3 Review(s)

This volume is a compendium of the thoughts and works of authors, and of prose and scientific thought prior to the American Civil War.Featured are Maury the oceanographer; the author William Gilmore Simms, of whom Edgar Allen Poe remarked was the best American novelist in recent decades; the Hutchinson Family Singers whose concert tours in the USA and Britain did much to serve the cause of emancipation; the "real" story of Davy Crockett, the American frontiersman who died with Jim Bowie at the Alamo, which is more interesting than the old fictional accounts of his life; and "Six Days in the Moon," a tale of an event that allegedly occurred in June 1844, by "an Aerio-Nautical Man" who has just returned from the Moon. Also featured are contemporary composers, explorers, poets and filibusters.This book is a concise view of pre-Civil War America.