A Mirror for Greatness Six Great Americans--论文代写范文精选

51due论文代写网精选代写范文：“A Mirror for Greatness Six Great Americans”。这篇文章主要对美国历代总统的事迹进行描写和评价，并对他们的对经济政治建设的发展的事迹褒扬。

The book I chose for my book review was A Mirror for Greatness: Six Great Americans by Bruce Bliven. He wrote this book in 1975 and the McGraw-Hill Book Company in New York published it. This book goes thought the live of six Americans: Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Sojourner Truth, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau. It shows their true character. Benjamin Franklin was a jack-of-all-trades and master of many.

No other American, except possibly Thomas Jefferson, has done so many things so well. During his long and useful life, Franklin concerned himself with such different matters as statesmanship and soap making, book printing and cabbage growing, and the rise of tides and the fall of empires. He also invented an efficient heating stove and proved that lightning is electricity. As a statesman, Franklin stood in the front rank of the people who built the United States. He was the only person who signed all four of these key documents in American history: the Declaration of Independence, the Treaty of Alliance with France, the Treaty of Paris making peace with Britain (now the United Kingdom), and the Constitution of the United States. Franklin's services as a diplomat in France helped greatly in winning the Revolutionary War. Many historians consider him the ablest and most successful diplomat that America has ever sent abroad. Franklin was the leader of his day in the study of electricity.

As an inventor, he was unequaled in the United States until the time of Thomas A. Edison. People still quote from Franklin's Sayings of Poor Richard and read his Autobiography. Franklin helped establish Pennsylvania's first university and America's first city hospital. Franklin's fame extended to Europe as well as America. Thomas Jefferson hailed him as "the greatest man and ornament of the age and country in which he lived." A French statesman, Comte de Mira beau, referred to Franklin as "the sages whom two worlds claimed as their own.” Franklin led all the people of his time in his lifelong concern for the happiness, well-being, and dignity of humanity. George Washington spoke for a whole generation of Americans in a letter to Franklin in 1789: "If to be venerated for benevolence, if to be admired for talents, if to be esteemed for patriotism, if to be beloved for philanthropy, can gratify the human mind, you must have the pleasing consolation to know that you have not lived in vain." John Adams guided the young United States through some of its most serious troubles. He served under George Washington as the first vice president, and followed him as the second president. The United States government moved from Philadelphia to Washington, D.C., during Adams's administration, and he became the first president to live in the White House. Adams was the first chief executive whose son also served as president. Adams played a leading role in the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, and was a signer of the historic document. He had spoken out boldly for separation from the United Kingdom at a time when most colonial leaders still hoped to settle their differences with the British.

As president, Adams fought a split in his own party over his determination to avoid war with France. He kept the peace, but in the process he lost a second term as president. Thomas Jefferson succeeded Adams. In appearance, Adams was short and stout, with a ruddy complexion. He seldom achieved popularity during his long political career. Adams was anything but a cold man, and those who knew him well, loved him. But his bluntness, impatience, and vanity made more enemies than friends. On the great decisions of his public career, history has proved him right and his opponents wrong. But his clumsiness in human relations often caused him to be misunderstood. Few people knew about another part of Adams's personality. His diary and personal letters show his genial, affectionate, and often playful nature. During Adams's term, the United States took its first steps toward industrialization. The first woolen mills began operating in Massachusetts, and Congress established the Department of the Navy and the Marine Corps. Americans enjoyed such songs as "The Wearing of the Green" and "The Blue Bells of Scotland." People read and admired The Life and Memorable Actions of George Washington by Mason Locke Weems. On the frontier, Johnny Appleseed began wandering through Ohio and Indiana, planting apple seeds and teaching the Bible. Thomas Jefferson is best remembered as a great president and as the author of the Declaration of Independence. He also won lasting fame as a diplomat, a political thinker, and a founder of the Democratic Party. Jefferson's interests and talents covered an amazing range. He became one of the leading American architects of his time and designed the Virginia Capitol, the University of Virginia, and his own home, Monticello. He greatly appreciated art and music and tried to encourage their advancement in the United States. He arranged for the famous French sculptor Jean Houdon to come to America to make a statue of George Washington. Jefferson also posed for Houdon and for the famous American portrait painter Gilbert Stuart. Jefferson also enjoyed playing the violin in chamber music concerts. In addition, Jefferson served as president of the American Philosophical Society, an organization that encouraged a wide range of scientific and intellectual research. Jefferson invented a decoding device, a lap desk, and an improved type of moldboard plow. His collection of more than 6,400 books became a major part of the Library of Congress. Jefferson revised Virginia's laws and founded its state university. He developed the decimal system of coinage that allows Americans to keep accounts in dollars and cents. He compiled a Manual of Parliamentary Practice and prepared written vocabularies of Indian languages. Jefferson also cultivated one of the finest gardens in America. Jefferson did not consider himself a professional politician.

