
3. In literature that contained slavery, stories would be told of real-life situations where the slave-owner's wife would be jealous of and sometimes beat to death any woman her husband expressed a liking for.
4. Ralph Waldo Emerson - teaches his readers that with politics, there is always information that is withheld by the government. He tells his readers that no matter the situation, go with your gut instinct.
5. White gifts vs. red gifts from Cooper's, "The Last of the Mohicans", indicated that "white gifts" (associated with Caucasians) was the term used to specify purity in certain white individuals. "Red gifts" was used to label Indians as subservient to Whites and usualyl related to savagery, nature and warfare.
Learning these new things has changed my view on American literature, but not so much on America. Yes, learning certain things about your country can be certainly be baffling at times. However, I think it is the writers of America who made a significant impact on history - their own views and feelings towards certain circumstances reflected the same of those who were impacted by certain events, such as the Salem Witch trials, slavery, etc., and put them in a format where years and years later, curious readers got to have the insider's view to what those effected by something were really feeling (not just what history books put into fact sheets).
It was better to be a slave in the city says FD. Note when the North outlawed Slavery. Dickinson's poetry also reflected a lot of other things. Sometime, lack of human contact in Dickinson's world might have been a good thing, given what women were not allowed to do or say.
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