Life in America

Life in America was written by doubting Thomas Low Nichols in the 1830s, it was a text that captured the life and the situation of the hoidenish some years after the 1812 war. It is somewhat hard to establish the critical genre of the text, since the literary styles were somewhat different in those days.The specific verge here is somewhat, since all the literary genres that exist today also existed then, only if some authorship styles that existed in mid 19th century do not really exist any more and the text by Nichols business leader just belong to a writing style that is gone.Essay writing in its original definition could be described as a writing of a report (e.g. about a verdant or a situation) in a quite poetic manner. This lovely of writing was very popular in the 19th century since much of the periods literature was inspired by epic works, struggles, revolutions and the romantic spirit. Revolutionary poems and this kind of epic journalism were very popular.The style to which the Nichols text bears such parity had a close relation to what used to called Travel Writing in several European languages. It is similar to the descriptive or epic journalism still it as an account of a journey by a writer or a journalist, to some extent an equivalent to a foreign correspondent nowadays. Before the telegraph that was the only way to be kept in tune with the news abroad, the correspondent would send each week or monthly reports through the mail and the texts would be published in journals or weeklies.Thomas Low Nichols is the perfect example of a high middle class amateur writer. The language he uses and the emphasis that is wedded to direction in the text show a high level of education. He actually writes as a professional and was a writer by dedication (a quite famous one) but that most probably wasnt his main source of income.High middle class people in target subversive America usually had family estates or businesses to run and wrote, practic ed fair play or got involved into politics for truehearted, personal or sentimental reasons rather then looking for a career as the case is today.Nichols is apparently from an estate and business owning family. He shows us that through the story of his let My spawn had been drafted as a militia-man during the war of 1812, and might have fought in the famous battle of Plattsburg had not his business engagements made it necessary for him to employ a substitute, by which he lost not only much glory, but the bounty-money and a hundred and sixty acres of land, which was afterwards given to every surviving soldier whose name could be found upon the rolls of the army.His fathers job was obviously important enough to allow him to learn a substitute as well as the fact that he became colonel shows a background of education and wealth.The most probable purpose of Nichols change state a journalist and an author is a mixture of love for writing, patriotic feelings, positive hopes for a new country and a new world.He belongs to the home revolutionary generation that might have lived through some periods of the revolution, but were too untried to take any active part in it. His generation was more optimistic and easy going then their fathers as well as they were more cultured and interested in humanistic discipline and poetry then their revolutionary fathers were. They also enjoyed a better and more certain economic situation then their struggling fathers. In other words Nichols generation was softer and more progressive.They were also very grand of what their fathers naturalized and Nichols actually gives us a mixed account of what has been accomplished by the war of independence as well as by the Cultural Revolution that was a direct result of the post revolutionary struggle for Americas place as a young and progressive country.His writing is basically directed at young Americans and Europeans in order to show them the progress that was accomplished in the 3 0-odd years of the countrys independence. He writes first hand from personal experience and the literary sources available at the time.