Frederick Douglass, ca. 1848
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Making the Self-Made Man —W
From Benjamin Franklin to Andrew Carnegie, popular autobiographies were read by ordinary Americans as entertainment, guides to conduct, calls to reform, examples of national character, and warnings of improper behavior in the early United States. Taken together, they also exhibit to the historian a variety of models for manliness and self-making, since these individuals “made” themselves as much on the page as in the marketplace—a process that took on particular urgency during the first century of nationhood, when citizenship and patriotism were very much under construction.
This seminar is designed to enhance students’ skills in historical and cultural analysis by studying transformations in personal identities, gender roles, and modes of self-description as these were represented in published autobiographies. Of course, the narrative ideal of the self-made man was used by American capitalists and presidents, but it was borrowed and altered by runaway slaves, religious converts, con men, and dangerous women, among others, becoming such a plastic mode that it could be used by anyone. The primary readings will include both canonic and obscure autobiographies as well as histories of economic success and failure, analyses of self-description in such genres as diaries and speeches, and philosophical treatises on the “self” in the 19th century.
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