Refined by:
Refine by:
- Publication date
- Time period
- Audience
- Creator
- Printer
- Publisher
- Subject
![]() |
Inauguration of the Spartanburg Female CollegeSpeech | Spartanburg Female College Board of Trustees | 1855
William Gilmore Simms spoke at the opening of the
Spartanburg Female College at approximately 1pm[1]
on August 22, 1855 to an audience comprised largely of the Board of Trustees
and other persons involved in the founding of that institution[2]. His remarks were published several weeks
later in a pamphlet entitled Inauguration
of the Spartanburg Female College. His
talk focused on the two related topics of the value of education in general and
the importance of female education specifically. On the former, Simms compared the mind of man
to a wilderness terrain awaiting ... |
![]() |
Self-DevelopmentSpeech | The Thalian Society | 1847
William Gilmore Simms was invited to
give the oration, which would become Self-Development,
by the Literary Societies of Oglethorpe University in Milledgeville, GA in 1847. In consideration of his student audience,
Simms took as his theme the nature and progress of the individual, especially
in relation to his function within God’s plan.
The title quality, according to the author, is about recognizing one’s
God-given potentials and subsequently nurturing and expressing them in
action. Everybody has inborn strengths
and aptitudes; self-development is the art of fully ... |
![]() |
The Sense of the Beautiful.Speech | Agricultural Society of South Carolina | 1870 Simms delivered The Sense of the Beautiful, his final
public oration, on May 3, 1870, a little over a month before his death.[1] The occasion was the first Floral Fair
held by the Charleston County Agricultural and Horticultural Society, a group
that would merge in August with the older and recently revived Agricultural
Society of South Carolina. In his
speech, Simms stressed the importance of natural beauty, a harmonious home
life, and female leadership. He praised
the spiritual value of the natural world and claimed that a stable domestic
sphere was a precondition for the progress ... |
![]() |
The Social PrincipleSpeech | The Erosophic Society of the University of Alabama | 1843 William Gilmore Simms delivered his lecture The Social Principle: The True Source of National Permanence to the Erosophic Society[1] at the University of Alabama on 13 December 1842 during the occasion of his receiving an honorary LL.D. degree from that university.[2] An important text in Simms studies, this oration marks “Simms’s single most extensive published exposition of his social philosophy.”[3] He took as the genesis for his talk what he perceived as the fundamentally changed nature of the environs of western Alabama from his previous visit to the area, ... |
![]() |
The Sources of American IndependenceSpeech | The Town Council of Aiken, SC | 1844
The Sources of
American Independence. An Oration, on the Sixty-Ninth Anniversary of American
Independence was delivered by William Gilmore Simms on 4 July 1844 in
Aiken, SC. As its long title suggests,
the speech was composed to celebrate the sixty-nine years of American
nationhood since the Declaration of Independence; what is unmentioned in the
title but equally relevant to an understanding of this work is the fact that it
was composed essentially as a stump speech[1]
during Simms’s successful 1844 run for a seat in the South Carolina State
Legislature. Giving a speech ... |