Moses Coit Tyler

Moses Coit Tyler ( born August 2, 1835 in Griswold, Connecticut, † December 28, 1900 in Ithaca, New York ) was an American historian and literary scholar.

Life

Tyler spent a rather restless childhood in various small towns in the states of New York and Michigan; 1842 settled his family permanently settled in Detroit. In 1850 he left home and was at the tender age of fifteen, a teacher at a rural school in the village of Romeo, approximately 50 km north of Detroit, as a traveling bookseller suggested by later and finally began in 1853 to study at the University of Michigan. In the second year he moved to the prestigious Yale College, where he 1857 BA, 1863 MA obtained. In the meantime, he studied at Yale Divinity School (1857-1858) and the Andover Theological Seminary (1858-1859) for the congregational priesthood and also served as a pastor in Owego and Poughkeepsie, gave this career but because of health problems. After a nervous breakdown in October 1862 he recovered with the help of a gymnastic therapy program of a certain Dr. Dio Lewis and became a convinced representative for Lewis ' patented " artistic gymnastics" (musical gymnastics ). In 1863 he traveled to England to market Lewis' therapy program there. In his lectures he saw, however, soon many curious questions about the nature and history of the United States toward and held as soon lectures on these topics.

After his return to the U.S. he was appointed 1867 Professor of Rhetoric and English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan. 1873-74 he interrupted his teaching career and worked in New York as senior editor of the literary department of the journal Christian Union, which was led by Tyler's model of Henry Ward Beecher. When the Cornell University was the first university ever founded a chair of American history, Tyler was appointed to the post; In 1884 he was one of the founders of the American Historical Association. In 1883 he was ordained as a priest in the Episcopal Church, but did not look back as a parish pastor.

Work

Tyler wrote two comprehensive works on American literature, history of the colonial and revolutionary period. Although there were in the 19th century previously approaches to a representation of American literary history - so in particular Samuel Knapp's Lectures on American Literature (1829 ), Henry Theodore Tuckerman's demolition A Sketch of American Literature (1852 ) and especially the Cyclopedia of American Literature ( 1855) the brothers George and Evert Duyckinck A. - but Tyler's works were the first systematic literature stories in book-length. Unlike the alphabetical and innocuous descriptive bibliographic Cyclopedia of Duyckincks Tyler was going chronologically and put greater emphasis on the aesthetic and literary qualities of the authors discussed. Although Tyler's judgments in the absence of a fixed methods apparatus often be quite impressionistic, they can be at least whether its stylistic brilliance read with profit today.

Tyler wore so a lot to the fact that American literature has subsequently been increasingly seen as a separate and different from the English national literature and as such also the subject of academic research and teaching was. Thus, he is often regarded as one of the progenitors of American Studies.

Writings

• (Ed.) The Brawnville Papers: Being Memorials of the Brawnville Athletic Club. Fields, Osgood, & Co., Boston, 1869 ( digitized ).
• History of American Literature falling on the Colonial Period, 1607-1765. 2 vols. G. P. Putnam 's Sons. New York 1879 ( digitized ).
• (Ed.) In Memoriam: Edgar Kelsey Apgar. Ithaca, NY 1885.
• Patrick Henry. Houghton Mifflin &, Boston 1888 ( digitized ).
• Three Men of Letters. GP Putnam's Sons, New York 1895 ( essays on George Berkeley, Timothy Dwight and Joel Barlow; digitized ).
• Literary History of the American Revolution, 1763-1783. 2 vols. GP Putnam's Sons, New York 1897 ( digitized Volume 1).
• Glimpses of England: Social, Political, Literary. G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York 1898.
• Jessica Tyler Austen (ed.): Moses Coit Tyler, 1835-1900: Selections from his Letters and Diaries. Doubleday, Page & Company, Garden City, NY 1911 ( digitized ).