What is “Western Civilization”?
Simultaneity and Juxtaposition in the Fight for Civilization
How newspaper coverage of the Crimean War shaped Americans’ views of Western Civilization
In Walden, Henry David Thoreau expressed bitter contempt for his compatriots’ passion for newspapers, particularly their interest in the latest news from abroad. “There was such a rush, as I hear, the other day at one of the offices to learn the foreign news by the last arrival,” he wrote, “that several large squares of plate glass belonging to the establishment were broken by the pressure, — news which I seriously think a ready wit might write a twelvemonth or twelve years beforehand with sufficient accuracy.”
When the original draft of that passage first appeared in Thoreau’s journals in 1848, the fascinating foreign story of the day would have been news of the Revolutions of 1848 sweeping across Europe. When the final draft of Walden was published in 1854, the foreign news of greatest interest and perhaps most frequent appearance in American newspapers would have been the latest reporting and commentary on the Crimean War — a conflict referred to at the time as the Eastern War, the Eastern Conflict, the European War, and similar designations.
