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This volume explores the extent to which the Revolutionary period (1740–1815) impacted the faculty, students and institutional life of Yale College and how those changes shed insight into the nature of the American Revolution itself as a conservative or radical event. Throughout the eighteenth century, Yale continued a tradition of producing individuals who would perpetuate the economic and social status quo. At the same time, the institution was undergoing an evolution reflective of the broader movements in America that would persist into the era of the early republic. In order to examine Yale’s influence on those who attended, this study uses the student experience as a major source of...
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As cultural authority was reconstituted in the Revolutionary era, knowledge reconceived in the age of Enlightenment, and the means of communication radically altered by the proliferation of print, speakers and writers in eighteenth-century America began to describe themselves and their world in new ways. Drawing on hundreds of sermons, essays, speeches, letters, journals, plays, poems, and newspaper articles, Christopher Grasso explores how intellectuals, preachers, and polemicists transformed both the forms and the substance of public discussion in eighteenth-century Connecticut. In New England through the first half of the century, only learned clergymen regularly addressed the public. After midcentury, however, newspapers, essays, and eventually lay orations introduced new rhetorical strategies to persuade or instruct an audience. With the rise of a print culture in the early Republic, the intellectual elite had to compete with other voices and address multiple audiences. By the end of the century, concludes Grasso, public discourse came to be understood not as the words of an authoritative few to the people but rather as a civic conversation of the people.