Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919). New York. 1906.
Page 208
| founded in New York early in the present century. The city began to have room for an occasional man of letters or science, in addition to the multitude of lawyers and clergymen,—the lawyer, in particular, occupying the front rank in Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary days. A queer, versatile scholar and student of science, who also dabbled in politics and philanthropy, Dr. Samuel Latham Mitchell, was one of New York’s most prominent and most eccentric characters at this time. Charles Brockden Brown published one or two mystical novels which in their day had a certain vogue, even across the Atlantic, but are now only remembered as being the earliest American ventures of the kind; and in 1807 Washington Irving may be said to have first broken ground in the American field of true literature with his “Knickerbocker’s History of New York” |
| This same year of 1807 was rendered noteworthy by the beginning of steam navigation. Robert Fulton, after many failures, at last invented a model that would work, and took his steamboat, the Clermont, on a trial trip from New York to Albany and back. Thus he began the era of travel by steam, to which, more than to any other one of the many marvelous discoveries and inventions of the age, we owe the mighty and farreaching economic and social changes which this century has witnessed. Fulton’s claim to the |