Cultural Context Essays
In addition to providing users with access to files located within the Rebecca Harding Davis Archive, our goal is to help audiences develop a deeper understanding of Davis' life and authorial choices. By conferring with cultural context essays, readers experience a unique time during Davis' life where her history impacted her writings. Furthermore, cultural context essays illuminate the realities of nineteenth-century America and highlight Davis' promotion of social advocacy. If you are interested in writing a cultural context essay—a short 500 word piece on an issue relevant to Davis's life and work—please fill request more information by filling out a contact form.
Essay and Author:
Key Passage:
Robin Cadwallader
"Davis understood the importance of telling a good story and what it meant to be a storyteller, and her children’s stories reflect this in content, imagery, and language" (Cadwallader 1).
Arielle Zibrak
"The Davises were a media power couple of their day—attending publishers’ dinners at Theodore Roosevelt’s White House and entertaining international literary celebrities like Oscar Wilde at the Ledger offices in Philadelphia. It is unsurprising that the Davis sons also went on to pursue careers in print culture" (Zibrak 1).
Sharon M. Harris
"It is impossible to study Davis’s body of work without recognizing the importance of medicine to her way of thinking about US culture and to understand the impact she had on medical debates of the day" (Harris 2).
Alicia Mischa Renfroe
"As even a cursory review reveals, Davis participated in contemporary debates about the treatment of workers, children, women, the insane, and other marginalized groups, and often questioned the law’s ability to provide social justice" (Renfroe 2).