[PDF] Mingling Souls Upon Paper eBook

Author : Cassandra A. Good
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 336 pages
File Size : 25,30 MB
Release : 2015-01-02
Category : History
ISBN : 0199376182

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"When Harry Met Sally" is only the most iconic of popular American movies, books, and articles that pose the question of whether friendships between men and women are possible. In Founding Friendships, Cassandra A. Good shows that this question was embedded in and debated as far back as the birth of the American nation. Indeed, many of the nation's founding fathers had female friends but popular rhetoric held that these relationships were fraught with social danger, if not impossible. Elite men and women formed loving, politically significant friendships in the early national period that were crucial to the individuals' lives as well as the formation of a new national political system, as Cassandra Good illuminates. Abigail Adams called her friend Thomas Jefferson "one of the choice ones on earth," while George Washington signed a letter to his friend Elizabeth Powel with the words "I am always Yours." Their emotionally rich language is often mistaken for romance, but by analyzing period letters, diaries, novels, and etiquette books, Good reveals that friendships between men and women were quite common. At a time when personal relationships were deeply political, these bonds offered both parties affection and practical assistance as well as exemplified republican values of choice, freedom, equality, and virtue. In so doing, these friendships embodied the core values of the new nation and represented a transitional moment in gender and culture. Northern and Southern, famous and lesser known, the men and women examined in Founding Friendships offer a fresh look at how the founding generation defined and experienced friendship, love, gender, and power.

Author : Bonnie Hurd Smith
Publisher : Createspace Independent Pub
Page : 226 pages
File Size : 49,56 MB
Release : 2012-07-01
Category : History
ISBN : 9781478213413

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November 3, 1774, Gloucester, Massachusetts -- When John Murray entered the Sargents' best parlor on that chilly November day, he looked forward to greeting his host, Winthrop Sargent, and warming himself by the fire as they discussed Universalist theology. As a tireless and popular preacher of universal salvation since he had first sailed for the British colonies in 1770, John expected his reception to resemble dozens of earlier such encounters. But this meeting was different because here, in Gloucester, he met Mr. Sargent's daughter. Judith Sargent Stevens was twenty-three years old, lovely, intellectually curious, and devoted to her chosen faith, Universalism. John was a robust thirty-three, a man whose charismatic presence and outgoing personality dominated the room.But Judith was married, and any thought of a romance with John was out of the question. Instead, Judith hoped they could “surely, and with the strictest propriety, mingle souls upon paper” by writing to each other. While few of John's personal letters are known to exist, Judith hand-copied approximately 5,000 of her letters into twenty letter books that were discovered in the library of a former Mississippi plantation. Many of her letters are reprinted here for the first time. The letters in Mingling Souls Upon Paper are Judith's words. They trace her fourteen-year friendship with John, their controversial twenty-seven-year marriage, and their lives together as husband and wife when John was the “choice of her heart” and she was his “ever devoted wife.” They chronicle Judith's blossoming career as the most important female essayist in eighteenth-century America, and John's as the founder of organized American Universalism. Finally, they record John's debilitating illness and death, and Judith's final days without him. All together, the letters cover forty-four years of personal and public lives. Through Judith Sargent Murray's letters, Bonnie Hurd Smith, herself a distant cousin of Judith's, skillfully brings to life two extraordinary eighteenth-century individuals whose love story is timeless.

Author : Sheila L. Skemp
Publisher : Macmillan
Page : 228 pages
File Size : 10,86 MB
Release : 1998-02-15
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780312115067

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"An accomplished essayist, playwright, and poet, Judith Sargent Murray (1751-1820) was America's first notable feminist. This brief study of her life and work takes a novel topical approach to provide a window on the gender issues that were being debated in the United States and Europe during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In the first half of the book, nine thematic chapters examine Murray's experience of and pronouncements on marriage, motherhood, religion, women's education, writing, and the construction of gender in American society. The biography is followed by fifteen primary documents - letters, poems, and essays, many of which have never been published before - that give readers firsthand access to Murray's views. A chronology, a bibliography, and an index are also included."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Author : Judith Sargent Murray
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
Page : 321 pages
File Size : 14,24 MB
Release : 1995
Category : Feminism
ISBN : 0195100387

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With selections from The Gleaner and Murray's other publications, this edition unearths an important early American feminist voice.

Author : Kathryn Gin Lum
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
Page : 329 pages
File Size : 43,56 MB
Release : 2014
Category : History
ISBN : 0199843112

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Hell mattered in the United States' first century of nationhood. The fear of fire-and-brimstone haunted Americans and shaped how they thought about and interacted with each other and the rest of the world. Damned Nation asks how and why that fear survived Enlightenment critiques that diminished its importance elsewhere.

Author : John R. Shook
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Page : 1249 pages
File Size : 38,28 MB
Release : 2012-04-05
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 1843711826

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The Dictionary of Early American Philosophers, which contains over 400 entries by nearly 300 authors, provides an account of philosophical thought in the United States and Canada between 1600 and 1860. The label of "philosopher" has been broadly applied in this Dictionary to intellectuals who have made philosophical contributions regardless of academic career or professional title. Most figures were not academic philosophers, as few such positions existed then, but they did work on philosophical issues and explored philosophical questions involved in such fields as pedagogy, rhetoric, the arts, history, politics, economics, sociology, psychology, medicine, anthropology, religion, metaphysics, and the natural sciences. Each entry begins with biographical and career information, and continues with a discussion of the subject's writings, teaching, and thought. A cross-referencing system refers the reader to other entries. The concluding bibliography lists significant publications by the subject, posthumous editions and collected works, and further reading about the subject.

Author : Sheila L. Skemp
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
Page : 508 pages
File Size : 18,69 MB
Release : 2011-08-24
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 0812203526

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Judith Sargent Murray (1751-1820), poet, essayist, playwright, and one of the most thoroughgoing advocates of women's rights in early America, was as well known in her own day as Abigail Adams or Martha Washington. Her name, though, has virtually disappeared from the public consciousness. Thanks to the recent discovery of Murray's papers—including some 2,500 personal letters—historian Sheila L. Skemp has documented the compelling story of this talented and most unusual eighteenth-century woman. Born in Gloucester, Massachussetts, Murray moved to Boston in 1793 with her second husband, Universalist minister John Murray. There she became part of the city's literary scene. Two of her plays were performed at Federal Street Theater, making her the first American woman to have a play produced in Boston. There as well she wrote and published her magnum opus, The Gleaner, a three-volume "miscellany" that included poems, essays, and the novel-like story "Margaretta." After 1800, Murray's output diminished and her hopes for literary renown faded. Suffering from the backlash against women's rights that had begun to permeate American society, struggling with economic difficulties, and concerned about providing the best possible education for her daughter, she devoted little time to writing. But while her efforts diminished, they never ceased. Murray was determined to transcend the boundaries that limited women of her era and worked tirelessly to have women granted the same right to the "pursuit of happiness" immortalized in the Declaration of Independence. She questioned the meaning of gender itself, emphasizing the human qualities men and women shared, arguing that the apparent distinctions were the consequence of nurture, not nature. Although she was disappointed in the results of her efforts, Murray nevertheless left a rich intellectual and literary legacy, in which she challenged the new nation to fulfill its promise of equality to all citizens.