Instead, he regarded himself as a public-spirited citizen and a broad-minded, practical thinker. He preferred his family, his books, and his farms to public life. But he spent most of his career in public office and made his greatest contribution to his country in the field of politics. The tall, red-haired Virginian believed that "those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God." His ideal society was a nation of landowning farmers living under as little government as possible. The term Jeffersonian democracy refers to such an ideal and was based on Jefferson's faith in self-government. He trusted the majority of people to govern themselves and wanted to keep the government simple and free of waste. Jefferson loved liberty in every form, and he worked for freedom of speech, press, religion, and other civil liberties. Jefferson strongly supported the addition of the Bill of Rights to the Constitution of the United States. Jefferson molded the American spirit and mind. Every later generation has turned to him for inspiration. Through about 40 years of public service, he remained faithful to his vow of "eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man." During Jefferson's two terms as president, the United States almost doubled in area with the purchase of the vast Louisiana Territory. America preserved its hard-won neutrality while France, led by Napoleon's armies, battled most of Europe. Congress passed a law banning the slave trade. It took travelers two days to go from New York City to Philadelphia by stagecoach. But the first successful voyage of Robert Fulton's steamboat, which became famous as the Clermont, signaled a promising new era in the history of transportation. Sojourner Truth was the name used by Isabella Baumfree, one of the best-known American abolitionists of her day. She was the first black woman orator to speak out against slavery. She traveled widely through New England and the Midwest on speaking tours. Her deep voice, quick wit, and inspiring faith helped spread her fame. Baumfree was born a slave in Ulster County, New York. She became free in 1828 under a New York law that banned slavery.

In 1843, she experienced what she regarded as a command from God to preach. She took the name Sojourner Truth and began lecturing in New York. Her early speeches were based on the belief that people best show love for God by love and concern for others. She soon began directing her speeches toward the abolition of slavery. In 1864, Sojourner Truth visited President Abraham Lincoln in the White House. She stayed in Washington, D.C., and worked to improve living conditions for blacks there. She also helped find jobs and homes for slaves who had escaped from the South to Washington. In the 1870's, she tried to persuade the federal government to set aside undeveloped lands in the West as farms for blacks. But her plan won no government support. Ralph Waldo Emerson ranks as a leading figure in the thought and literature of American civilization. He was an essayist, critic, poet, orator, and popular philosopher. He brought together elements from the past and shaped them into literature that had an important effect on later American writing. He influenced the work of Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Henry James, and Robert Frost. Emerson's essays are a series of loosely related impressions, maxims, proverbs, and parables. He has been described as belonging to the tradition of "wisdom literature" that includes Confucius, Marcus Aurelius, Michel de Montaigne, and Francis Bacon, among others. Despite personal hardships, Emerson developed a moral philosophy based on optimism and individualism. In "Self-Reliance," he wrote, "Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind," and, "Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist." Emerson was born in Boston. His early life was marked by poverty, frustration, and sickness. His father, a Unitarian minister, died in 1811, leaving Emerson's mother to raise five sons. One of his younger brothers spent most of his life in mental institutions. Another brother, also a victim of mental illness, died in 1834. A third brother died in 1836 of tuberculosis. Until Emerson was 30, he also suffered from poor health, including a lung disease and periods of temporary blindness. In addition, his first wife, Ellen, died in 1831 and his first son, Waldo, died in 1842. Emerson wrote one of his finest poems, "Threnody," for his son. In 1817, Emerson entered Harvard College, where he developed lifelong interests in literature and philosophy. After graduating in 1821, he taught school briefly and then returned to study theology at the Harvard Divinity School. In 1826, he was licensed to preach. In 1829, he was ordained Unitarian pastor of the Second Church of Boston. For personal and religious reasons, Emerson grew dissatisfied with this profession and resigned his pulpit in 1832.

After one year's travel in Europe, Emerson began a career as a writer and lecturer. The sources of Emerson's thought have been found in many intellectual movements—Platonism, Neoplatonism, Puritanism, Renaissance poetry, mysticism, idealism, skepticism, and romanticism. His prose style was active, simple, and economical. His first book, Nature (1836), was received with some enthusiasm, particularly by the young people of his day. The book expressed the main principles of a new philosophical movement called transcendentalism. Soon after its publication, a discussion group was formed with Emerson as its leader. It eventually came to be called the "Transcendental Club." The club published an influential magazine, The Dial, devoted to literature and philosophy. Emerson edited the periodical from 1842 to 1844. During the 1830's, Emerson gained a solid, though controversial, reputation as a public lecturer and as a young man with remarkably forceful and original ideas. In 1837, he gave a famous address at Harvard called "The American Scholar," in which he outlined his philosophy of humanism. He said that independent scholars must interpret and lead their culture by means of nature, books, and action. He urged his listeners to learn directly from life, know the past through books, and express themselves through action. In this address, Emerson proclaimed America's intellectual independence from Europe. In the so-called "Divinity School Address" (1838), Emerson attacked "historical Christianity." He favored a new religion founded in nature and fulfilled by direct, mystical intuition of God, and opposed formal Christianity's emphasis on ritual. Emerson's next two books, Essays (1841 and 1844), contain much of his most enduring prose.

