Ernst Mendelssohn-Bartholdy - From New York to San Francisco: Travel Sketches from the Year 1869
Here you can read online Ernst Mendelssohn-Bartholdy - From New York to San Francisco: Travel Sketches from the Year 1869 full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. year: 2017, publisher: Indiana University Press, genre: Home and family. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:
Romance novel
Science fiction
Adventure
Detective
Science
History
Home and family
Prose
Art
Politics
Computer
Non-fiction
Religion
Business
Children
Humor
Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.
- Book:From New York to San Francisco: Travel Sketches from the Year 1869
- Author:
- Publisher:Indiana University Press
- Genre:
- Year:2017
- Rating:3 / 5
- Favourites:Add to favourites
- Your mark:
From New York to San Francisco: Travel Sketches from the Year 1869: summary, description and annotation
We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "From New York to San Francisco: Travel Sketches from the Year 1869" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.
A fresh, wonderful, captivating journey across 19th-century America through the letters of composer Felix Mendelssohns nephew(alfemminile.blogspot.com).
Welcome to an America youve never seen. Where anyone can drop by the White House and visit the President between 10 a.m. and noon; where cowcatchers are bloodied daily on train tracks between New York and Boston; where spent bullets are strewn across Civil War battlefields, and Indians still roam Yosemite Valley; where pigs rut in the sand-and-clay streets of Washington, DC., and the weather-bleached skeletons of oxen and horses line the old mail roads across the West.
For three hot summer months in 1869, Ernst Mendelssohn-Barthody, the nephew of famed composer Felix Mendelssohn, traveled by train across the United States accompanied by his older cousin. His letters back home to Prussia offer fascinating glimpses of a young, rapidly growing America. Unceasingly annoyed at the Americans tendency to spit all the time, the Prussian aristocrats seemingly visited everyone and everywhere: meeting President Grant and Brigham Young; touring Niagara Falls, Mammoth Cave, the Redwoods, and Yosemite; taking in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, Omaha, San Francisco, and the still war-ravaged city of Richmond; and crossing the continent by rail just two months after the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads had been joined at Promontory, Utah.
Full of marvelous tales and insightful observations, Ernst Mendelssohn-Barthodys letters are a revealing window to a long-ago America.
If you love epistolary genre and the USA and if you want to understand how Americans lived immediately after the Secession War, From New York to San Francisco is the book you were waiting for.alfemminile.blogspot.com
Welcome to an America youve never seen. Where anyone can drop by the White House and visit the President between 10 a.m. and noon; where cowcatchers are bloodied daily on train tracks between New York and Boston; where spent bullets are strewn across Civil War battlefields, and Indians still roam Yosemite Valley; where pigs rut in the sand-and-clay streets of Washington, DC., and the weather-bleached skeletons of oxen and horses line the old mail roads across the West.
For three hot summer months in 1869, Ernst Mendelssohn-Barthody, the nephew of famed composer Felix Mendelssohn, traveled by train across the United States accompanied by his older cousin. His letters back home to Prussia offer fascinating glimpses of a young, rapidly growing America. Unceasingly annoyed at the Americans tendency to spit all the time, the Prussian aristocrats seemingly visited everyone and everywhere: meeting President Grant and Brigham Young; touring Niagara Falls, Mammoth Cave, the Redwoods, and Yosemite; taking in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, Omaha, San Francisco, and the still war-ravaged city of Richmond; and crossing the continent by rail just two months after the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads had been joined at Promontory, Utah.
Full of marvelous tales and insightful observations, Ernst Mendelssohn-Barthodys letters are a revealing window to a long-ago America.
If you love epistolary genre and the USA and if you want to understand how Americans lived immediately after the Secession War, From New York to San Francisco is the book you were waiting for.alfemminile.blogspot.com
Ernst Mendelssohn-Bartholdy: author's other books
Who wrote From New York to San Francisco: Travel Sketches from the Year 1869? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.
Ernst Mendelssohn-Bartholdy
Rebecca Felix
Sidney Mendelssohn
Felix Mendelssohn
Benedict Taylor
Strauss Leo
John Michael Cooper
R. Larry Todd
Peter Mercer-Taylor (Editor)
David Sorkin
From New York to San Francisco: Travel Sketches from the Year 1869 — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work
Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "From New York to San Francisco: Travel Sketches from the Year 1869" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.
Light
Font size:
↓
↑
Reset
Interval:
↓
↑
Bookmark:
Make
FROM NEW YORK TO SAN FRANCISCO
FROM NEW YORK TO SAN FRANCISCO
Travel Sketches from the Year 1869
ERNST MENDELSSOHN-BARTHOLDY
Translated by BARBARA H. THIEM
Edited by GERTRUD GRAUBART CHAMPE
German edition by KARIN BRGER AND SEBASTIAN PANWITZ
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2017 by Indiana University Press
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, Ernst von, 18461909, author. | Champe, Gertrud Graubart, editor. | Burger, Karin, editor. | Panwitz, Sebastian, editor.
Title: From New York to San Francisco : travel sketches from the year 1869 / Ernst Mendelssohn-Bartholdy; translated by Barbara H. Thiem; edited by Gertrud Graubart Champe; German edition by Karin Burger and Sebastian Panwitz.
