This biography delves into the life and influence of America's founding religious father, exploring his pivotal role in shaping the nation's spiritual landscape. It examines his beliefs, contributions, and the historical context surrounding his life, offering insights into how his ideas continue to resonate today. Through detailed research and analysis, the book reveals the complexities of his character and the impact he had on both religion and society in early America.
American Transcendentalism is a sweeping narrative history of America's first group of public intellectuals, the men and women who defined American literature and indelibly marked American reform in the decades before and following the American Civil War. Philip F. Gura masterfully traces their intellectual genealogy to transatlantic religious and philosophical ideas, illustrating how these informed the fierce theological debates that, so often first in Massachusetts and eventually throughout America, gave rise to practical, personal, and quixotic attempts to improve, even perfect the world. The transcendentalists would painfully bifurcate over what could be attained and how, one half epitomized by Ralph Waldo Emerson and stressing self-reliant individualism, the other by Orestes Brownson, George Ripley, and Theodore Parker, emphasizing commitment to the larger social good. By the 1850s, transcendentalists turned ever more exclusively to abolition, and by war's end transcendentalism had become identified exclusively with Emersonian self-reliance, congruent with the national ethos of political liberalism and market capitalism. - Publisher
William Apess, a Pequot Indian intellectual and itinerant preacher, emerged as a significant advocate for Native American rights in the 19th century. This biography chronicles his tumultuous upbringing, military service during the War of 1812, and conversion to Methodism, leading to his prominence as a lecturer and author. His 1829 autobiography, notable for being the first by a Native American, reflects his activism alongside the abolitionist movement. Philip F. Gura highlights Apess's contributions and enduring legacy, positioning him as a vital figure in antebellum reform.
Banks failed, inequality grew, people were out of work, and slavery threatened to rend the nation in two. The Panic of 1837 drew forth reformers who, animated by self-reliance, became prophets of a new moral order that would make America great again. Philip Gura captures a Romantic moment that was soon overtaken by civil war and postwar pragmatism.
This volume traces the development of the library and the role the Society's librarians have played as collectors, scholars of American writing and publishing, and stewards of the nation's history. Readers will meet Isiah Thomas and his successors at the Society's helm