The Moment of Decision: Biographical Essays on American Character and Regional Identity

by John McKivigan, Randall M. Miller

Overview

Focusing primarily on 19th-century social reform, political issues, or intellectual issues, the essays in this collection all consider the historical moment in the lives of representative 19th-century, and one family of 19th- and 20th-century, Americans. Each of these Americans experienced a moment of decision that converted them to action and altered their lives and identities thereafter. All the essays examine the moments of decision within regional and social contexts. In three separate sections, the volume looks at the role of identity within the southern regional context, antislavery and moral reform within the antebellum northern regional context, and the response to emancipation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780313286353
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	06/22/1994
Series:	Contributions in American History , #15
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.62(d)
Lexile:	1660L (what's this?)

About the Author

RANDALL M. MILLER is Professor of History at Saint Joseph's University. He is the author or editor of numerous books, including Dear Master: Letters of a Slave Family, Shades of the Sunbelt (Greenwood, 1988), and with John David Smith The Dictionary of Afro-American Slavery (Greenwood, 1988).

JOHN R. McKIVIGAN is Associate Professor of History at West Virginia University. He is an editor of the Frederick Douglass Papers at Yale Univerity and the author of The War Against Proslavery Religion: Abolitionism and Northern Churches, 1830-1865.

Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Moment of Decision by Randall M. Miller
Reform and Identity in a Southern Context
The Percy Family, the "Adamses" of the Deep South: A Study of Creative Melancholy by Bertram Wyatt-Brown
Law, Slavery, and Petigru: A Study in Paradox by Jane H. Pease and William H. Pease
The Agony of Defeat: Calvin H. Wiley and the Proslavery Argument by John H. Weaver
John Tyler as President: An Old School Republican in Search of Vindication by Sylvan Kesilman
"There is a great work for you to do": The Evangelical Strategy of David Walker's Appeal and His Early Years in the Carolina Low Country by Peter P. Hinks
Varieties of Antislavery and Reform in a Northern Context
Garrison, Phillips, and the Symmetry of Autobiography: Charisma and Character of Abolitionist Leadership by James Brewer Stewart
At the Crossroads: Leonard Bacon, Antislavery Colonization, and the Abolitionists in the 1830s by Hugh Davis
A True Woman's Duty "To Do Good": Sarah Josepha Hale and Benevolence in Antebellum America by Angela Howard Zophy
Civil Warriors and Postbellum Reformers
A Critical Moment and Its Aftermath for George H. Thomas by John Cimprich
James Redpath in South Carolina: An Abolitionist's Odyssey in the Reconstruction Era South by John R. McKivigan
George H. Moore—"Tormentor of Massachusetts" by John David Smith
Bibliography of Merton L. Dillion
Bibliography
Index