Creating the Culture of Reform in Antebellum AmericaUniversity of Georgia Press, 1 Ara 2006 - 280 sayfa 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. |
Kitabın içinden
70 sonuçtan 1-5 arası sonuçlar
... structural change in American society. The growth of religious pluralism as a permanent feature of the American cultural ... structure that stands in a propagandistic relationship to the general population. It is also less important that ...
... structural impact on American civil society. The Unitarian controversy, in my view, is paradigmatic because it articulates the core discursive structure of the culture of reform. The debates between Angelina Grimké and Catharine Beecher ...
... structure of public discourse in the way that women's rights or antislavery did. Indeed, Ronald Walters concludes that temperance “was far less threatening to the social order than antislavery, women's rights, and most other antebellum ...
... structure during the antebellum period. Thus, one of the most important debates in the formation of the culture of reform involved the constellation of issues that mediate access to the public sphere. This constellation was shaped not ...
... structure of public discourse itself. By Douglass's reasoning, since the legitimization of social norms was rapidly moving into a sphere of public debate, gaining access to that realm of civil mediation represented a means of claiming ...
İçindekiler
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 |