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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... civil war, reformers of all ideological persuasions were constructing instruments of public dialogue that would become vital means for addressing the most threatening and divisive questions to face the nation. The original founders of ...
... 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 over the implications of ...
... because the debates that nurtured reform permitted a simulation of civil equality for committed individuals who were outside the official public sphere. In addition to the emergence of a permanent culture of reform, the introduction 5.
... civil discourse, they forced a second restructuring of the public sphere. Though the official public sphere of the citizen remained relatively homogeneous until after the Civil War, the informal public arena, where norms are debated and ...
... civil mediation represented a means of claiming equality in a reformed, pluralistic public sphere. Although women's rights emerged most forcefully after the schism over the “woman question” in the antislavery movement, I have chosen to ...
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 |