The Columbian Orator taught nineteenth-century Americans how to speak | Hacker News Reader

The Columbian Orator taught nineteenth-century Americans how to speak

neh.gov

86 pointssamclemens19 comments

As a side note: Columbia/Columbian used to be a byword for america https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_(personification)

This is weirdly effective as one of those "surprising facts" you can drop to reliably get some "oh, really? Wow"s even though it's right in the name of our nation's capital (Washington, District of Columbia)

I'd like to see a history of the relative popularity of Columbia, Uncle Sam, and various birds (eagles, turkeys). I'd assume that gender preferences in national symbols reflect trends in the wider culture.

Most people today will be familiar with her as depicted in the title card for Columbia Pictures.

The Big Three TV broadcasters (NBC, ABC, CBS: National Broadcasting Company, American Broadcasting Company, and Columbia Broadcasting System) are all named after the country, though CBS now seems like the odd one out.

Various scans of the original book at Internet Archive: https://archive.org/search?query=title%3A%28Columbian%20Orat...

Kind of surprising its not on Project Gutenberg as far as I can tell, but maybe it's obscure enough that they just haven't gotten around to that one?

It's not in the pipeline there, or at Wikisource. You can probably propose it for both projects if you can find or assemble a complete set of scans from what's available at the IA.

An aside:

The visual design of this website is lovely. It contains no distractions, no sexy, elaborate web design. It's just the article and relevant images.

It's also a superb piece, so I decided to get a subscription to Humanities, in which it appears. This brought me to https://bookstore.gpo.gov/products/, which is one of the fastest, snappiest mobile websites I've used in quite a while. Navigating it is a stark reminder of just how bad most websites are and how terrible their performance.

When I click on the three horizontal bars in the upper left, the menu appears immediately. There is no delay or animation. Likewise when I click through its three items. I wish this were standard web design, rather than animation-laden, visually diffuse "mobile friendly" patterns that are essentially allergic to informational density when it isn't offset by a generous helping of stock photography and god-awful allegria art.

Weather.gov, along these same lines, is one of my favorite websites.

Frederick Douglass always amazes me.

I hate to think this, but with today's US Gov and this being a .gov site, I wonder when it will be purged.

I just went to the wayback machine to the save the page to be safe, but nice to see it was already saved!

Yeah, it talks about how the author was progressive for his era and pulled a quote about how Presidents have a tradition of serving only two terms. If this article isn’t pulled for being a gross example of DEI, I’ll eat my hat.

Good article though, well worth saving.

You need to put "gross example of DEI" in qoutes if you want to indicate your disagreement with it. The way it stands in your comment, it reads like you agree with a classification the current fascist regime would make..

FWIW, I got what labster and understand why you commented.

But what I do not know is why the down votes ? To me, both of you seems to agree with my intent, am I missing something ?

You put the content first, they put angry reactionary politics first. Fighting fire with fire just fuels the flame.

Countries may go through developmental trajectories similar to startups—progressively striving for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) ideals in the beginning, only to later regress to traditional ways.

Rhetoric is part of the part of the Trivium[0] and was taught to elite American kids getting a Classical education starting around the age of 15. By this time they would have already studied Latin grammar and a bit of logic and dialectic.

I imagine some advanced students also read some selections on the topic by Cicero.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trivium

Are more books/sources like this that has contributed to the peculiarly formal American fiction that is found (for example in many people Peter Santanello talks with in his youtube channel). Mostly they are people from small towns, but they seem to speak ain highly structured, even ornate manner.

There’s a copy online at HathiTrust:

https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.$b258249&seq=9

Every time I read Douglass I feel so humbled.

How is this book not in Project Gutenburg?

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