The Way of Improvement Leads Home: Philip Vickers Fithian's Rural Enlightenment, by John Fea

Teaching the Article
Exercise 1, The Enlightenment: High and Rural

Read the following excerpt from Charles Sellers's The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846 (pp. 29-31). How does Sellers's description of the world of colonial Americans (i.e., "peasant forbears," "at the mercy of nature," "folk convictions," "animistic magic and mystery") make it seem inhospitable to the Enlightenment as it is traditionally defined?

1. Excerpt from Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution

 

A. The High Enlightenment

Consider the images below. How do they reflect the traditional, high-culture, urban, and elite understanding of the Enlightenment?

Images:

Benjaming Frankling at the French Court

Benjamin Franklin at the French court

Nassau Hall

Nassau Hall, the College of New Jersey at Princeton (1860)

An East Perspective of Philadelphia

An East Perspective View of the City of Philadelphia ([1778]-c.1790)

 

B. The Rural World of Philip Vickers Fithian

Consider the images below. How might Sellers interpret them? With Philip Vickers Fithian's experience in mind, how do you interpret these colonial scenes familiar to him. How did Fithian experience the Enlightenment in these familiar settings?

Images:

View from Bushongo Tavern

View from Bushongo Tavern (1788)

Deerfield Church

Deerfield, New Jersey, Presbyterian Church (1848)

Greenwich 1800

Greenwich (1800)

Cohansie Region, c. 1770

The Cohansey, New Jersey region, (1770)

 

Probably Site of Enoch Green's Academy

Probable site of Enoch Green's Presbyterian academy in Deerfield (2003)

Greenwich Fields

A field in Greenwich, New Jersey (2003)