Creating the Culture of Reform in Antebellum AmericaUniversity of Georgia Press, 2006 M12 1 - 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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... become vital means for addressing the most threatening and divisive questions to face the nation. The original founders of the culture of reform emerged out of the doctrinal debate that fractured an increasingly pluralistic Protestant ...
... become indistinguishable parts of an emerging marketplace of religious and moral ideas. In “The Transcendentalist,” he writes that “each 'cause,' as it is called—say Abolition, or Temperance, say Calvinism, or Unitarianism—becomes ...
... becoming smaller and smaller. The disunionist tropes and bitter condemnation of politics that characterize his writing of the late 1850s indicate his shift toward the culture of reform as the last steward of an authentic critical public ...
... becomes corrupted and meets opposition; voting is no longer unanimous; the general will is no longer the will of all; contradictions and disputes arise; and even the best opinion is not allowed to prevail unchallenged.”6 In its original ...
... become central to theories of discursive democracy and to theories of public discourse more generally.8 In important respects, the long-running debate between liberal and communitarian political philosophers is focused on the ...
Contenido
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 |
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Creating the Culture of Reform in Antebellum America T. Gregory Garvey Sin vista previa disponible - 2010 |