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Between the Revolution and the Civil War, the dialogue of religious skepticism and faith profoundly shaped America. Although usually rendered nearly invisible, skepticism touched-and sometimes transformed-more lives than might be expected from standard accounts. This book examines Americans wrestling with faith and doubt as they tried to make sense of their world.
Why have so many figures throughout American history proclaimed their life stories when confronted by great political problems? The Claims of Experience provides a new theory for what makes autobiography political throughout the history of the United States and today. Across five chapters, Nolan Bennett examines the democratic challenges that encouraged a diverse cast of figures to bear their stories: Benjamin Franklin amid the revolutionary era, Frederick Douglass in the antebellum and abolitionist movements, Henry Adams in the Gilded Age and its anxieties of industrial change, Emma Goldman among the first Red Scare and state opposition to radical speech, and Whittaker Chambers amid the sec...
This book examines the life and work of the Reverend John Callender (1706-1748) within the context of the emergence of religious toleration in New England in the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, a relatively recent endeavor in light of the well-worn theme of persecution in colonial American religious history. New England Puritanism was the culmination of different shades of transatlantic puritan piety, and it was the Puritan’s pious adherence to the Covenant model that compelled them to punish dissenters such as Quakers and Baptists. Eventually, a number of factors contributed to the decline of persecution, and the subsequent emergence of toleration. For the Baptists, tole...
In a literary environment dominated by men, the first American to earn a living as a writer and to establish a reputation on both sides of the Atlantic was, miraculously, a woman. Hannah Adams dared to enter--and in some ways was forced to enter--a sphere of literature that had, in eighteenth-century America, been solely a male province. Driven by poverty and necessity, and aided by an extraordinarily adept mind and keen sense of business, Adams authored works on New England history, sectarian history, and Jewish history, using and citing the most recent scholarly works being published in Great Britain and America. As a female writer, she would always remain something of an outsider, but her...
To many he speaks with unprecedented urgency. For Henry Adams at the turn of the twentieth century, as for his successors in the twenty-first, the relation of mind to a world remade by technology and geopolitical conflict largely determines the destiny of civil life. Henry Adams and the Need to Know presents fourteen essays that articulate Adams's ongoing interest to both scholarly and general readerships, stressing his eclecticism and his need to clarify the role of critical intelligence in public life.
Between 1820 and 1860, American social reformers invited all people to identify God's image in the victims of war, slavery, and addiction. Identifying the Image of God traces the theme of identification--and its liberal Christian roots--through the literature of social reform, focusing on sentimental novels, temperance tales, and slave narratives, and invites contemporary activists to revive the "politics of identification."
John Adams -- lawyer, congressman, diplomat, vice president, and president--had one of the most varied and productive public careers of America's Revolutionary generation. His many achievements, taken for granted or even discounted through much of the twentieth century, have in the past decade attracted the increasingly enthusiastic attention of historians, political scientists, and the larger public. This collection of essays, the first ever on its subject, provides unique insights on Adams's life, from youth through old age, and his vital contributions to the founding of the nation. An introduction by the editor lays out the breadth of Adams's life and career in general, setting the stage ...
When John Winthrop, first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, emigrated from Stuart England to America, he and the colonists who accompanied him carried much of their culture with them. Written by leading English and American scholars, the essays in The World of John Winthrop: England and New England, 1588-1649 vigorously assert a new unity to the transatlantic and Puritan, Anglo-American sphere, integrating the English and colonial stories from a refreshingly single perspective. Contributors: Tom Webster (University of Edinburgh) * Mark A. Peterson (University of Iowa) * David D. Hall (Harvard Divinity School) * Alexandra Walsham (University of Exeter) * Alden Vaughan (Columbia University) * Virginia Mason Vaughan (Clark University) * Richard J. Ross (University of Illinois) * James S. Hart (University of Oklahoma) * Richard Godbeer (University of Miami) * Mark Valeri (Union Theological Seminary of Virginia) * Lyn Botelho (Indiana University of Pennsylvania) * Francis J. Bremer (Millersville University of Pennsylvania)