Creating the Culture of Reform in Antebellum AmericaUniversity of Georgia Press, 1 de dez. de 2006 - 280 páginas In this study, T. Gregory Garvey illustrates how activists and reformers claimed the instruments of mass media to create a freestanding culture of reform that enabled voices disfranchised by church or state to speak as equals in public debates over the nation’s values. Competition among antebellum reformers in religion, women’s rights, and antislavery institutionalized a structure of ideological debate that continues to define popular reform movements. The foundations of the culture of reform lie, according to Garvey, in the reconstruction of publicity that coincided with the religious-sectarian struggles of the early nineteenth century. To counter challenges to their authority and to retain church members, both conservative and liberal religious factions developed instruments of reform propaganda (newspapers, conventions, circuit riders, revivals) that were adapted by an emerging class of professional secular reformers in the women’s rights and antislavery movements. Garvey argues that debate among the reformers created a mode of “critical conversation” through which reformers of all ideological persuasions collectively forged new conventions of public discourse as they struggled to shape public opinion. Focusing on debates between Lyman Beecher and William Ellery Channing over religious doctrine, Angelina Grimke and Catharine Beecher over women’s participation in antislavery, and William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass over the ethics of political participation, Garvey argues that “crucible-like sites of public debate” emerged as the core of the culture of reform. To emphasize the redefinition of publicity provoked by antebellum reform movements, Garvey concludes the book with a chapter that presents Emersonian self-reliance as an effort to transform the partisan nature of reform discourse into a model of sincere public speech that affirms both self and community. |
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... Society for the History of the Early American Republic (SHEAR) and initiated correspondences that helped me contextualize the chapter. Most important in this regard is the help I received from members of the Emerson Society: Ron Bosco ...
... society. The religious debates that stand at the origin of the culture of reform were themselves part of a broad structural change in American society. The growth of religious pluralism as a permanent feature of the American cultural ...
... society. I have chosen to focus on the debates that have left the most lasting structural impact on American civil society. The Unitarian controversy, in my view, is paradigmatic because it articulates the core discursive structure of ...
... society, it does not represent the most important traditions of modeling utopia. In this book I analyze church communities and Garrison's perfectionist society, which consciously sought to embody earthly utopias even as they actively ...
... society that consists of independent citizens meeting in the shade of an oak tree: “When we see among the happiest ... society in which individuality and equality are perfectly harmonized because the society is ideologically homogeneous ...
Conteúdo
1 | |
Religious Pluralism and the Origins of the Culture of Reform | 31 |
Sincerity and Publicity in the GrimkéBeecher Debate | 74 |
Garrison Douglass and the Problem of Politics | 121 |
Emersons SelfReliance as a Theory of Community | 161 |
Sincerity and Pluralism in Critical Conversation | 199 |
Notes | 203 |
Bibliography | 223 |
Index | 237 |