In "Compensation," "Spiritual Laws," and "The Over-Soul," he stated his faith in the moral orderliness of the universe and the divine force governing it. In "Experience," perhaps his best essay, Emerson allowed room for skepticism and showed how doubts are conquered through faith. In "Art" and "The Poet," he outlined his philosophy of aesthetics, and in "Politics" and "New England Reformers," he explained his social philosophy. Emerson's later prose works are more specialized and better organized. Representative Men (1850) is a series of semi biographical, semi critical essays on Plato, Emanuel Swedenborg, Montaigne, William Shakespeare, Napoleon, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. They are linked by Emerson's thesis that "great men" teach us to "correct the delirium of the animal spirits, make us considerate and engage us to new aims and powers." In English Traits (1856), Emerson recorded his two voyages to Europe and discussed English literature, character, customs, and traditions. Though in theory Emerson believed that "it is not metres, but a metre-making argument that makes a poem," he wrote his verse in traditional forms. Conventional rhythms, rhyme patterns, and stanza forms, as well as economy of phrasing and simplicity of imagery characterize his poetry. Henry David Thoreau was an American writer who is remembered for his attacks on the social institutions he considered immoral and for his faith in the religious significance of nature. The essay "Civil Disobedience" is his most famous social protest. Walden, a study of Thoreau's experiment in living close to nature, is chiefly responsible for his literary reputation. Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts, on July 12, 1817. Unlike most leading writers of his time, Thoreau came from a family that was neither wealthy nor distinguished. His father made pencils in a small shop. His mother took in boarders. Thoreau graduated from Harvard College in 1837. He soon met the writer Ralph Waldo Emerson, who encouraged him to write, gave him useful criticism, and later employed him as a gardener and handyman. Emerson also taught Thoreau the philosophy of transcendentalism, with its emphasis on mysticism and individualism. Thoreau published only two books in his lifetime, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849) and Walden. Many of the books published after his death were based on trips he had taken. These books include Excursions (1863), The Maine Woods (1864), Cape Cod (1865), and A Yankee in Canada (1866). The books are organized in a loose chronological form that takes the reader through the author's experiences. Thoreau believed that people must be free to act according to their own idea of right and wrong, without government interference. In "Civil Disobedience" (1849), he said that people should refuse to obey any law they believe is unjust. Thoreau practiced this doctrine of passive resistance when, in 1846, he refused to pay poll taxes. He did so to express his opposition to slavery as it became an issue in the Mexican War. Thoreau spent one night in jail for his refusal. Thoreau summed up his idea of the role of government in "Civil Disobedience." He wrote, "There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly." The essay greatly influenced such reformers as Leo Tolstoy of Russia, Mohandas Gandhi of India, Martin Luther King, Jr., and other leaders of the American civil rights movement. Thoreau called for an end to slavery. He attacked it in the essay "Slavery in Massachusetts" (1854), and defended abolitionist John Brown's raid at Harpers Ferry in "A Plea for Captain John Brown”. In 1845, Thoreau moved to the shore of Walden Pond near Concord, Massachusetts. He lived there alone from July 4, 1845 to Sept. 6, 1847. Walden (1854) records Thoreau's observations of nature there, and tells how he built his house, paid his bills, and spent his time. It also tells about his visitors and reports what he read and thought.

On a deeper level, the book is a celebration of people living in harmony with nature. Thoreau insisted that his trip to Walden Pond was an experiment in simple living, not an idle withdrawal from society. He wrote, "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." He appealed to people to economize, to simplify their lives, and thus to save the time and energy that will allow them "to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life. ..." The sources that Bruce Bliven use to write A Mirror for Greatness: Six Americans sere his own feeling toward these great figures but he also used articles for a large portion of the information on the lives of these figures. Many of these articles were form the Reader’s Digest. Bliven took these articles and Ideas from his own journals and notes about what he had gained and learned from the individuals in the book, his feeling on how different characteristics in different people attribute to the definition of what one considers great. All of these factors tied in to make the pattern of this book. The thesis of Bliven book is to as he says write a “love letter to six great Americans” was his goal in this book. To only dwell on their virtues, to not dwell on their fault s to see their faults as thing that made up their character ad made them the great people that they were. Bliven chose these six because in his mind those who he chose” embodied in his or her own person a special American characteristic of importance”.

To show the qualities and circumstances that made these figures the great people they became. He wanted to show that even though they all cam from different background they were all very influential in the forming of this great nation. I think his big them or question to the reader is what would these great men and women think of us today and what can we learn from them. Hence the title a mirror for greatness the figures are to be a clear picture of what to strive for in great character. My evaluation and judgment of this book is that the author used his background in journalism to make up the style and flow of this book. This book led the reader though these figures lives in away that most historian have only attempted to do. He uplifted them by showing the reader the figures as common people with outstanding character, rather than as outstanding people with common characters. I enjoyed this book very much and feel there is much to gain from it. I highly recommend it.-M

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