"Most of the books published during the five-year period leading up to, during, and after the invasion of Mexico were war-mongering tracts. Euro-American settlers were nearly all literate, and this was the period of the foundational "American literature," with writers James Fenimore Cooper, Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, John Greenleaf Whittier, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville all active-each of whom remains read, revered, and studied in the twenty-first century, as national and nationalist writers, not as colonialists. Although some of the writers, like Melville and Longfellow, paid little attention to the war, most of the others either fiercely supported it or opposed it. Whitman, a supporter, was also enamored of the violent Indian- and Mexican-killing Texas Rangers. Whitman saw the war as bolstering US self-respect and believed that a "true American" would be unable to resist "this pride in our victorious armies.""
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Novelists from the United StatesEssayists from the United StatesPoets from the United StatesJournalists from the United States19th-century poets from the United States
Original Language: English
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Sources
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (2014)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Walt_Whitman
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Walt Whitman
1819 – 1892
US-amerikanischer Dichter
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