Seduced, Abandoned, and Reborn

Seduced, Abandoned, and Reborn PDF Author: Rodney Hessinger
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812202244
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
Seduced, Abandoned, and Reborn exposes the fears expressed by elders about young people in the early American republic. Those authors, educators, and moral reformers who aspired to guide youth into respectable stations perceived new dangers in the decades following independence. Battling a range of seducers in the burgeoning marketplace of early America, from corrupt peers to licentious prostitutes, from pornographic authors to firebrand preachers, these self-proclaimed moral guardians crafted advice and institutions for youth, hoping to guide them safely away from harm and toward success. By penning didactic novels and advice books while building reform institutions and colleges, they sought to lead youth into dutiful behavior. But, thrust into the market themselves, these moral guides were forced to compromise their messages to find a popular audience. Nonetheless, their calls for order did have lasting impact. In urban centers in the Northeast, middle-class Americans became increasingly committed to their notions of chastity, piety, and hard work. Focusing on popular publications and large urban centers, Hessinger draws a portrait of deeply troubled reformers, men and women, who worried incessantly about the vulnerability of youth to the perils of prostitution, promiscuity, misbehavior, and revolt. Benefiting from new insights in cultural history, Seduced, Abandoned, and Reborn looks at the way the categories of gender, age, and class took rhetorical shape in the early republic. In trying to steer young adults away from danger, these advisors created values that came to define the emerging middle class of urban America.

Seduced, Abandoned, and Reborn

Seduced, Abandoned, and Reborn PDF Author: Rodney Hessinger
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812202244
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 264

Get Book Here

Book Description
Seduced, Abandoned, and Reborn exposes the fears expressed by elders about young people in the early American republic. Those authors, educators, and moral reformers who aspired to guide youth into respectable stations perceived new dangers in the decades following independence. Battling a range of seducers in the burgeoning marketplace of early America, from corrupt peers to licentious prostitutes, from pornographic authors to firebrand preachers, these self-proclaimed moral guardians crafted advice and institutions for youth, hoping to guide them safely away from harm and toward success. By penning didactic novels and advice books while building reform institutions and colleges, they sought to lead youth into dutiful behavior. But, thrust into the market themselves, these moral guides were forced to compromise their messages to find a popular audience. Nonetheless, their calls for order did have lasting impact. In urban centers in the Northeast, middle-class Americans became increasingly committed to their notions of chastity, piety, and hard work. Focusing on popular publications and large urban centers, Hessinger draws a portrait of deeply troubled reformers, men and women, who worried incessantly about the vulnerability of youth to the perils of prostitution, promiscuity, misbehavior, and revolt. Benefiting from new insights in cultural history, Seduced, Abandoned, and Reborn looks at the way the categories of gender, age, and class took rhetorical shape in the early republic. In trying to steer young adults away from danger, these advisors created values that came to define the emerging middle class of urban America.

Smitten

Smitten PDF Author: Rodney Hessinger
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501766481
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 227

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Book Description
In Smitten, Rodney Hessinger examines how the Second Great Awakening disrupted gender norms across a breadth of denominations. The displacement and internal migration of Americans created ripe conditions for religious competition in the North. Hessinger argues that during this time of religious ferment, religious seekers could, in turn, play the missionary or the convert. The dynamic of religious rivalry inexorably led toward sexual and gender disruption. Contending within an increasingly democratic religious marketplace, preachers had to court converts in order to flourish. They won followers through charismatic allure and making concessions to the desires of the people. Opening their own hearts to new religious impulses, some religious visionaries offered up radical dispensations—including new visions of how God wanted them to reorder sex and gender relations in society. A wide array of churches, including Methodists, Baptists, Mormons, Shakers, Catholics, and Perfectionists, joined the fray. Religious contention and innovation ultimately produced backlash. Charges of seduction and gender trouble ignited fights within, among, and against churches. Religious opponents insisted that the newly converted were smitten with preachers, rather than choosing churches based on reason and scripture. Such criticisms coalesced into a broader pan-Protestant rejection of religious enthusiasm. Smitten reveals the sexual disruptions and subsequent domestication of religion during the Second Great Awakening.

