I found it incredibly dull, and very tedious. He had some really great things to say.. I just really had to push my way through it. And was anyone else annoyed with the random words capitalized throughout his narrative? Ah! It drove me crazy! I would be reading through and admittedly, maybe drifting off a little bit, and then I would come across a capitalized word and think that I had started a new sentence and not even realized it! Maybe, in the end, this was a good thing though - it kept me alert to a certain extent.
Crevecoeur, on the other hand, I found very intriguing. The first section was a little slow moving, but once he got into the slavery, I found it very intriguing. It's interesting that he was opposed to slavery. It doesn't seem like there were many white American's who spoke out against slavery at that time.
The part where he discussed the preacher speaking against slavery was especially intriguing (pg. 322). It's one of those examples of how, many times, people just want to hear that they're doing the right thing, even when they aren't.
As a closer, I know Benjamin Franklin invented a lot of things (and of course experimented - we've all heard the story of the kite getting hit by lighting in elementary school) but I didn't know what all, so I looked it up and this is what I found:
The lighting rod
The Franklin Stove
Bifocal glasses
Urinary catheter
One of the first ideas for the refrigerator
Sources:
http://www.buzzle.com/articles/interesting-facts-about-benjamin-franklin.html
The randomly capitalized words bothered me, too, and I noticed them in the Adams letters, too. I'm guessing that English wasn't rigidly standardized then, or maybe random caps was the fashionable way to write? Or perhaps they just did what they wanted because they didn't Microsoft Word's green squiggly lines to tell them that they were being grammatically incorrect? I'd like to know more about that; maybe it would make the capitalized letters less annoying if we knew why they were there.
ReplyDeleteThanks also for noting that Crevecoeur is unusual for his negative portrayal of slavery from a white perspective (for his time) and his calling out the congregation that didn't want their minister to tell the truth to them. I was too busy fussing over his exaggerations about America to notice that :)
Thanks also for sharing Franklin's inventions :)