"...could rest easier if the sufferings of other races...", 1830s

"By the 1830s the Americans were eagerly grasping at reasons for their own success and for the failure of others. Although the white Americans of Jacksonian America wanted personal success and wealth, they also wanted a clear conscience. If the United States was to remain in the minds of its people a nation divinely ordained for great deeds, then the fault for the suffering inflicted in the rise to power and prosperity had to lie elsewhere. While Americans could rest easier if the sufferings of other races could be blamed on racial weakness rather than on the white's relentless search for wealth and power."

-- Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism, Reginald, Horsman, 1981, p. 210.
   

Jefferson and the Saxons, 1825

"Near the end of his life, in 1825, Jefferson contrasted the Saxon and the Norman conquests of England  'the former exhibiting the genuine form and political principles of the people constituting the nation, and founded in the rights of man; the latter built on conquest and physical force, not at all affecting moral rights, nor even assented to by the free will of the vanquished. The battle of Hastings, indeed, was lost, but the natural rights of the nation were not staked on the events of a single battle. Their will to recover the Saxon constitution continued unabated.' [TJ letter Oct. 25, 1825]. This view of Anglo-Saxon England was in its way as unreal as those writings which depicted Arthur's England as a Camelot of brave knights, fair ladies, and magic swords, but it persisted in English and American thinking long after Jefferson's death."

-- Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism, Reginald, Horsman, 1981, p. 21.
   

the erred optimism of Mill?

"[Sir James] Stephen's response to [J. S.] Mill, in Liberty, Equality, Fraternity [1873] was that the facts did not support Mill's optimistic view. Look at actual men and you will see that they are a mixed bag, but that on the whole one cannot rely on their non-vicious or non-selfish characteristics. Large numbers of mankind are bad and indifferent, selfish, idle and sensuous, incapable of advance from ignorance through argument and discussion. To bestow liberty on such people does not improve them; nor is it necessarily to their advantage to have freedom to indulge the impulses of their character. Because man's nature is untrustworthy, to grant free rein to it is likely to be socially pernicious rather than beneficial. It is desirable, therefore, upon occasion, perhaps many occasions, to coerce others for our good and theirs."

-- Wilhelm von Humboldt and German Liberalism, A Reassessment, John Roberts, 2009, p. 97.
   

"The consequent German intellectual emphasis on private culture..."

"The French Revolution had revealed, at least in the view of most Germans of the educated class, the disastrous effects of trying to remodel society in accordance with purely rational theories. But, equally, the paternalism of the German principalities was insufficient and even worse, self-defeating, as a means of reforming society to achieve the conditions of human dignity, in that it treated men as means rather than as individuals in themselves. The consequent German intellectual emphasis on private culture reflected disenchantment with the conditions that public life presented. It justified for some (though not for Humboldt and Schiller) a flight from politics when the alternative approaches to political questions appeared either unpalatable, impractical, or both.
"Humboldt's thought is an attempt to make this conception of the cultured man within a civilized society the criterion for the political arrangements of society."

-- Wilhelm von Humboldt and German Liberalism, A Reassessment, John Roberts, 2009, p. 72.
  

Bildung and Kultur, to Herder and Humboldt

"For Herder and [W. v] Humboldt, Bildung, the inner constitution of the individual, and Kultur, the external constitution of the world are not isolated but two elements in one relationship. Kultur revealed in history, speech and knowledge is the outside force with which the individual must unite to find his true individuality. Realising individuality has become the process of assimilating and adapting the external cultural environment into one's own personality."

-- Wilhelm von Humboldt and German Liberalism, A Reassessment, John Roberts, 2009, p. 63-64.
  

W. v Humboldt on Kant vs Jacobi, 1789

"A year later, in October 1789, [Wilhelm von] Humboldt writes that the arguments of [Christian] Wolff have collapsed and 'Kant is the king of the castle.' In fact, the philosophies of Kant and Jacobi were opposed to each other. Kant relied on the intellect and reason to direct men to moral action and Jacobi relied on intuition. Humboldt came to see that Jacobi's system was entirely different from Kant's, and for Humboldt both were inadequate. Kant was too rationalistic, too abstract, placing reliance on a priori reason divorced from the world of sense; Jacobi placed too much reliance on unverifiable feelings with the consequent difficulty of distinguishing truth from delusion."

-- Wilhelm von Humboldt and German Liberalism, A Reassessment, John Roberts, 2009, p. 3. 
  

collegians in '27...

"Students today are much more alike than they were. . . . They wear the same kind of caps, the same cut of trousers, the same variety of 'slickers' and coonskin overcoats -- they talk the same slang and have much the same easy air of knowing the world. You may tell a collegian today whenever you meet him".

-- cited from Eight O'Clock Chapel, 1927, by "two elderly professors", in The American College and the Culture of Aspiration, David Levine, 1988, p. 122.

"the Humanities"?

"The word humanities emerged after 1850 in America as a neologism to describe a kind of elevating, holistic study of literature, music, and art. It derived from the academic meaning of the fifteenth-century word humanity, which distinguished the secular study of Greek and Latin texts (literae humaniores) from theological studies: humanity contrasted with divinity. Humanity in the antebellum era meant primarily study of Greek and Latin texts. But after 1850 it acquired it plural form and hitched itself to those studies that bestowed liberal culture."

-- The Culture of Classicism, Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellectual Life 1780-1910, Caroline Winterer, 2002, p. 118.

the stadium versed the serious student

"Athletics played a most important role on the college campus of the 1920s. A football victory set an optimistic tone at many schools in the interwar period. Furthermore, a successful sports program raised the visibility of an institution: it provided a means of entertainment and identification for the local community -- and that community could include an entire state -- as well as for the college's alumni and students. In the eyes of most people, students and others alike, the stadium was the most important building on campus, and the achievements of a school's athletes there overshadowed the achievements of faculty and students in the laboratory and in the classroom.
...
"Amidst the activities and fraternities, one type of student was bound to be unhappy -- the serious student."

-- The American College and the Culture of Aspiration, David Levine, 1988, p. 120, 121.

"...nearer the year 1 than to the year 1900."

"The American boy of 1854," wrote Henry Adams in the early twentieth century, "stood nearer the year 1 than to the year 1900." With those words the historian described the cataclysmic intellectual and social changes that marked the four decades after the Civil War. Like many of his contemporaries, Adams imagined the late nineteenth century as the first truly modern age, distinguished from earlier eras by an almost unbreachable chasm of thought and practice."

-- The Culture of Classicism: Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellectual Life 1780-1910, Caroline Winterer, 2002, p. 99.