Dangerous to Know

Dangerous to Know PDF Author: Susan Branson
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812201426
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
In 1823, the History of the Celebrated Mrs. Ann Carson rattled Philadelphia society and became one of the most scandalous, and eagerly read, memoirs of the age. This tale of a woman who tried to rescue her lover from the gallows and attempted to kidnap the governor of Pennsylvania tantalized its audience with illicit love, betrayal, and murder. Carson's ghostwriter, Mary Clarke, was no less daring. Clarke pursued dangerous associations and wrote scandalous exposés based on her own and others' experiences. She immersed herself in the world of criminals and disreputable actors, using her acquaintance with this demimonde to shape a career as a sensationalist writer. In Dangerous to Know, Susan Branson follows the fascinating lives of Ann Carson and Mary Clarke, offering an engaging study of gender and class in the early nineteenth century. According to Branson, episodes in both women's lives illustrate their struggles within a society that constrained women's activities and ambitions. She argues that both women simultaneously tried to conform to and manipulate the dominant sexual, economic, and social ideologies of the time. In their own lives and through their writing, the pair challenged conventions prescribed by these ideologies to further their own ends and redefine what was possible for women in early American public life.

Philadelphia Stories

Philadelphia Stories PDF Author: C. Dallett Hemphill
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812253183
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
Philadelphia Stories chronicles the rich lives of twelve of its citizens—men and women, Black and white Americans, immigrants and native born—to explore the city's people and places from the colonial era to the years before the Civil War.

Siblings

Siblings PDF Author: C. Dallett Hemphill
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190215895
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 327

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Book Description
Based on a wealth of family papers, period images, and popular literature, this is the first book devoted to the broad history of sibling relations in America. Illuminating the evolution of the modern family system, Siblings shows how brothers and sisters have helped each other in the face of the dramatic political, economic, and cultural changes of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As Hemphill demonstrates, siblings function across all races as humanity's shock-absorbers as well as valued kin and keepers of memory.

The Vegetarian Crusade

The Vegetarian Crusade PDF Author: Adam D. Shprintzen
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469608928
Category : Cooking
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
Vegetarianism has been practiced in the United States since the country's founding, yet the early years of the movement have been woefully misunderstood and understudied. Through the Civil War, the vegetarian movement focused on social and political reform, but by the late nineteenth century, the movement became a path for personal strength and success in a newly individualistic, consumption-driven economy. This development led to greater expansion and acceptance of vegetarianism in mainstream society. So argues Adam D. Shprintzen in his lively history of early American vegetarianism and social reform. From Bible Christians to Grahamites, the American Vegetarian Society to the Battle Creek Sanitarium, Shprintzen explores the diverse proponents of reform-motivated vegetarianism and explains how each of these groups used diet as a response to changing social and political conditions. By examining the advocates of vegetarianism, including institutions, organizations, activists, and publications, Shprintzen explores how an idea grew into a nationwide community united not only by diet but also by broader goals of social reform.

Domestic Intimacies

Domestic Intimacies PDF Author: Brian Connolly
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812246217
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Although it is commonly thought that incest has been taboo throughout history, nineteenth-century Americans evinced a great cultural anxiety that the prohibition was failing. Theologians debated the meaning and limits of biblical proscription, while jurists abandoned such injunctions and invented a new prohibition organized around the nuclear family. Novelists crafted fictional tales of accidental incest resulting from the severed ties between public and private life, while antislavery writers lamented the ramifications of breaking apart enslaved families. Phrenologists and physiologists established reproduction as the primary motivation of the incest prohibition while naturalizing the incestuous eroticism of sentimental family affection. Ethnographers imagined incest as the norm in so-called primitive societies in contrast to modern civilization. In the absence of clear biological or religious limitations, the young republic developed numerous, varied, and contradictory incest prohibitions. Domestic Intimacies offers a wide-ranging, critical history of incest and its various prohibitions as they were defined throughout the nineteenth century. Historian Brian Connolly argues that at the center of these convergent anxieties and debates lay the idea of the liberal subject: an autonomous individual who acted on his own desires yet was tempered by reason, who enjoyed a life in public yet was expected to find his greatest satisfaction in family and home. Always lurking was the need to exercise personal freedom with restraint; indeed, the valorization of the affectionate family was rooted in its capacity to act as a bulwark against licentiousness. However it was defined, incest was thus not only perceived as a threat to social stability; it also functioned to regulate social relations—within families and between classes as well as among women and men, slaves and free citizens, strangers and friends. Domestic Intimacies overturns conventional histories of American liberalism by placing the fear of incest at the heart of nineteenth-century conflicts over public life and privacy, kinship and individualism, social contracts and personal freedom.