Other titles: Von New York nach San Francisco. English
Description: 1st edition. | Bloomington, Indiana : Indiana University Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017025699 (print) | LCCN 2017019271 (ebook) | ISBN 9780253031228 (ebook) | ISBN 9780253026316 (cloth : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: United StatesDescription and travel. | Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, Ernst von, 18461909Correspondence. | United StatesSocial life and customs19th century. | Railroad travelUnited States. | Travelers writings, German.
Classification: LCC E168 (print) | LCC E168 .M53513 2017 (ebook) | DDC 917.304/09034dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017025699
1 2 3 4 5 22 21 20 19 18 17
CONTENTS
TRANSLATORS NOTE
WHEN I CAME ACROSS the original private publication of these letters a few years ago, I was fascinated by the many aspects of American life in 1869 that are vividly reported. As one of the Mendelssohn family, I initially intended to translate this book for the many members of the clan who now live in this country and no longer speak German. However, I came to believe that these pages would be of interest to a larger public because they illustrate the vantage point of an educated European who spouts Latin quotations (for better or worse) and compares his experiences to his travels in Europe.
My thanks go to Gertrud Champe, who spent many hours making this translation idiomatic and flowing, and Jon Thiem, who helped us with his knowledge of the literature on the Mendelssohns and who was the first to discover the original book, as it was published privately in the nineteenth century.
Barbara H. Thiem
FROM NEW YORK TO SAN FRANCISCO
Introduction
LETTERS PROVIDE a rich and lively approach to cultural history; if the writing is sharply observant, they teach us a great deal about the time and place the writer is describing, no matter why the letters were written. Even as strangers, reading the letters long after they were written, we can let our imagination play among the cameos of the later-nineteenth-century United States that the present collection offers. The letters were composed in 1869, a time when the center of the country was moving westward after the end of the Civil War. In small settlements and large towns, people were building, for good and for ill, bringing with them elements of European civilization that ranged from newspapers to concerts of both European and American music, from city planning to the formation of communities based on faith. And for added divergence from what had been there, unalloyed for millennia, there was even a bit of authentic Chinese theater on the western shore.
The vast expanse of land was beginning to think of itself as one country. Financiers and industrialists had devoted imagination and funds to the construction of a continent-spanning railroad whose two arms, the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific, met and joined at Promontory, Utah, in May 1869. In many cities, black men and women were doing for pay what they had so recently done under duress. It was a time of ferment.
Into this bustling world came two privileged young Prussian men on holiday, Ernst Mendelssohn-Bartholdy and his older cousin Ernst Westphal, both members of the Mendelssohn family of Berlin. Over a period of three months, they traveled across the United States and back again by train. During this time, no matter where they were, they sent word of their travels back home, enthusiastic about the sights and adventures they encountered and firmly convinced of their opinions about the way Americans conducted their affairs. Encountering their reports today provides a bittersweet opportunity to see ourselves as others saw us then.
All the letters in this collection are written by Ernst Mendelssohn-Bartholdy. Ernst Westphal is not necessarily a lesser personality, but as his cousin points out in one letter, he just doesnt like to write. His presence, however, must certainly have added to the pleasure and adventure of the excursion.
Mendelssohn-Bartholdys early letters from New York are a colorful mixture of praise and criticism. Everything is exoticthe size, the noise, the banana he had for dessert, the beauty and freedom of the young women he sees (not that he enjoys the apparently subservient position into which these beauties put the men). And he is quick to praise the things he finds better in New York than in Berlin, like the general availability of streetcars, but he is quite ready to give the rough side of his tongue to whatever he finds distasteful, inappropriate, or even just unfamiliar.
Far from being an egalitarian, Ernst has an unfriendly or sarcastic word for any instance of people who think they are as good as anybody else. He pounces with a grin on a corrupt customs official:
The customs officer who was inspecting my suitcase stood there comfortably, opening his hand behind his back saying: You shant have any trouble, Sir! which I answered silently but pleasantly with a few dollars. The noble republican immediately signed my luggage with chalk, meaning that the bags were properly fixed.
Nor does Ernst spare his cousin a few gibes when he refuses to use the same expedient to shorten their time of dealing with authority. Westphal, servant of the law, will not resort to bribery.
But for all his sniping at servants who dont serve, at riffraff with no manners, at the exaggerated elegance of womens clothes, Ernst has a certain sensitivity for the allure of New York, which was already a great world city:
Light
Font size:
↓
↑
Reset
Interval:
↓
↑
Bookmark:
Make
Similar books «From New York to San Francisco: Travel Sketches from the Year 1869»
Look at similar books to From New York to San Francisco: Travel Sketches from the Year 1869. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.
Rebecca Felix
Sidney Mendelssohn
Felix Mendelssohn
Benedict Taylor
Strauss Leo
John Michael Cooper
R. Larry Todd
Peter Mercer-Taylor (Editor)
David Sorkin
Reviews about «From New York to San Francisco: Travel Sketches from the Year 1869»
Discussion, reviews of the book From New York to San Francisco: Travel Sketches from the Year 1869 and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.