By Alec<\/a><\/span> <\/p>\n

United States of Amour<\/i>ica: Romantic Letter-Writing in the Revolution and Early Republic<\/strong><\/p>\n

For my final project, I want to research and analyze love letters written during the Revolutionary period and the Early Republic. I will place the initial criteria that either the sender or the recipient of each letter must have been an inhabitant of the colonies (or states, depending on the date), and that the two parties must be romantically involved in some way. Depending on the number of letters I am able to find that meet these two baseline requirements, I will add any additional restrictions for building a pool of documents. For example, I may need to be somewhat generous with my definition of a \u201clove letter\u201d \u2013 a note which makes it clear that the intended recipient is a romantic interest but mostly deals with other topics, like daily life or politics, will probably be just fine. Additionally, though I anticipate that letters between slaves will be harder to find than those between freed individuals, theirs would surely be an interesting and useful perspective to include, granted that I am able to locate any.<\/p>\n

When reading these letters, I want to pay particular attention to two elements that I expect will guide my research questions for this project. First, I am curious how<\/em> romantically involved individuals in North America wrote to one another. What does the tone, formality, and word choice of the letter lead us to concluded about accepted social behaviors between lovers, and whether or not letter-writing presented an escape from public norms? How does a letter from a husband to his wife (or vice versa) differ from one between two unmarried lovers? How do additional factors such as the gender, class, religion, ethnicity, and geographic location and distance also affect these considerations?<\/p>\n

Secondly, I am interested in precisely what<\/em> these eighteenth century lovebirds wrote about. Were couples concerned more with updating each other on more personal details, like health or local happenings, or did they also include information about politics and national news? How did the content of these letters vary depending on the geographical distance between the lovers? Finally, what can these documents tell us about the public perception of the Revolution and of the Early Republic, and what sort of unique perspective do love letters provide for answering these questions that may not be present in correspondence between, say, friends or family members? I expect that in additional to a more formal writeup, my project will incorporate some quantitative method of answering these questions (counting occurrence of certain words, calculating geographical distance, etc.), as well as some sort of visualization of my findings.<\/p>\n

<\/a>  <\/a>  <\/a>  <\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Alec United States of Amourica: Romantic Letter-Writing in the Revolution and Early Republic For my final project, I want to research and analyze love letters written during the Revolutionary period and the Early Republic. I will place the initial criteria that either the sender or the recipient of each letter must have been an […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1322","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-public","post-preview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1322","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1322"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1322\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1322"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1322"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1322"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}