Essays, poems, letters, speeches or songs form part of the American culture. Different points of view of the same topic in the same time or at a different one can make us see how the past times were, how people felt in each crisis, war, revolution o peaceful period.
The literary language has been and still is a useful tool that has helped to specialists in history to develop important progressions in their theories and to prove and make an idea of how past times were. Literature in the United States has contribuited and have played an important role in creating the nation's character, bearing in mind the several compositions from different people: negros, women, writers, presidents, working-classes, native-borns, immigrants... Some of these texts are not considered as literary ones, and perhaps they will never be, but they are a very fiable source of understanding people and knowing different forms of knowledge, apart from these ones which have been and are great masterpieces of History.
Important texts for and from the Americans and that are very useful in knowing the history of the United States could be the following ones:
-FROM THE REVOLUTION: Declaration of Independence (Thomas Jefferson)
-REFORM AND EXPANSION: Civil Disobedience (Henry David Thoreau)
-CIVIL WAR: The Gettysburg Address (Abraham Lincoln)
-POST CIVIL WAR: Speech at the National Convention of Colored Men (Frederick Douglas)
-THE PROGRESSIVE AGE: The Solitude of Self (elizabeth Cady Stanton)
-WORLD WAR I: War Message to Congress (Woodrow Wilson)
-DEPRESSION AND WORLD WAR II: Happy Days are Here Again (Milton Ager and Jack Yellen)
-AFTER WORLD WAR II: The Silent Generation (Louis Simpson)
-TROUBLE TIMES/ CONTEMPORARY TIMES: I have a dream (Martin Luther King Jr.)
Source: "The American Reader, Words that moved a Nation", by Diane Ravitch.
By Estefanía Benítez Sánchez
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