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More About This Title The American Mind in the Mid-Nineteenth Century Second Edition
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Strictly speaking, of course, there was no "American mind" during this period, since Americans were then, as they are now, of many minds. Child and adult, man and woman, native and foreign born, Northerner and Southerner, slave and citizen-everyone who lived in America lived in a world of ideas and values shaped in part by a particular history and particular circumstances. However, as Tocqueville observed after visiting America in the 1830s, the citizens of any vigorous society are usually "rallied and held together by certain predominant ideas." Except for the chapter on the slave-holding South, we will be concerned here with the dominant ideas and values most Americans shared and identified with their new nation during the years from 1815 to 1860."
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Irving Henry Bartlett was an American historian. After graduating from Ohio Wesleyan University, Bartlett obtained his master's and doctoral degrees at Brown University.
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One: Interpreting American Democratic Thought 1
Two: Religion, Philosophy, and Science in the American Democracy 6
Religion 7
William Ellery Channing 9
Charles Grandison Finney 13
Horace Bushnell 15
Philosophy 19
The Academic Mind 20
The Transcendental Mind: Emerson 22
Science 27
Three: Political and Social Thought in the American Democracy 35
The Mind of the Jacksonians 36
William Leggett 39
George Bancroft 41
The Reform Impulse 42
Henry Thoreau: The Transcendentalist as Critic and Reformer 47
Wendell Phillips: The Rationale for Agitation 52
The Grimke Sisters and the Birth of Feminism 59
Conservatism and Democracy 65
Daniel Webster and National Conservation 66
Abraham Lincoln and Democratic Conservatism 74
Four: The Mind of the South 83
The Democratic Mind in the South 84
The Southern Mind as Apologist for Slavery 89
John C. Calhoun 91
George Fitzhugh 97
The Reactionary Enlightenment 102
The Mind of the Slave 104
Five: The Democratic Imagination 108
P.T. Barnum: The Showman as Artist 108
An American Literature 112
Walt Whitman: The Democrat as Poet 115
The Novel in America 121
Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Democrat as Puritan 123
Herman Melville: The Democrat as Skeptic 127
Six: Conclusion 132
Bibliographical Essay 136
Index 145