The Crimson Letter: Harvard, Homosexuality, and the Shaping of American Culture
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.61 (577 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0312198965 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 416 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2016-07-16 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
The origin of The Crimson Letter is a speech Shand-Tucci, a 1972 graduate of Harvard College, gave to the Gay and Lesbian Caucus in 1997. He lives in Boston’s Back Bay.. Douglass Shand-Tucci’s previous books include The Art of Scandal, the bestselling biography of Isabella Steward Gardner; Boston Bohemia, and, most recently, Harvard University, with photographs by Richard Cheek and a foreword by Neil Ruden
The Crimson Letter follows the gay experience at Harvard in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, focusing upon students, faculty, alumni, and hangers-on who struggled to find their place within the confines of Harvard Yard and in the society outside.Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde were the two dominant archetypes for gay undergraduates of the later nineteenth century. Harvard took very seriously its mission to shape the minds and bodies of its charges, who came from and were expected to perpetuate the nation’s elite, yet struggled with the open expression of their sexual identities, which it alternately accepted and anathematized. Shand-Tucci brilliantly exposes the secrecy and codes that attended the gay experience, showing how their effects could simultaneously thwart and spark creativity. He explores in particular the question of gay sensibility and its effect upon everything from symphonic music to football, set design to statecraft, poetic theory to skyscrapers.The Crimson Letter combines the learned and the lurid, tragedy and farce, scandal and vindication, and figures of world renown as well as those whose influence extended little farther than Harvard Square. In a book deeply impressive in its reach while also deeply embedded in its storied setting, bestselling historian Douglass Shand-Tucci explores the nature and expression of sexual identity at America’s oldest university during the years of its greatest influence. S
In the end the book feels like a collection of minutiae and anecdotes, not a cultural history. From Publishers Weekly What Shand-Tucci (The Art of Scandal) attempts here is nothing less than a re-evaluation of American culture by looking at how it was shaped by Harvard-connected gay men. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. But a greater problem is that Shand-Tucci, try as he does in the final chapter, "Hunting the Sensibility," fails to make the case that there is something about Harvard that generates a specific sexuality and culture. Unfortunately most of the information here is from secondary sources, and as a result the book feels slightly shopworn, a problem compounded by the author's off-hand, often sloppy style. The material is often fasci
Crimson letter By Roadwarrior This really gives an insight into the gay community for those of us who have been related to someone who graduated from Harvard and was gay. It gave a small look into their movement, how it got started and how long it has been a part of the Harvard commu. A splendid concordance Kevin Killian Historian Shand-Tucci goes the distance with a deeply fascinating account of gay men studying and falling in love at Harvard University over the past 130 years. Page after page will surprise even those readers familiar with the men he's put under the mic. "Interesting Nuggets to be Found" according to Ricky Hunter. Harvard, Homosexuality, and the Shaping of American Culture is, perhaps, an unfortunate sub-title for the otherwise interesting The Crimson Letter by Douglas Shand-Tucci as it does not quite live up to this rather grandiose idea of shaping american cultu