Suchergebnisse

A history of how abolitionism evolved from an elite and conservative movement to a radical, grassroots reform cause. It traces the development of the abolitionist movement from the 1770s to the 1830s, covering the attitudes and actions which made it the radical cause we think of it as today

This commentary provides a synthetic overview and analytic framework for understanding the papers in this volume of The ANNALS, which focuses on sharing networks in a comparative context. Economic crises endemic to capitalist societies generate the need for support networks, while welfare state configurations influence their importance as an additional survival tool. Social norms set the stage for the degrees of reciprocity and durable obligation that networks engender and the boundary conditions that enable or disable the most vulnerable members of the social hierarchy to tap the resources of more privileged contacts.

Well before Lincoln issued any Emancipation Proclamation—preliminary or otherwise—Civil War Americans were involved in a robust debate about the broader social and ideological dimensions of black wartime freedom. Indeed, it is fair to say that even without the Great Emancipator's liberating deed, pre-1863 Americans would still have been engaged in the most serious discussion of emancipation since the postrevolutionary period. Much like the so-called "First Emancipation," when the exigencies of war and nation building compelled the founding generation of statesmen, reformers, and citizens to reexamine slavery's place in American life (culminating in a series of gradual abolition laws above the Mason-Dixon Line), pre-Proclamation emancipation debate flowed from a complex matrix of wartime concerns. Prompted by a half-dozen "emancipating proclamations," or proto-abolitionist edicts, issued by military and political officials during the first year and a half of sectional battle, this debate illuminated much more than strategic concerns of the moment. Rather, it reflected continuing concerns about black freedom in the United States.