Murder and Madness

Murder and Madness PDF Author: Matthew Schoenbachler
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813173590
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 394

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Book Description
The “Kentucky Tragedy” was early America’s best known true crime story. In 1825, Jereboam O. Beauchamp assassinated Kentucky attorney general Solomon P. Sharp. The murder, trial, conviction, and execution of the killer, as well as the suicide of his wife, Anna Cooke Beauchamp—fascinated Americans. The episode became the basis of dozens of novels and plays composed by some of the country’s most esteemed literary talents, among them Edgar Allan Poe and William Gilmore Simms. In Murder and Madness, Matthew G. Schoenbachler peels away two centuries of myth to provide a more accurate account of the murder. Schoenbachler also reveals how Jereboam and Anna Beauchamp shaped the meaning and memory of the event by manipulating romantic ideals at the heart of early American society. Concocting a story in which Solomon Sharp had seduced and abandoned Anna, the couple transformed a sordid murder—committed because the Beauchamps believed Sharp to be spreading a rumor that Anna had had an affair with a family slave—into a maudlin tale of feminine virtue assailed, honor asserted, and a young rebel’s revenge. Murder and Madness reveals the true story behind the murder and demonstrates enduring influence of Romanticism in early America.

Public Theatres and Theatre Publics

Public Theatres and Theatre Publics PDF Author: Sara Freeman
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443838616
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
Public Theatres and Theatre Publics presents sixteen focused investigations that connect theatre and performance studies with public sphere theory. The organizing critical lens of publics and publicness allows for the chapters to speak to one another other across time periods and geographies, inviting readers to think about how performing in public shapes and circulates concepts of identity, notions of taste or belonging, markers of class, and possibilities for political agency. Each essay presents a theorized case study that grapples with fundamental questions of how individuals perform in public contexts. The essays, written by a cross-section of prominent and emerging theatre and performance scholars, contribute new discussions and understandings of how theatre and performance work, as well as how publics, publicity, and modes of publicness have been constructed and contested over the last three centuries and in multiple national contexts including the US, Britain, France, Germany, Argentina and Egypt.

The Life of Daniel Waldo Lincoln, 1784-1815

The Life of Daniel Waldo Lincoln, 1784-1815 PDF Author: Rebecca M. Dresser
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000644316
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
Placed within a comprehensive contextual historical narrative, The Life of Daniel Waldo Lincoln, 1784–1815 offers a compelling portrait of one brilliant but compromised man’s perspective of his changing times. Daniel Waldo Lincoln, the second son of Levi Lincoln, a prominent Massachusetts Democratic-Republican, was destined to become a man of influence. Born in 1784, equipped with wealth, prestige, a Harvard education, powerful friends, and a distinguished family name, Lincoln ranked high among the inheritors of the Revolution whose purpose was to protect the ideals of the nation’s founders. In over 250 private letters, essays, and poems beginning with his first day at Harvard in 1801 and ending just weeks before his death in 1815, Lincoln brings to readers a portrait of privilege as it careened into disappointment. A young man active in Republican circles, an orator and attorney in Worcester, Portland, Maine, and Boston, Lincoln comments on the politics, honor, religion, the War of 1812, and his struggles with romance and alcohol. Written for private eyes, his letters are an unusually candid eyewitness account of early-nineteenth-century Massachusetts interwoven with his personal agonies. This volume is of great use for students and scholars interested in life, society, and politics in nineteenth-century America.