Moral Problems in American Life: New Perspectives on Cultural History

Abstract

Moral Problems in American Life: New Perspectives on Cultural History. Edited by Karen Halttunen and Lewis Perry. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998. Pp. ix, 350. Illustrations. Cloth, $59.95; paper, $19.95.) Perhaps half the essays in this volume cover subjects that fall squarely under the rubric of the republic, even by the recently expanded definitions of SHEAR and this journal. Readers should not restrict themselves to those articles in this rich collection simply because the others stand outside the boundaries of specialized concern. Indeed, the clear implication of both authors and editors is that few significant problems in American history fit neatly into the chronological slots created for undergraduate courses or requested in job advertisements. To categorize them by particular subdisciplines-labor history, history of reform-is to miss the intricacy of their arguments and place them back in pigeonholes they try to escape. The best of these pieces provide fresh approaches for thinking about longstanding and difficult historical problems on several levels. Deviance, for example, has been a popular theme first in the 1960s among scholars seeking historical roots for contemporary social upheavals and later by those influenced by the works of Michel Foucault. Karen Halttunen's latest installment in her exploration of popular antebellum narrative forms and ideas about social discipline and Tamara Thornton's adroit consideration of left-handedness illuminate this idea as it is enacted and expressed in everyday life, articulated through prescriptive literature and other forms of popular publication. Anne C. Rose's thoughtful treatment of interfaith marriage sheds new perspective on identity by rejecting any deterministic assumptions about how a particular social or religious location would force her subjects into a particular line of action or thought. Although they cross chronological time barriers, several of the pieces stand in lively conversation with each other. Jonathan Glickstein's analysis of the meaning of hard work in the early republic enriches and is enriched by William Forbath's focus on the New Deal and issues of equality. Christine Stansell's account of the sexual avant-garde in the early twentieth century is, in some respects, the next chapter in Halttunen's discussion of the Gothic mystery genre and social expose. Stansell traces a change in social legitimation, religious and institutional to social and psychological, (283) that she discusses in the context of opinions about sex. Jackson Lears notes in his loosely organized (and occasionally confusing) essay What if History Was a Gambler? that anti-gambling thought had moved from the grounds of morality to pathology. These same transformations in social thought are explored in several of these works. Anne C. Loveland addresses this theme directly in her account of the use by military chaplains during the Vietnam era of secular methods drawn from a therapeutic culture (which several of these authors have discussed in other work). Notions of nationalism, group identity, and belonging are addressed in varied registers in useful and interesting contributions by Edward Ayers on the historiography and recent uses of the Civil War, Lewis Perry on the relationship of black abolitionists to ideas of civil disobedience, Amy Dru Stanley on the gender implications of possessive individualism, and Jonathan Sarna on the evolution of Jewish prayers for the United States government. …