Cultural Interactions between Europe and the United States in the Nineteenth and its prospects for today

Resumo

While in Europe during the second half of the nineteenth century - especially in France - intellectuals as Jules Michelet, Ernest Renan and Hippolyte Rivail Denizard, among many others, produced monumental works that would be studied to this day, North America - still under strong Victorian influence – was looking to build its identity. The United States, a young nation, culturally dependent on Britain, was a predominantly an agrarian State and strongly influenced by Puritan Protestantism. In this context, a frail, black woman, Ellen White wrote over seventy years, one hundred thousand manuscript pages - without the intellectualism of the French - but with remarkable depth on subjects as seemingly disparate as psychology, education, religion and diet. The purpose of this communication is to analyze the broad outlines of the holistic work of Ellen White from the context of a sense of her time and propose relations between the European production (French) for the period and her work, contributing to discussions between various areas of Humanities.