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[The grand gymnastic exhibition of]

About This Item

  • Title: [The grand gymnastic exhibition of]
  • Date: 16 March 1857
  • Creator(s): Walt Whitman
  • Whitman Archive ID: per.00717
  • Source: Brooklyn Daily Times, 16 March 1857: 3. Our transcription is based on a digital image of a microfilm scan of the original issue. Microfilm of original issue held at Pennsylvania State University Libraries. For a description of the editorial rationale behind our treatment of the journalism, see our statement of editorial policy.
  • Editorial note: This piece is unsigned, as was the case for most of Whitman's journalism. However, this editorial is part of a series of texts that deal with a coherent theme that has been identified by the Whitman Archive journalism team as likely authored by Whitman. This decision is based on a combination of historical and (auto)biographical accounts, similarity to contemporary Whitman writings, a history of scholarly attribution, extant clippings retained by Whitman, computational stylometric analysis, and, in some cases, manuscript evidence in Whitman’s hand.
  • Contributors to digital file: Kellee Forkenbrock Kaylen Michaelis Samantha Gilmore Kevin McMullen Karie Cobb
  • Cite this page: Whitman, Walt. "[The grand gymnastic exhibition of]." The Walt Whitman Archive. Gen. ed. Matt Cohen, Ed Folsom, & Kenneth M. Price. Accessed 16 July 2024. <http://www.whitmanarchive.org>.
  • Source File: per.00717.xml (TEI)
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☞The grand gymnastic exhibition of the German Turners comes off at the Odeon to night.1 It is repeated at the request of a large number of those who attended on the previous occasion.

Notes:

1. The German Turners were members of the "Turnverein" (gymnastic club) movement, which consisted mainly of so-called German "Forty-Eighters" (political refugees fleeing the European revolutions of 1848) who endorsed a body politic of rigorous health and republican, liberal politics and have been suggested as a model for Whitmna’s own health theorizing in "Manly Health and Training" (Peter Riley, "'Arm, Fortify, Harden, Make Lithe, Himself': 'Manly Health,' German Turners, and Whitman's Poetics of Training," The Oxford Handbook of Walt Whitman, eds. Kenneth M. Price and Stefan Schöberlein [New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2024], 225–42). Whitman had a documented interest in the movement and its members, having written about them as early as the late 1840s while editor of the New Orleans Daily Crescent. [back]

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