Steven Mintz

The Decades before the Civil War saw the first secular efforts in history to remake society through reform. Reformers launched unprecedented campaigns to reform criminals and prostitutes, educate the deaf and the blind, guarantee women's rights, and abolish slavery. Our modern systems of free public schools, prisons, and hospitals for the mentally ill are all legacies of this era. Moralists and Modernizers tells the fascinating story of America's first age of reform, combining incisive portraits of leading reformers and movements with perceptive analyses of religion, politics, and society. Arguing that the reform impulse grew out of the era's peculiar mix of fear and hope, Steven Mintz shows that reform arose not only from fears of social disorder, family fragmentation, and widening class divisions but also from a millennialist sense of possibility rooted in new religious and philosophical ideas. He then examines three distinct responses to pre-Civil War America's pressing social problems. Moral reform sought to create a Christian moral order using moral suasion. Social reform combatted poverty, crime, and ignorance through new institutions offering nonauthoritarian forms of social control. Radical reform sought to regenerate American society by eliminating fundamental sources of inequality such as slavery and racial and sexual discrimination. In an epilogue, Mintz fits antebellum reform into the larger context of America's liberal tradition. . Mintz concludes that America's pre-Civil War reformers were at once moral critics and cultural modernizers. As exponents of a distinctly modern set of values, reformers attacked outmoded customs, smoothed the transition from a preindustrial to an industrial order, and devised modern bureaucratic systems of criminal justice, public education, and social welfare. The first comprehensive account of antebellum reform to appear in twenty years, Moralists and Modernizers is a rich and rewarding work of synthesis and interpretation which draws upon the most recent historical research.

Looks at the ways the American family has adapted to change over the past three hundred years, and discusses the families of American Indians, slaves, and immigrants.

"Globalization has carried vast consequences for the lives of children. It has spurred unprecedented waves of immigration, contributed to far-reaching transformations in the organization, structure, and dynamics of family life, and profoundly altered trajectories of growing up. Equally important, globalization has contributed to the world-wide dissemination of a set of international norms about children's welfare and heightened public awareness of disparities in the lives of children around the world. This book's contributors - leading historians, literary scholars, psychologists, social geographers, and others - provide fresh perspectives on the transformations that globalization has produced in children's lives"--

Drawing on a gold mine of primary documents - including letters, diary entries, personal narratives, political speeches, broadsides, trial transcripts, and contemporary newspaper articles - The Boisterous Sea of Liberty brings the past to life in a way few histories ever do. Here is a panoramic look at American history from the voyages of Columbus through the bloody Civil War, as captured in the words of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe and many other historical figures, both famous and obscure. In these pieces, the living voices of the past speak to us from opposing viewpoints - from the vantage point of loyalists as well as patriots, slaves as well as masters - providing a more sophisticated understanding of the forces that have shaped our society, from the power of public opinion to the nearly absolute power of the slaveholder. The Boisterous Sea of Liberty is a documentary history of America, which uses the first-person testimony to reconstruct the basic forces, events, ideas, and struggles that shaped American society during its formative era. It places the defining documents of American history in their proper context and presents a lively and innovative interpretation of our history from earliest colonization through the Civil War.

"The first history of American adulthood, The Prime of Life examines how succeeding generations of Americans dealt with the primary tasks of adulthood: Navigating the passage from youth to maturity, achieving intimacy and connection, raising the next generation, experiencing work's pleasures and pains, and wresting meaning from life's losses and stresses. Highly attentive to class, ethnicity, gender, and race, this book draws upon a wealth of private letters and other previously untapped sources to challenge a host of misconceptions that distort public thinking today. These include the myths that the transition to adulthood was smoother and more seamless in the past and that adulthood was more stable and predictable than it has since become. But this book does something more. It underscores women's historical role in driving fundamental changes in attitudes toward love, friendship, marriage, childrearing, and work. It demonstrates the ways that social class has differentiated adult experience. It also reconstructs the emotional interior of a life stage too often treated as fit only for self-help books or novels dealing with the travails of the suburban middle class. It not only recaptures adulthood's joys and disappointments, its hopes and frustrated expectations, its soaring dreams and bitter regrets, it demonstrates that development across the life span is shaped less by psychology than by cultural and historical circumstances"--Provided by publisher.