Who Is Vanderbilt's Encounters During The Early Twentieth-Century?

The history of ideas is full of random encounters between highly intelligent individuals that sometimes result in relationships that produce profound intellectual growth. These cognitive results sometimes provide fresh approaches to unfavorable contemporary conditions. Depending on the social and historical context, these chance encounters have the ability to generate intense creative atmospheres that benefit all who are involved with the efforts of the emerging group. This research paper will explore one such chance encounter that occurred in Nashville on the Vanderbilt University campus during the early twentieth-century. During this period in Vanderbilt’s history, a group of highly talented faculty and students came together to produce a magazine that played an integral role in the Southern literary renaissance. As we will see, some of these members went on to produce a politically conservative response to, what they believed to be, the destructive forces of modern industry. …show more content…
We will examine the efforts of this group to industrialize and diversify agriculture in the Southern states, and the sociocultural impact that these changes had on the the Southern populace. We will then shift our attention toward Vanderbilt during the infancy of the twentieth-century. By focusing on the educational environment that gave rise to the literary magazine The Fugitive, we will see how the relationship that developed between John Crowe Ransom, Donald Davidson, and Allen Tate served to create an intellectual environment that produced some of the best poetry in the South during the twentieth-century. It will also become clear that, due to their involvement with The Fugitive, these three members of the Vanderbilt community became outsiders in the eyes of the institutional