As the United States has developed as a nation, so too has its educational system. As the colonies rebelled from Britain, their initial reliance on European educational models and philosophies was replaced by a greater focus on the Enlightenment, republicanism, and the influence of such prominent Americans as Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Rush, and Noah Webster.
Thomas Carlyle's major work, Sartor Resartus (meaning 'The tailor re-tailored'), first published as a serial in 1833-34, purported to be a commentary on the thought and early life of a German philosopher called Diogenes Teufelsdroeckh (which translates as 'god-born devil-dung'), author of a tome entitled "Clothes: their Origin and Influence." Teufelsdröckh's Transcendentalist musings are mulled over by a skeptical English editor who also provides fragmentary biographical material on the philosopher.
Under the Greenwood Tree or The Mellstock Quire: A Rural Painting of the Dutch School is a novel by Thomas Hardy, published anonymously in 1872. It was Hardy's second published novel, the last to be printed without his name, and the first of his great series of Wessex novels. The plot concerns the activities of a group of church musicians, the Mellstock parish choir, one of whom, Dick Dewy, becomes romantically entangled with a comely new school mistress, Fancy Day.
Two on a Tower (1882) is a novel by English author Thomas Hardy, classified by him as a romance and fantasy and now regarded as one of his minor works. The book is one of Hardy’s Wessex novels, set in a parallel version of late Victorian Dorset.
